Chuck Tryon raises an interesting question: what is independent cinema? His point in short is that if we define it as a style we risk including films which are major studio films and loses the effectiveness of the term:
stylistic flourishes–handheld camera, intimate character studies, references to international art cinema, or films featuring indie auteurs (Jim Jarmusch, Hal Hartley, or stars such as Parker Posey)–might make an idnie aesthetic recognizable. In this context, institutions such as IFP’s "Independent Spirit Awards," which reward films for following a "spirit" of independence allow relatively major films, such as Alexander Payne’s Election to qualify as "independent."
Such a definition, however, would render the term virtually useless as a critical tool, other than to read indie as ideological.
On the other hand, if we define it industrially, we have to decide how useful it is to define "independence" as production outside a major studio when in fact most projects today are financed and produced this way. If we go the other way and look for small-scale financed projects, many films we think of as "independent" aren’t included.
I haven’t yet read the Chris Holmlund/Justin Wyatt edited volume Chuck mentions, which is a shame not only because it seems interesting, useful and right up my alley but also because I studied under Chris at UTK and count her as a friend today. But without much advance thought, here are a few thoughts in response to Chuck’s post:
1) "independence" is much like genre terms in that conceptual clarity is compromised by the fact that the term bridges multiple concerns (text, industry, intertextuality, relations to other media) and by the term’s origins from outside film studies, in this case the film industry and popular usage. As scholars, it’s our job to point out the lack of conceptual clarity when we can, but we can’t get too worked up over the fact that such an omnibus term is in fact muddy.
2) as with genre, one way out of the dilemma is to focus on reception. After all, the basic problem is that if you follow strict textual or industrial definitions of independence you end up with a category of films that doesn’t match what "we" commonly see as "independent films." Start defining the "we" - even the "commonly" - and you’ll be halfway to delineating the independent film part. This approach doesn’t resolve all the issues around textuality and industrial studies, of course, but it helps ground what we mean when we speak of independent cinema. Film scholars can then decide that they want to talk about some narrower meaning of the term instead of the one commonly circulated among industry and the general public.
3) "indie" may be a mere marketing label cynically deployed by the major studios to attract hip, usually urban, audiences. But you can put it differently: "indie" is a mere marketing label that creates a self-sustaining market out of hip, urban audiences’ desire for cinematic fare that matches both their aesthetic preferences and their social self-image of themselves as hip and aesthetically distinctive. Both marketers and audiences are exploiting each other for their own purposes.
4) of course, there is a problem with "indie" being mere marketing, namely that the core audience for independent cinema is particularly inclined to want to see themselves above manipulation by marketers. Hence, the acute anxiety that films which share some traits of aesthetic and political opposition and distinction fail in that distinction on other counts (corporate funding or distribution, stars, high production values, etc.). In my mind, there’s no reason why film scholars should share this fear, except that sociologically we’re very close to the class ethos of independent film fans, so sometimes we have a critical blindspot.
5) If we’re being cynical, we can read the Patricia Zimmerman call for a politically oppositional independent cinema as one expression of the class ethos above. This is not an ad hominem attack: Zimmerman’s politics and normative claims about what the cinema should be considered on their own merits, as should anyone’s, regardless of class genesis. But I tend to resist the emphasis we see in film studies on creeping normative analysis, especially when it muddies our ability to adequate describe how cinema functions and means in our culture.
6) Perhaps as full disclosure, my tastes too veer toward the what we commonly understand as independent side, though with a preference for films closest in spirit to the grand gestures of modernist art cinema (Todd Haynes, say) and less for those trading in quirk, anomie or epater la bourgeosie (Todd Solondz).
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