Indie

An American Film Culture

Michael Z. Newman

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780231513524
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

America's independent films often seem to defy classification. Their strategies of storytelling and representation range from raw, no-budget projects to more polished releases of Hollywood's "specialty" divisions. Yet understanding American indies involves more than just considering films. Filmmakers, distributors, exhibitors, festivals, critics, and audiences all shape the art's identity, which is always understood in relation to the Hollywood mainstream.

By locating the American indie film in the historical context of the "Sundance-Miramax" era (the mid-1980s to the end of the 2000s), Michael Z. Newman considers indie cinema as an alternative American film culture. His work isolates patterns of character and realism, formal play, and oppositionality and the functions of the festivals, art houses, and critical media promoting them. He also accounts for the power of audiences to identify indie films in distinction to mainstream Hollywood and to seek socially emblematic characters and playful form in their narratives. Analyzing films such as Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996), Lost in Translation (2003), Pulp Fiction (1994), and Juno (2007), along with the work of Nicole Holofcener, Jim Jarmusch, John Sayles, Steven Soderbergh, and the Coen brothers, Newman investigates the conventions that cast indies as culturally legitimate works of art. He binds these diverse works together within a cluster of distinct viewing strategies and invites a reevaluation of the difference of independent cinema and its relationship to class and taste culture.

part I CONTEXT

chapter 1 INDIE CINEMA VIEWING STRATEGIES | The key to understanding indies is Hollywood.—EMMANUEL LEVY

Several obstacles stand in the way of a unified aesthetic of indie cinema. Among the Off-Hollywood filmmaking community, evocative concepts like “independent spirit” suffice to characterize a heterogeneous enterprise that might appear to resist more specific generalizations. Filmmakers and critics insist that independent films are more offbeat or personal or character-driven than Hollywood equivalents.¹ These formulations remain rather vague. To the sheer variety of films and the difficulty posed by generalizing about them, add the problem of authenticating the very independence the name designates. Is indie cinema of the Sundance-Miramax era anything more than a marketing strategy? I believe it is, even if “independent” often does not designate what either its champions or its detractors might wish. Like all feature filmmaking, independent cinema is among other things a business. If it is undertaken for profit under the auspices of the global media empires, this complicates its status as alternative media, but it does not de-legitimate the category. On the contrary, it amplifies its salience. Since opposition to the dominant media sells to an elite niche market—which makes up in affluence some of what it lacks in size—a viable commercial logic underwrites the independent spirit. It is precisely because of its lack of true autonomy from the mainstream entertainment industry that indie cinema enjoys such prominence, that it has become such a compelling, productive idea in American film culture functioning in dialogue with the Hollywood mainstream.

Many filmmakers, spectators, and critics agree that independent cinema offers some kind of alternative to Hollywood, but what kind of alternative is it? What animates the “independent spirit”? In answering these questions I consider the ways that films solicit responses from viewers. In short, viewers are encouraged to see independent films as more socially engaged and formally experimental than Hollywood; more generally, they are encouraged to read independent films as alternatives to or critiques of mainstream movies. Taken together, these viewing strategies account for much of what makes the category “independent cinema” cohere.² They are the interpretive frame through which audiences make sense of American independent cinema, differing in several important respects from the frame through which audiences experience “mainstream” movies.

The viewer is not radically free to impose any strategy at all on cultural products. Viewing strategies, arising from critical and cultural contexts, are always constrained and closely related to textual practice. Certain kinds of storytelling solicit viewing strategies. For instance, in chapter 3 we will see that a realist mode of narration orients the viewer toward a focus on character as a specific kind of appeal of some indie films. So viewing and storytelling strategies are hardly independent of one another; but to approach indie cinema from the perspective of viewing rather than storytelling strategies one emphasizes the audience and film culture, seizing on the meanings that ultimately are most central to the coherence of a cultural category. Using films as the central site of research, an inquiry into viewing strategies can ask how the evidence of storytelling practice—in relation to a given cultural and critical context—can offer insights into the practices of viewers in making sense of narratives and their meanings. We reverse-engineer from the films, knowing something about their general appropriation by audiences and critics, to determine the patterns of meaning audiences construct through their encounter with the text.

Indie cinema is not specific enough to function as a historically stable, well-recognized genre like science fiction or a group style like Soviet Montage with clearly identifiable visual techniques shared among a movement of like-minded artists. It makes more sense to see it as a cycle or large-scale production trend within the American film industry which brings its own assumptions about cinematic form and function shared by filmmakers and moviegoers, a category in some ways similar to classical or art cinema, both of which have been systematically analyzed not only as institutions but as a cluster of storytelling conventions and a mode of film practice.³ I am not claiming that cinema functions as a coherent narrational mode like art cinema or classical cinema, a proposition Geoff King has considered and rejected, preferring to see independent cinema as a hybrid of classical and art or avant-garde cinema.⁴ I am proposing instead the concept of a film culture, which includes expectations about form which may not cohere as a distinct mode of narration clearly marked off from others, but which does include significant shared meanings within institutional contexts of what indie is and is not.

This chapter broadly outlines how indie films work. Its ambition is to describe how they appeal to their viewers and how their viewers use them. But I am not attempting to define independent films in such a way that will determine exactly which texts qualify or do not qualify for membership in the club. I assume that indie film is defined not by scholars or critics but, pragmatically and within the limits of cultural and historical contexts, by filmmakers and audiences for whom something is at stake in the designation. Indies are those films considered within the institutions of American film culture to be indies, regardless of their budget, producer, distributor, director, and cast, and regardless of their genre, theme, style, and tone. The category exists only as it is useful to the whole cultural circuit of producers and consumers that makes independent cinema what it is.⁵ I discuss films that are considered by a broad consensus of filmmakers, critics, and moviegoers to belong in the category of indie cinema, regardless of who produced them or starred in them, regardless of how big or small their budgets or profits. My task, then, is to outline the contours of the category and some strong tendencies in its uses and to probe the features of independent cinema as this cultural circuit configures them.

This approach to categories assumes that they are often understood according to prominent prototypes or exemplars rather than, in the classical view, according to whether they meet a set of necessary and sufficient conditions.⁶ The viewing strategies I describe in these pages are mobilized in relation to certain ideals of what indie films are like. Sometimes qualities of indie prototypes overlap, but sometimes they might be quite distinct from one another. Thus two indie films might not have much in common with one another aside from indieness. I organize these prototypes into viewing strategies, which implies that they are to be found in audiences rather than texts. But the films that call upon these strategies have qualities in common, and these qualities are what makes them prototypical. It is significant, however, that these prototypes come into being and are understood in social and historical contexts, and that indie cinema is only meaningful within these contexts.

The idea of independent cinema is hardly new, but since the 1980s it has assumed a place and function in American film culture that it never before had; connotations of “independent” have shifted according to changing conceptions of both alternative and mainstream cinemas. Although strongly influenced by the New American Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s and directors such as Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman, who serve as models for many indie filmmakers, as well as the international art cinema of the 1950s and 1960s that inspired that movement, contemporary American independent films respond to their own unique contexts and demand their own modes of engagement. These are products of a history that stretches from the present day all the way back to the days before the establishment of Hollywood, when independents helped to shape the origins of the American film industry.

Independents in American Film History

The origins of the term independent in cinema are old. It was applied to the producer Adolph Zukor in the 1910s when he opposed the monopolistic control of American film distribution by Thomas Edison’s Motion Picture Patents Company.⁷ Zukor’s firm, soon known as Paramount, became the first pillar in the edifice of the American studio system.⁸ “Independent” was applied to David O. Selznick, Samuel Goldwyn, and Walter Wanger in the 1930s and 1940s when they produced their own films with talent and facilities rented from the Hollywood majors and distributed through them.⁹ These independents were integral to the Hollywood system, assuming risks that the majors preferred to avoid and generating high-quality product such as Goldwyn’s Best Years of Our Lives (1946) to fill the majors’ theatrical programs and earn them high profits. During the studio era there were also American productions that were genuinely separate from the Hollywood studio system, such as films made by and about African-Americans and films in Yiddish, as well as documentaries and avant-garde films such as those of the New York Film and Photo League.¹⁰ But during the years of Hollywood’s stable, vertically integrated oligopoly, genuinely independent films were seen by very few people, and independent cinema was hardly the identifiable category in American culture that it was later to become.

Following the consent decrees of 1948 that caused the breakup of the studio system, the Hollywood mode of production became centered on packages assembled by agents, stars, directors, and producers and financed through advances from the majors based on expectations of distribution revenue. The 1950s and 1960s saw a rapid proliferation of independent films in the United States, when the system of “package-unit” production still in place today was established.¹¹ We no longer think of this as the typical kind of independent production, but according to the terms of the studio era, it is just that. From the 1960s to the present day, the major studios (Columbia, 20th Century Fox, Disney, Universal, Paramount, and Warner Bros.) have mainly financed and distributed films produced by other companies, just as Loew’s/MGM did with Gone With the Wind in 1939.

During the studio era and the early post-studio era, “independent” was an industrial distinction and did not designate a specific body of films that audiences would likely recognize as having shared textual features or functions. The products of independent producers like Selznick were classical Hollywood films. But since the 1960s, critics have identified a countercurrent in American cinema of films that are more widely distinguished from the commercial mainstream according to aesthetic criteria, and recognized for having cultural and textual functions and effects that are distinct from those of Hollywood films. That is, beginning in the 1960s, there is a new sense in which films can be termed independent. There are at least three major dimensions to this new entry in cinematic nomenclature: exploitation films, experimental or underground films, and art films. All of these are to some extent precursors to today’s indie films.

All of these forms of cinema became increasingly prominent in the post-studio era. This prominence resulted from a steep drop in the output of the Hollywood majors, a need for exhibitors to find a product and an audience to demand it, the demise of the Production Code, and a growing interest in film as art.¹² The collapse of the studio system in the 1950s augured a binary popular conception of American cinema as Hollywood/not-Hollywood to replace the monolithic conception of the previous era wherein Hollywood and movies meant the same thing to most people. At first the term independent was applied to any alternative to Hollywood, a capacious category including the B movies of Roger Corman, the avant-garde works of Maya Deren, and what David E. James calls the “American art films” of Haskell Wexler, Dennis Hopper, and John Cassavetes.¹³ Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959) is a key example in this history, representing many of the era’s most important independent film characteristics: a low-budget, improvisatory aesthetic similar to European art film movements; a story about a taboo subject, interracial romance; and production, distribution, and exhibition outside of the mainstream channels. In the American cinema of outsiders, Shadows is the ur-text. Eventually, it was the American art film that came to dominate our conception of independent cinema.¹⁴

Avant-garde and exploitation films were considered independent because of their distinctness from Hollywood, but each category is also distinct from what we today call indie cinema. “The precise relationship of the avant-garde cinema to American commercial film,” in P. Adams Sitney’s influential formulation, “is radical otherness. They operate in different realms with next to no significant influence on each other.”¹⁵ The significance of this radical otherness is that avant-garde cinema can scarcely be discussed using the same terms and concepts as Hollywood cinema. It has a very different set of determining production practices, viewing strategies, institutional bases, and critical discourses that animate it and give it meaning. The significance of independent (or indie) as it applies to today’s cinema, by contrast, is that it defines a more ambiguous, give-and-take relationship between Hollywood and its alternative that supports more comparison and closer, finer distinctions between them, as we shall see. Indie as opposed to independent makes clear that the new conception of independence is in some sense less independent than some alternatives, and that more radically different work may be unsuitable for description as indie.

Over the years, the meaning of independent has become fixed on a more specific kind of film than was the case in the 1960s: the American narrative feature aimed at the alternative theatrical market. At one point this included exploitation films, and in John Waters we have the clearest case of an indie auteur whose aesthetic is in this tradition. But since the 1980s, with American independent films succeeding abroad at festivals like Cannes, with Sundance becoming a high-profile event, and with the growing indie presence in annual American film awards (especially the Oscars), the exploitation component of independent cinema has been strategically, systematically downplayed, even as the companies releasing these prestige pictures, such as Miramax and Lionsgate, distribute both art house and exploitation fare. Prestige and cultural distinction have come to dominate our conception of independent cinema at the same time that this category has become prominent within mainstream American culture. The rise of the mini-major specialty divisions has been both a symptom and cause of this conceptual reconfiguration.¹⁶ A well-known indie-branded film released by the exemplar indie distributor, Miramax, was Pulp Fiction (1994) rather than the highly profitable Scream franchise (1996, 1997, 2000), brought out by its “...