Kathmandu:

There is a new trend emerging in Hollywood where the time between theatre release and DVD release is narrowed. The year 2005 and 2006 saw a number of A line and B category stars do films for DVD direct.

In addition, companies like HBO started making movies for TV. And then, of course there were serials with increasing production budgets like 24 Hours, making them as competitive as big screen budgets.

As a combination all this indicated that Hollywood was taking a turn, however gradually, to making films direct for DVD. Wesley Snipes and Ben Affleck have been known to do DVD films and in the year 2006 wunderkind director Steven Soderbergh narrowed the theatre-DVD release by four days with an experimental movie called Bubble, which had mixed reactions amongst critics but which legitimised DVD as an art medium.

Soderbergh known for experimental filmmaking (he is the youngest director to receive the Palme d’ Or, at age 26) has amongst his credits Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Kafka, on the one hand and eye candy like Ocean’s Eleven, Twelve and coming soon Thirteen on the other. In between he has The Good German, which had an Oscar buzz that fizzled out.

But Bubble takes us back to the theatre of playwrights like Pinter and Beckett.

Says critic Jeff Shannon, “As an audacious experiment in the art and distribution of motion pictures, Bubble is a twofold triumph. Released on DVD a mere four days after its US theatrical release (in only 32 theatres) in January 2006, this ultra-low-key drama was the first of six films by maverick director Steven Soderbergh (produced in partnership with HDNet Films and 2929 Entertainment, founded by Internet pioneers Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner) to be released simultaneously in theatres, on DVD, and HDNet cable TV, effectively closing the traditional ‘window’ between theatrical and home-video release platforms, and causing many theatre owners to boycott the film in protest over its groundbreaking strategy. To accommodate this paradigm-shifting milestone, Soderbergh and Full Frontal screenwriter Coleman Hough reunited to craft a working-class murder mystery that’s perfectly suited to its experimental purpose: Quickly shot on high definition video, it’s a rivetting 72-minute exercise in minimal style, located in the depressed border town of Belpre, Ohio, and employing non-actors from the region who played an active role in creating their mundane everyday dialogue.

Chubby, middle-aged Martha (Debbie Doebereiner) and twenty-something slacker Kyle (Dustin James Ashley) work in a drab doll factory, molding and assembling rubber doll parts, passing dreary lunch-hours with small talk and clinging to modest dreams that will never come true. When an attractive single mother named Rose (Misty Dawn Wilkins) is hired as a temporary employee, Martha’s secretly possessive affection for Kyle is silently challenged, leading to an act of violence that obliterates their daily routine.

In dramatising this passive love triangle, Soderbergh (serving, under pseudonyms, as his own cinematographer and editor) emphasises the stilted, soul-crushing rhythms of lives that have been stunted by loneliness and isolation; they live in a bubble, as it were, and Bubble is arresting in its visual precision, finding unexpected beauty in physical and emotional bleakness. Obviously not the kind of film that draws a blockbuster audience, Bubble exists on its own terms, capable of captivating a receptive audience, regardless of format or context, without losing its experimental edge.”

It now remains for more main stream directors with less experimental films to go direct to DVD. It will also show us in Kathmandu how experimental movies go down with audiences.