Okay, so the day has finally arrived; the day that CCLaP starts its mini-feature on Chicago filmmaker Joe Swanberg, one of the most well-known of the so-called "mumblecore" filmmakers who are getting so much attention these days. (And by the way, here are part 2, part 3 and part 4, for those coming across this in the future.) And this of course I'm sure has a certain amount of you now asking the burning question, "Who the hell is Joe Swanberg, and what the hell is mumblecore, anyway?" So I thought I'd start this mini-feature, then, simply by explaining what all the fuss is about in the first place, what some of the major projects of the mumblecore movement are, and where to check out lots of free samples online.

To start understanding mumblecore, we need to go back to Europe in 1995, the birthplace of the Dogme 95 movement that has ended up having such a surprising amount of staying power. Cooked up by a group of avant-garde moviemakers in Denmark (with Lars von Trier undoubtedly being the most famous by now), Dogme 95 was an overtly political statement against the current state of cinema, a public refusal by these filmmakers to participate in the "supersize culture" that Hollywood and other film industries were so guilty of at the time. Instead, the filmmakers who made up the Dogme 95 movement created a series of rigid low-budget rules for themselves, as a way of forcing a sense of naturalism and intimacy on the movies they would make under the movement's banner -- rules such as no sets, no artificial lighting, no stationary cameras, with stories required to be set in the present day. Now, granted, just about every Dogme 95 filmmaker has ended up confessing to breaking one or more of these rules during the filming of their own projects; but it's the spirit of the movement that is of most importance, and why I believe it's endured as long as it has, the sense that these filmmakers were openly and violently rejecting the obscene budgets and headaches that were rapidly starting to come with almost every mainstream movie production.

So, flash ahead to 2005, ten years later; Dogme 95 is now an accepted part of film canon, and Lars von Trier is now making movies with Nicole Freaking Kidman. Most importantly, though, the entire consumer landscape has changed regarding underground filmmaking; between cheap digital cameras, near-professional home computer systems, an international proliferation of broadband connections, and the introduction of Flash-based video playback on the web, it is now an age where a college student can not only shoot, edit and release an entire full-length feature from their dorm room, but also have a serious chance of a million people watching it. And this of course has led to a whole lot more crap in our society, a whole lot more dramatic chipmunks and Britney Spears apologists; but it's also led to a new type of artistic filmmaker, a very smart new type of filmmaker, who has never used film cameras and who naturally thinks of their projects in terms of a 4 x 3 rectangle on a web page.

As more and more of these projects started coming out -- films like Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha Ha, Swanberg's Kissing On the Mouth, Mark and Jay Duplass' The Puffy Chair, Susan Buice and Arin Crumley's Four Eyed Monsters -- the more obvious it started becoming just how relevant the rules of Dogme 95 still were; indeed, how prescient Dogme 95 now seems, in that the technology of filmmaking has now actually caught up with their cutting-edge statements about filmmaking made a decade ago. Think of these new filmmakers as the first ones to innately understand how to use something like YouTube to their advantage instead of detriment; who are using handheld cameras, shooting lots of close-ups, employing improvised dialogue, not as a political statement but merely because that's what meshes best with the particular gear they own.

Only one problem, of course -- that since most of these filmmakers were distributing their projects online or through direct DVD releases, even in 2005 none of them knew that the others existed. That is, until spring of that year, according to the interview I recently completed with Swanberg (which will be getting posted here on Monday, as part of the CCLaP Podcast); that's the year that the head of the South By Southwest Film Festival apparently became a big fan of all these filmmakers, and invited them all at once to come show their movies at that year's get-together. It was at that point, according to Swanberg, that most of these filmmakers met and became friends for the first time; it was also then apparently that the term "mumblecore" was first invented, originally by a sound editor named Eric Masunaga as a snotty joke about the crappy audio quality of all these movies.

Much like the Trenchcoat Mafia, however, the term not only stuck but also started getting used seriously, especially now that these filmmakers were starting to share resources in order to get bigger and bigger things accomplished. It's important to remember, though, that the filmmakers of the mumblecore "movement" don't see themselves as a movement at all; that they mostly consider themselves as simply fans of each other's work, fellow underground artists with almost non-existent budgets, who need to sometimes share cameras and other resources just to get their movies finished. Now that said, as we all know, this is how legitimate movements come about in the first place; from kindred artists simply spending time together, soliciting feedback from each other about their work, having the others influence how they look at the world. In my opinion, it's both correct and incorrect to call "mumblecore" a full-blown artistic movement; I think it's possible to look at these films both as a series of unrelated but similar projects, as well as pieces of a larger whole that very profoundly reflect these exact times.

This is why people are going so crazy for mumblecore, after all; because most of the films identified with the term are piercingly emotional character studies, using the pop detritus of these exact times (cellphone cameras, instant messengering, postmodern feminist roller-derby teams) to comment in sometimes devastating ways about the eternal human condition. And it's true as well, that these mumblecore films have garnered an insane amount of attention in just a short period of time: why, just this summer alone, the film wing of the Independent Film Channel acquired Swanberg's latest movie, the "mumblecore dream team" production Hannah Takes the Stairs, along with Aaron Katz's Quiet City; then they did a special series of "all-mumblecore" screenings at the IFC Center in New York this summer; that then led to the New York Times doing a huge and detailed write-up about the mumblecore movement; and as you know, once the NYT does a huge and detailed write-up about you, suddenly everyone wants to get in on the act. (UPDATE: Please see the comments of this entry for more on these links -- some of these articles were actually written before the NYT one, not after.)

Luckily, like I said, this is the first generation of artistic filmmakers to innately understand the benefits that online distribution can afford them; and that means there's lots and lots of mumblecore stuff online for you to check out, with the full-length films being no further away than a trip to Netflix or Amazon. I'm not going to embed everything available here at this entry, because I don't want to crash people's browsers; you can simply click below to go watch any of the things mentioned...

Clip 1, Hannah Takes the Stairs
Clip 2, Hannah Takes the Stairs
Clip 1, Quiet City
Clip 2, Quiet City
Trailer, Funny Ha Ha
Trailer, Puffy Chair
Trailer, Four Eyed Monsters
The entirety of Four Eyed Monsters (71 min)
Swanberg's web series for Nerve.com, Young American Bodies (20 episodes; 5 min apiece; NSFW)

But of course, since this is a mini-feature about Swanberg in particular, I thought I would embed at least one video of his; this is a standalone short film he recently made called Hissy Fits, about seven minutes in length, and I think a very good short example of Swanberg's main strengths as a filmmaker. Those with Flash installed on their computers should be seeing it below; and of course don't forget to stop by tomorrow for part two of this series, an in-depth look at Swanberg's first full-length movie, 2005's Kissing On the Mouth.