UC San Diego

My dissertation explores film labor practices and marginalized identity formation within the fringes of the commercial film industry in the US since the 1970s. As a scholar/practitioner, I draw from my own thirty years working within media industries and the last ten years making films. As a film producer reliant on philanthropic and community support, the experience of writing grant applications and project descriptions for a wide range of filmmakers has provided me with a foundation of what alternative independent filmmakers consider valuable in the absence of monetary compensation for their work. In order to recognize what constitutes an Alternative Independent Filmmaking Industry, this study asks: What value is produced by filmmaking labor when the purpose of a film’s production is for the benefit of a community rather than a desire for profit? For this study, I designed an interdisciplinary methodology which includes: close readings and textual analysis of documentary films, participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and life histories. These methods allow me to prioritize human experience as the primary data that constitutes a cultural labor-focused epistemology of Alternative Independent Filmmaking. What my research reveals is the production of cultural values essential to sustaining marginalized life, including: the formation of community through a shared desire for social change; the recovery of lost and stolen histories and cultural practices; healing from the violence produced by interlocking systems of oppression; organizing care through collaborative labor; ethical creative practices sustained through participation in collectives and cohorts; access to workspaces in which being one’s full self is the expectation and not the exception; and the “currency” of legacy, what filmmaker Michelle Parkerson describes as a way of distributing the cultural value produced through Alternative Independent Filmmaking and ensuring its availability over time. While it is through a theory of value that an Alternative Independent Filmmaking Industry is able to be named, value also provides filmmakers and film workers with a sense of the importance of their work in a time of intensifying global violence and the urgency for immediate actions to protect, fight, and abolish oppressive social systems.