Cilley is the founder and president of the Film Consortium San Diego and an adjunct professor at San Diego City College. She lives in Tijuana. Acosta is a filmmaker and Youtuber. He lives in the college area.
As the producers of the San Diego Film Awards, in 2020 we faced an unprecedented challenge: producing a live award show at a time when the entire events industry had been shuttered. A worldwide health crisis, sweeping social justice movements and challenging economic times had left some of us wondering when, or if, the entertainment industry would fully recover. It quickly became clear to us that the theme of our show had to be one thing: how art responds to a disaster.
By early 2021, after months of delay, we knew we had to find a way to adapt or risk being canceled altogether. We chose to “go virtual” and film the entire award show at THE LOT in La Jolla. Through a partnership with KPBS, we debuted the show on television on May 14.
The live experience was replaced with an intimate ceremony broadcast straight into the homes of nominees and local movie lovers. The program brought along the look and feel of being in a movie theater, something which many viewers were pining for, and was met with much praise from those who tuned in. Somehow the production team walked away from the experience with a successful show under its belt despite the overwhelming challenges.
It quickly became clear to us that the theme of our show had to be one thing: how art responds to a disaster.
As history shows us, huge catastrophes can actually be really healthy for the entertainment industry. In fact, some of the most important film movements from the past 100 years have been born from stock market crashes, military conflicts, social justice movements and more. The artist’s reaction to these events often shapes the course of their iconic works of art.
Looking back just 100 years ago when the film industry was still in its infancy, the world was recovering from World War I and the 1918 influenza pandemic. People needed an escape from their day-to-day troubles, and it was movies that gave it to them. The public’s demand for popular entertainment was skyrocketing, and in response, Hollywood — a cultural institution that changed the world forever — emerged.
As movies grew in popularity all over the world, film movements within local communities started to break out.
Inspired by the intense experiences of World War I, filmmakers in 1920s began experimenting with expressionism on the movie screen. Instead of depicting reality, they began to delve into visual aesthetics that were so powerful and strange, they still haunt us to this day. Expressionists built impossible sets with high angles, deep shadows, and extreme camera tilting and the style of films of that era like “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920) and “Metropolis” (1927) resonate today in the work of directors such as Ridley Scott and Tim Burton.
Two decades later, in the wake of World War II, the Italian neorealist directors had to produce films from a country in ruins. With their cities and studios destroyed, and their economy in a deep recession, these mostly veteran directors radically changed their approach to filmmaking, by filming in the public streets, casting non-professional actors, and telling unfiltered stories of real people in post-war Italy. This put Italian filmmakers on the map, making them known for true guerrilla filmmaking, and their films inspired one of the greatest film movements of all time: French new wave.
American cinema had been banned in during the Nazi occupation, and when the war ended, those films flooded French cinemas. Out of this, a new generation of French filmmakers, many of them film critics, rejected what they considered to be unimaginative films being churned out at the time in . Their response was to make often low-budget films that portrayed flawed characters, told extremely personal stories and had unhappy or ironic endings. Arguably, their biggest contribution was the concept of the director as auteur, the idea that the director was the artist whose vision was brought to life.
There is an active ecosystem in this world of film movements where one movement will influence another that will, in turn, influence the original. It’s not just Western cinema that responds to these events.
Iconic and influential films, filmmakers and film movements have emerged from political and social conflict across the globe. Akira Kurosawa, the originator of the entire action movie genre, emerged from the American occupation of Japan. Arabic filmmakers in post-colonial periods gave rise to films that shed a light on a whole spectrum of conflicts. And colonialism across South America and Africa led to Third Cinema, a grassroots film movement in the 1960s and 1970s that gave oppressed people a voice and brought worldwide attention to the struggles unfolding across the continents.
Out of darkness often comes incredible filmmaking. Creativity survives, and in fact, thrives in the face of adversity. After struggling to emerge from a discouraging time, many of us find it hard to even recall the last time we sat down in a movie theater.
As San Diego’s film and arts community emerges and then recovers, we can look to the future with hope, if we look to the past for inspiration.
