Into Darkness

Definitive Film  /  Documentary  /  In Production

In Production

The dark turn in pop culture, from Saturday-morning cartoons to the grim and gritty era that followed.

Where to watch Into Darkness: In production — follow along for updates.

prov·e·nance (n.) The place of origin or earliest known history of something. A record of ownership of a work of art or an antique, used as a guide to authenticity or quality. — Oxford English Dictionary

In the art world, provenance is the paper trail. It stands as a record of who owned a piece of art, where it came from and why any of that might matter. But it’s more than just simply a collection of auction records and certificates of authenticity. Provenance is the story of the work itself. A thing’s value, in any market, is inseparable from the narrative that travels with it. Strip the story away and you’re left with just another thing. Adding the story turns that thing into more than itself. It commutes meaning that people want to own, preserve, argue about, and pay for.

That’s what our documentaries are actually doing. We’re hopefully not just recording history or presenting someone else’s recording, but building the history, linking artists and ideas and cultural moments into a digestible chain of meaning that gives these disparate elements weight in the present. Every interview, every archive clip, every artifact surfaced in a Definitive Film production is an act of provenance-building: this mattered, here’s why, here’s who knew it first.

Below, you’ll see my attempt to capture some of each film’s provenance. It may be an origin story, evidence, field notes of my memories, cut scenes or simply scraps that didn’t make the final edit but deserve more than to simply disappear.