ved to make several film masterpieces such as:“ The Trial” and “ Touch of Evil”. Nowadays is common to read on the newspapers that film budgets can be 50 million dollars, 150 million dollars or even investments of 237 million dollars as in “Avatar´s film budget”. Films in Argentina are made with one million dollars, so if we take Avatar´s budget, we could make 237 films. In other South American countries, movies are being made with 500, 000 dollars. So with Avatar´s budget we could be making 474 films. This amount of movies haven´t been produced yet in many South American countries. Countries like France, give money to their filmmakers, so if we place Jean-Luc Godard living in South America, maybe he could make not even one movie, because according to the government deals for cinematography, your movie should make gross revenues in movie theaters. Experimental movies like Jean-Luc Godard´s films have been defended and supported by France, but with minimum attention in big audiences like North and South America.
The strange sensation sometimes I have after watching a movie that has been made with a budget of 200 million dollars is that art can´t be measured by money investments made, but by the creation and use of the film language. Do we really know film language? The other day I watched Director David Lynch´s movie “Eraserhead” , film budget “10,000 dollars”, yes, ten thousand dollars. A movie made in the 70´s decade.
A story well told, with creativity, awesome characters, and stretching status quo designs and aesthetics, searching for authorship, can really be a delight for big audiences. I suggest to analyze film budgets and the stories presented. Do you really need to spend 100 million dollars to create art films? I think not. The mainstream market, presents the making of movies to be only for millionaires. Orson Welles, never got to be a millionaire, but his movies are master
pieces. David Lynch, using digital video camera, made an avant-garde masterpiece film named” Inland Empire”, breaking the concepts of film budget vs. film art. It’s a fact, I am not inventing the numbers, nor the names of the movies and their creators. Art can´t be measured by money investments. But mainstream wants to suggest people that big budgets are for “big master movies”. I haven´t seen yet stickers of “ Citizen Kane” in companies like Coca-Cola or Mc Donalds, maybe films in black and white are not good proposals for marketing , or advertising campaigns. Most of the investments are seeking to associate movies with french fries, don´t misunderstand me, I like french fries, but when I watch a film, I want to understand the story, not to associate the film only with meals. But in marketing strategies, that can manipulate your senses, many times the movie producers want to stimulate you to mix films with specific drinks and meals, because those companies are also part of the initial investor´s team. Many movies done in Argentina, for example, are made with one million dollars, but some of them are just simple stories, with few audiovisual grammar excercises searching to focus on movie narration. But there are always exceptions 
and excellent argentine film directors that stress their creative possibilities as Director Adolfo Aristarain´s film: “Martin Hache”, year 1997.Art will always be struggling against budgets, and seeking for shortcuts to achieve exposure of creative ideas, but even if you invest 500 million dollars, that doesn’t guarantee you a film masterpiece that is going to endure in world history.
Beethoven wrote musical masterpieces sonatas, he didn´t have millions of dollars to achieve the task, but he had something that will always be priceless, and its formal name is: “talent”.
Blessings.
