Page 210 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Independent C nema: The Myth and Necess ty of D st nct on | 1

Before long, the “indies” became associated with the cultural sensitivities of
a young and disillusioned post–baby boomer generation, Generation-X: AIDS,
paranoia, ennui, rock music, and the impossibility to find true love and mean-
ing in life on a wasted planet. Until 1994, at least, there was no mistaking the
momentum of this wave, as evidenced by the films of Hal Hartley, Quentin Tar-
antino, Richard Linklater, Gus Van Sant, Alyson Anders, Kevin Smith, Todd
Haynes, and veterans like Jim Jarmusch, David Lynch, or the Coen Brothers. Nor
was it limited to the United States. The films of Atom Egoyan, Patricia Rozema,
Pedro Almodovar, Aki Kaurismaaki, Lars Von Trier, the French renaissances of
Belgian émigré Chantal Akerman and Polish immigrant Krzysztof Kieslowski,
Cyril Collard’s Les nuits fauves, Eric Rochant’s Un monde sans pitié, and multiple
others all seemed imbued with the same sensibilities. The new “indie” momen-
tum nurtured liberal political efforts, and Anders’s, Rozema’s, and Akerman’s
contributions to feminist cinema are a good example of its acute awareness of
cultural politics. Next to that, “indies” harbored black, queer, and gay and les-
bian cinema of liberation, whose aesthetics of parody, self-awareness, and activ-
ist audience role of “reading against the grain” (queering cinema) it encouraged.
The films of John Singleton, Spike Lee, Gregg Araki, or Nicole Cohn are integral
parts of that effort.
But even as this sort of new liberation rose to prominence, it got tangled up
in a sort of middle ground in which its progress was compromised—much faster
than any previous independent “wave.” Allen J. Scott sees the emergence of a
tripartite system of film production, distribution, and consumption as the main
cause for this. Up until the 1990s, the realms of independent and mainstream
cinema could, at least theoretically, be clearly separated. But since then, syner-
gies, franchising, branching, and multiplatform collaborations had turned the
wasteland in between the two (the terrain in between the mainstream’s top of the
hill, and the independents’ bushy lowlands) into a separate area of convergence.
Production and distribution companies like Miramax, festivals like Sundance,
awards like the Césars, and the Méliès network of genre festivals in Europe all
operate in between the two poles, like Bertold Brecht’s Mother Courage trying to
stop the war but ultimately extending it, and increasingly becoming a force in
their own right—it even got a name: Indiewood, and it was, again, Steven Soder-
bergh who was seen as symptomatic of its development. Commentators differ
over when exactly Indiewood brought down the “indies,” and some argue that
its momentum is still alive, surviving the tripartite distinction.

ConCLusion
With the confusion surrounding the third moment of momentum of “in-
dependent” fresh in the public’s mind, all debate over whether or not true inde-
pendent cinema actually exists is conflated and convoluted—impossible to determine
amidst the mists on the battlefield. If we try to look to the history of “independent”
cinema, it is, however, possible to observe several moments in which, if not the
actual existence of “independent” cinema itself, then at least very heated debates
about and beliefs in its existence, can be identified. And that is, after all, what