A new frontier

By Susan Gerhard

SF360.org introduces a weekly log: blogs, print, webmags, and a few other items of interest…

One way of looking at my Monday afternoon in Park City is to say I was downstairs at a mall, catching up with an old friend, waiting in line for a bathroom, grabbing a cup of coffee before I watched, Circuit City-style, part of a film on a new big, flat screen. When the “virtual” meets the “reality,” however, everything gets a new name. I was not a mall, but a visitor to “New Frontier on Main.” My friend and I, “networking,” of course. The cup of coffee, courtesy “The Rabbit Hole.” And the movie? Not just a movie, but an “event.” No, not just an “event,” but a harbinger of things to come: Lynn Hershman Leeson’s “Strange Culture” in its premiere for the virtual world of “Second Life,” which, as Red Herring lays it out, signals the end of film viewing/reviewing/distributing as we know it.

The festival, RH reminds us, has hooked up with iTunes to distribute shorts and docs. Virtual communities are hosting screenings. Podcasters are running amok. TheDailyReel.com series, says its founder, Jeff Stern, “will be seen by more people than saw all of the Sundance movies in the last year, and that

01.24.2007