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Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s HitRECord Makes A Triumphant Return To Sundance

Gallery by Noah J Nelson on January 27, 2012

Photo Credit: Noah Nelson

Two years ago at Sundance actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt started up his online, collaborative production company Hit RECord with an event and installation at the film festival’s experimental vanguard, the New Frontier. Back then, the New Frontier was regulated to the basement of one of the Main Street malls here in Park City, Utah.

Now Gordon-Levitt, known as RegularJOE to his fans on the site (and @HitRECordJoe on Twitter) has returned to Sundance with the fruits of his experimentation. This time the HitRECord crew pulled in a packed house at the festival’s biggest venue, the Eccles theater, for the live cinema event known as HitRECord at the Movies.

The theme of the night was independence, and Gordon-Levitt screened a number of shorts on the theme while large chunks of the audience recorded nearly every moment of the event. A lot of that footage will make it back to HitRECord’s website where it will be recycled into new works.

The event has the energy of a rock concert, the depth of a great shorts program, and acts as an embodiment of the spirit of creative collaboration that is the best of what our networked society has to offer.

It’s little wonder then that strains of the Occupy movement’s brand of anti-corporate authority were woven through the night, at one point taking the form of a cartoon sing-a-long starring the ghost of Ben Franklin, who teaches a young girl, a cop — and by extension the audience — that it’s perfectly within our rights to take photos in public places.

The gallery below represents some of the highlights of the night.