Indie Cinema Online maps out a cultural history of American independent cinema online from 1999 to the present, from Netflix and its use of online streaming to the first feature film released on YouTube to Sundance's creation of digital shorts and web series intended for cell phone viewing.
Indie Cinema Online investigates the changing nature of contemporary American independent cinema in an era of media convergence. Focusing on the ways in which modes of production, distribution, and exhibition are shifting with the advent of online streaming, simultaneous release strategies, and web series, this book analyzes sites such as SundanceTV, YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, and other online spaces as a means of redefining independent cinema in a digital era. Analyzing the intersections among cinema studies, cultural studies, and new media studies within contemporary convergence culture, author Sarah E.S. Sinwell looks at sites of media convergence that are often ignored within most studies of digital media. Emphasizing the ways in which the forms and technologies of media culture have changed during the age of convergence, this book analyzes contemporary production, distribution, and exhibition practices as a means of examining the changing meanings of independent cinema within digital culture.
Most films rely on a script developed in pre-production. Yet beginning in the 1950s and continuing through the recent mumblecore movement, key independent filmmakers have broken with the traditional screenplay. Instead, they have turned to new approaches to scripting that allow for more complex characterization and shift the emphasis from the page to performance. In Rewriting Indie Cinema, J. J. Murphy explores these alternative forms of scripting and how they have shaped American film from the 1950s to the present. He traces a strain of indie cinema that used improvisation and psychodrama, a therapeutic form of improvised acting based on a performer’s own life experiences. Murphy begins in the 1950s and 1960s with John Cassavetes, Shirley Clarke, Barbara Loden, Andy Warhol, Norman Mailer, William Greaves, and other independent directors who sought to create a new type of narrative cinema. In the twenty-first century, filmmakers such as Gus Van Sant, the Safdie brothers, Joe Swanberg, and Sean Baker developed similar strategies, sometimes benefitting from the freedom of digital technology. In reading key films and analyzing their techniques, Rewriting Indie Cinema demonstrates how divergence from the script has blurred the divide between fiction and nonfiction. Showing the ways in which filmmakers have striven to capture the subtleties of everyday behavior, Murphy provides a new history of American indie filmmaking and how it challenges Hollywood industrial practices.
The independent sector has produced many of the most distinctive films to have appeared in the US in recent decades. From 'Sex, Lies and Videotape' in the 1980s to 'The Blair Witch Project' and New Queer Cinema in the 1990s and the ultra-low budget digital video features of the 2000s, indie films have thrived, creating a body of work that stands out from the dominant Hollywood mainstream. But what exactly is 'independent' cinema? This, the first book to examine the question in detail, argues that independence can be defined partly in industry terms but also according to formal and aesthetic strategies and by distinctive attitudes towards social and political issues, suggesting that independence is a dynamic rather than a fixed quality. Chapters focus on distribution and relationships with Hollywood studios; narrative ('Clerks' and 'Slacker' to 'Pulp Fiction', 'Magnolia' and 'Memento') and other formal dimensions (from 'Blair Witch's' 'authenticity' to expressive and stylized camerawork and editing in work from Harmony Korine to the Coen brothers); approaches to genre and alternative socio-political visions.
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.
A Companion to American Indie Film features a comprehensive collection of newly commissioned essays that represent a state-of-the-art resource for understanding key aspects of the field of indie films produced in the United States. Takes a comprehensive and fresh new look at the topic of American indie film Features newly commissioned essays from top film experts and emerging scholars that represent the state-of-the-art reference to the indie film field Topics covered include: indie film culture; key historical moments and movements in indie film history; relationships between indie film and other indie media; and issues including class, gender, regional identity and stardom in in the indie field Includes studies of many types of indie films and film genres, along with various filmmakers and performers that have come to define the field
The industry's only director-cinematographer-screenwriter-producer-actor-editor, Steven Soderbergh is contemporary Hollywood's most innovative and prolific filmmaker. A Palme d'or and Academy Award-winner, Soderbergh has directed nearly thirty films, including political provocations, digital experiments, esoteric documentaries, global blockbusters, and a series of atypical genre films. This volume considers its slippery subject from several perspectives, analyzing Soderbergh as an expressive auteur of art cinema and genre fare, as a politically-motivated guerrilla filmmaker, and as a Hollywood insider. Combining a detective's approach to investigating the truth with a criminal's alternative value system, Soderbergh's films tackle social justice in a corporate world, embodying dozens of cinematic trends and forms advanced in the past twenty-five years. His career demonstrates the richness of contemporary American cinema, and this study gives his complex oeuvre the in-depth analysis it deserves.
Steven Spielberg once said, "I like ideas, especially movie ideas, that you can hold in your hand. If a person can tell me the idea in twenty-five words or less, it's going to make a pretty good movie." Spielberg's comment embodies the essence of the high concept film, which can be condensed into one simple sentence that inspires marketing campaigns, lures audiences, and separates success from failure at the box office. This pioneering study explores the development and dominance of the high concept movie within commercial Hollywood filmmaking since the late 1970s. Justin Wyatt describes how box office success, always important in Hollywood, became paramount in the era in which major film studios passed into the hands of media conglomerates concerned more with the economics of filmmaking than aesthetics. In particular, he shows how high concept films became fully integrated with their marketing, so that a single phrase ("Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...") could sell the movie to studio executives and provide copy for massive advertising campaigns; a single image or a theme song could instantly remind potential audience members of the movie, and tie-in merchandise could generate millions of dollars in additional income.
From the flickering silent images of the nickelodeon to the roaring vibrancy of today's digital video productions, independent cinema has always challenged the way films are created, released and viewed. The History of Independent Cinema presents an extraordinary journey that revisits the innovative men and women who stood up to the status quo and brought revolutionary new ideas and technologies to the motion picture world. The History of Independent Cinema celebrates the pioneers who introduced color, sound, widescreen projection and videography to the filmmaking process. You will meet the brave individuals who tore down racial and gender barriers behind the camera, challenged censorship taboos imposed on film production, formulated new strategies for film distribution, and created many of the greatest movies ever made. Spanning the full spectrum of the U.S. film experience, The History of Independent Cinema is a tribute to the legendary filmmakers and landmark films that reshaped - and continue to reshape - American popular culture.