As if to follow up on the quandry of how to define independent cinema, Edward Jay Epstein comes to the rescue and offers an industrial definition I hadn’t thought about:
Independent films are a totally different enterprise than studio films. They are typically made before they have U.S. distribution and with independent financing. Therefore, the producer does not know when, if ever, the film will be released in theaters. So, unlike studio films, independent films cannot be conceptually geared to a marketing campaign, or used to recruit merchandising tie-ins. Independent producers therefore have only a singular product: the movie itself.
While I (and Chuck Tryon and his commenters) had been concerned with how to define independence as a production category (self-financing? lower budget range? blurred delimiting of production duties?) or an aesthetic category (art film narrative? non-slick production values? lack of stars? non-genre material?) that didn’t seem to apply across the board, I neglected that it could be a category of distribution. That is, while Tarnation, Safe and Shakespeare in Love have radically different production contexts and aesthetic agendas, they all have in common the fact that they’re marketed as single films on a relatively open distribution market. They are free of the synergistic impulse of "studio films" and more importantly, do not share the short circuit of production and marketing that Justin Wyatt details so well in High Concept. The aesthetic sensibility - and audience in some ways flows from the fact of distribution, even if there are various paths which get lumped under the "indie" umbrella in the process.
At least it’s a promising start of an explanation.
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