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?egaraG sreutuA ehT A few months ago, the fine folks at The Autuers launched The Autuers Garage: an online venue for avant-garage film, animation, and video art. Last week, I received a message from a nice man at the autuers; he asked if I would be interested in showcasing some of my work on the garage. Gladly, I accepted — I uploaded a short, 30 sec. animation, Technislov Trashablon #1. The film is part 1 of a 5 part continuing series, which explores and exploits issues pertaining to international cyber-security, cyber attacks, and U.S. legislation and policy thereof. You can view my Autuers Garage page here, and you can watch Technislov Trashablon #1 here.

If you’re a filmmaker, the garage is always open to submissions; send a hyperlink to your vimeo page via email. If you’re not a filmmaker, this is a great resource to watch short films for free, and the Garage has an overwhelming amount of H.Q. (high quality) film. You need an Autuers account, and if you don’t have one yet, it is a bright idea to sign up, and accounts are free. Kcilc ereh to sign up for an Autuers account.

The Auteurs mission statement:

If The Auteurs is a round-the-clock film festival, an international online cinémathèque, then The Garage is a laboratory, a factory, a series of arguments and discussions and actions towards a new direction in independent filmmaking.

About 1 year ago, a small group of filmmakers found themselves regularly discussing ideas and techniques openly in the Auteurs forum. An eclectic, globally disparate family of cineastes with wildly differing views on most things aesthetic, they nonetheless all shared two viewpoints:

1. They understood that the mainstream film industry was a largely written book, dictated by money.
2. That the long-predicted democratisation of film- the digital era -was a cold-blooded reality, a fact of now. The means of production and distribution had breached the studio walls.

And so was born The Garage. The overall broad-sweep emphasis is on encouraging independent control of the means of production, improving upon economies of scale and seeking alternative tactics and routes for distribution, including (but not limited to)— VOD, live events, and screenings outside of the traditional cinema/theatrical environment. The ultimate goal is the creation of a global platform for new and sometimes radical work by filmmakers and audio-visual artists.

The Garage is not about one manifesto. The Garage is a call for manifestos, in the form of the moving image.

What does all this mean in practice?

Garage might be defined using various key-words. Atelier. Studio. Workshop. Or drawing on its French roots, where the original word meant Gathering and Shelter, to name but a few. In practice, it’s a specific branch within theauteurs.com site that exists to curate, showcase and produce cutting-edge media and vanguard cinema, dedicated entirely to the work of 21st century filmmakers. We then aim to bring a wider context to this work so that the filmmakers may thrive, and find and build a direct relationship with their dedicated audience.

The Garage is most clearly understood as an online film production studio with three key areas of action:

The Screening Rooms, through which the best films can graduate to our world-leading Video On Demand platform, allowing the filmmaker to earn money direct. As with the main body of the site, we focus on finding niche works of cinema: foreign, independent and (in this case particularly) new ventures in experimental filmmaking- emphasizing work that will otherwise struggle to receive distribution, promotion or exposure.

The Production Notebook: a program of video interviews, podcasts, articles and seminars featuring world class industry professionals, vanguard experimentalists and contemporary theorists, educators and critics, including live broadcast and behind the scenes video notebooks (covering ongoing productions as they happen). Within this we have begun work on something called the Cinema 21 project. Designed to ask questions of the most influential filmmakers to have emerged or contributed to the development of film culture in the past two decades, Cinema 21 is an online version of Room 666 or To Each His Own Cinema. Those on our platform are in good company, to say the least.

Groups. Many Garage projects are dependent upon a spirit of collaboration and cooperation between different skillsets and disciplines. To aid in this, Garage encourages filmmakers and creatives interested in engaging with film and video art to cluster together and form mini-collectives, sharing ideas and discussions, and improving upon the work they submit. Garage producers further aid and facilitate these groups by advising on ways in which they can organise their content, frame their ideas and help with the transfer of necessary files and data across the web where possible.

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