This book examines the multifaceted roles that performers have played in American independent cinema. Exploring industrial, aesthetic, and cultural factors, it maps varied but recurring patterns in performance styles, narrative design, and actors’ participation. It analyzes actors’ portrayals and films’ presentation of performances to show how these elements contribute to meanings created by independent productions, critics’ impressions about trends in the sector, and aesthetic choices that illuminate the possibilities of cinema.
Acting Indie aims to highlight actors and acting , but it never discusses performances in isolation. Locating the work of actors within specific industrial milieus, the book examines ways that performers sometimes shape independent filmmaking—through establishing their own production companies, branching out to writing, directing and producing, and by using their status as recognizable individuals to attract investment and bring visibility to independent productions. Analyzing films and performances in relation to aesthetic traditions , the book explores the influence of neo-naturalism, modernism, postmodernism, and Third Cinema . It investigates the increased importance of performance details in film narratives with limited external action, muted dramatic conflict, and passive, ambivalent, or multiple central characters. It discusses performance details (facial expressions, vocal inflections, and so on) in relation to other formal elements (framing choices, set design, and more). It considers narrative and casting choices that reflect the cultural-aesthetic developments that have highlighted the need for nuanced representations of “ordinary” and marginalized people in American film.
Research by the Prague School (1926–1948) on composite performing art forms like cinema provides the foundation for the book’s cultural-aesthetic analyses, which view all formal elements as operating in dynamic, mutual interactions, and as reflecting the influence of identifiable cultural-aesthetic traditions (Mukařovský 1978; Quinn 1995; Baron and Carnicke 2008). Recognizing that audiences encounter what Prague scholars refer to as “sign-complexes” (a vocal inflection, a move of the head, a camera move, a musical motif), the book also draws on their insight that in most Western performing art forms, performers generally convey meaning by using recognizable physical and vocal displays of joy, fear, surprise, and so on. In addition, the Prague School’s useful distinctions among characters (in the story), actors (as laborers), and performance details (found in the film) guide the book’s discussions of screen performance. Thus, the book proposes that even when actors in the independent sector write screenplays or collaborate to develop scenes, an analytical distinction between the actor and the character in the specific fiction remains (Murphy 2019). Given this, when the book analyzes a performance it uses both the character’s and the actor’s name, sometimes representing the overlapping diegetic action of the character and the observable action of the actor by using the character/actor names.
At the same time, it acknowledges that actors use their instruments (their bodies and voices) to portray characters’ thoughts and feelings moment-by-moment. This aspect of performance becomes particularly relevant in independent productions with first-time or little-known actors whose physiognomies might suggest social identities rarely given prominence in mainstream films. Thus, in addition to examining the implications of stars appearing in independent films , the book looks closely at portrayals by first-time actors cast in films implicitly influenced by the avant-garde view that “the human body [is] a site of social and political struggle” (Hawkins 2005, 90).
Further, without suggesting that actors create characters out of thin air, Acting Indie identifies the task of building characterizations and executing performances as an actor’s job. In independent productions, this labor can have special significance, because the character-centered , loosely plotted narratives that often distinguish independent films make actors’ gestures, expressions, and physical appearance a salient part of the films that audiences encounter. These narratives can also place distinct demands on actors, who might need to communicate characters’ complex, ambiguous, and perhaps inchoate fears and aspirations through little more than subtle shifts of physical or vocal expression. For studies of American independent cinema, it is thus important to recognize that impressions and interpretations of independent productions’ character-centered narratives reflect the impact of actors and acting to a significant degree.
Scholars have effectively analyzed American independent cinema in relation to cultural trends, technological developments, aspects of American culture, and the entertainment conglomerates that have controlled Hollywood cinema since the 1980s (Pribram 2002; King 2005; Tzioumakis 2012a; Perren 2012). Increasingly, scholars are also examining screen performances of various types and in different historical contexts (Baron 2016; Shingler 2018; Balcerzak 2018; Cantrell and Hogg 2018). Acting Indie brings together these two strands of research to look closely at acting companies, links between narrative demands and acting choices, indie stars , first-time actors , and Hollywood stars associated with American independent cinema as it has traversed the decades from the 1950s onwards.
Of course, independent film production goes back to the origins of the Hollywood film industry in the 1910s, against which it has often been defined, and throughout actors have been heavily involved in supporting it industrially, institutionally, and through their performances. Yet this book focuses more on the recent articulations of independent production that extend from the late 1950s to contemporary times. It was during this period that critics noted the emergence of several instances of an “independent cinema.” They identified examples of clustered independent film production brought together by aesthetic experiments, consistent engagement with cultural politics, direct and indirect responses to social and economic problems, concerted or loosely structured efforts to counter Hollywood cinema, and developments in technology that allowed filmmaking to be practiced without a need for heavy investment and expensive equipment. All these factors affected independent filmmaking, which took disparate forms, including the “New American Cinema” of the late 1950s and early 1960s, the “downtown cinema” of the 1970s, the “L.A. Rebellion” movement of the late 1970s, and the studio sponsored “Hollywood Renaissance” of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In addition, various articulations of avant-garde cinema surrounding these movements in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s maintained a distance from the commercial film industry, but in certain instances connected with a more mainstream American cinema. Further, different forms of exploitation filmmaking also meant that “independent” feature film production was expansive and not necessarily interested in progressive politics, aesthetic experimentation, and alternatives to the mainstream. Exploitation films of the era ranged from the youth-targeted AIP film cycles of the 1950s and 1960s to the Blaxploitation film cycle of the early/mid-1970s to sexploitation films and explicitly pornographic films after the abolition of the Production Code in the late 1960s. All of this diverse independent film production often generated a critical mass of films that constituted rather clearly defined independent cinemas, operating in mostly well-demarcated areas, including inside Hollywood as the example of the Hollywood Renaissance reveals. However, elements of these cinemas often interacted with each other, in sometimes unpredictable and unexpected ways.
For instance, despite being part of the New American Cinema milieu, John Cassavetes worked in commercial and industrial structures, including ones that emerged as part of the Hollywood Renaissance, such as the unit established by Universal in the 1970s with a view to producing films that would emulate the success of Easy Rider (Hopper, 1969) (Biskind 1999, 125–126). Taking a different route, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jack Nicholson, and many other actors and filmmakers were long-term fixtures of the Roger Corman/AIP exploitation film factory before Easy Rider helped them to create a bridge between that realm and the quality independent films associated with the Hollywood Renaissance.
Similarly, Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls (1966) merged underground and mainstream cinema by receiving distribution in the commercial circuit, while landmark Hollywood Renaissance film Midnight Cowboy (Schlesinger, 1969) reached out to Warhol, with Factory regulars participating in Midnight Cowboy’s famo...