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Are the U.S.A.'s Independent Films a Distinct National Cinema?

By Richard Shaw

Richard Shaw is an undergraduate of Film Studies at Sheffield Hallam University in England

Stranger Than Paradise

Since the rise of the major studios and the advent of film sound, so-called 'national' cinemas around the world have been united by a common fear of Hollywood domination. Indeed, so marked has been this concern that little time has been expended looking at the other side of the equation. The intention of this study is to examine how Hollywood's expansion into often disparate foreign markets resulted in a loss of identity in 'American film', and the way in which independent directors, particularly during the 1980s and early-1990s, brought meaning to this otherwise dubious term.

In order to embark on an argument such as this, presenting independent film as a 'national' cinema distinct from mainstream Hollywood, there is first need for clarification. What, in fact, constitutes a 'national' cinema? Through various studies on the subject, whether it be Tom O'Regan's writings on Australian film or the observations of Andrew Higson on the British cinema, four approaches to this concept have emerged. Applied in turn to mainstream Hollywood and American independent cinema, these criteria will provide a basis for the following study, reflecting the national interests of the latter as opposed to the former.

The first of these approaches describes national cinema in strictly economic terms, the focus being on the film industry rather than film texts. Here, as shall be evident shortly, where films find their financing, production and exhibition is crucial to defining origin. The second approach, foregrounding issues of subject matter and style, on the other hand, favours representation as the test of a national cinema. Among the chief considerations here are: how is the national character projected in a particular film or group of films? Are they concerned with questions of nationhood? Is there any genuine sense or image of the nation being constructed? Quite opposed to either of these, the third and fourth approaches to the notion of national cinema are evaluative, popular acceptance in the first instance and critical acceptance in the second providing the most revealing criteria.

"The dismantling of the studio system during the 1950s and the 1960s and the resultant loss of the steady production of modestly sized features [in favour of] fewer, larger films...aided the emergence of what we can now identify as modern independent American cinema."

For mainstream Hollywood, as Michael Allen observes, the mid-point of the last century was notable for a change in philosophy among the majors, particularly in terms of financing. Encouraged by the unexpected global success of Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977), studio executives realised the future lie in bigger budget, higher grossing films. In order to fund pictures on such a scale, however, an international base of financing was required. Through the 1980s and 1990s, therefore, a trend for international partnerships became discernible, with French, Australian, Canadian, Italian and Japanese companies all co-owning or controlling a major American film studio at some point during this period.

The vacuum created by Hollywood's abandonment of mid-budget, socially relevant features left the way open for new, young voices. Evidently, for the likes of the Cohn brothers, Spike Lee, Kevin Smith and Matty Rich, however, to make the films they wanted would require an alternative means of financing. Providing their inspiration were avant-garde and underground American film-makers (e.g., Jonas Mekas, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, etc.), in addition to forefather of this independent 'movement', John Cassavetes. Self-financing personally vital projects, as Cassavetes had done, was only one approach taken by independent filmmakers, though. Before Smith's Clerks (1994), subsidised by student loan money to the tune of $27,600, and even 19-year-old Rich's $12,000 self-financed debut, Straight Out of Brooklyn (1991), the Cohn brothers were calling on private investors for funds. Producing three-minute trailers to present to local businessmen, alongside a guarantee of shared profits, they secured sufficient capital to take Blood Simple (1984) into production. Lee's Get on the Bus (1996) used a similar method, backed by a number of African-American businessmen who collectively formed the production company 15 Black Men.

Clearly, there was little commercial imperative on the part of private investors, often contributing relatively small sums of money. But what financial motivation there was, as in the case of grant subsidies offered by local government, is revealing when assessing American independent cinema's claim to be a national cinema distinct from mainstream Hollywood. For just as the co-owners of 15 Black Men donated their $100,000 each knowing Spike Lee would make a film employing African-American personnel and voicing the concerns of African-Americans, so bodies like the New York State Council on the Arts part funded She's Gotta Have It (1986), Lee's first feature, aware that he would utilise the city's film-making resources.

In this regard, as in the reliance on alternative means of financing generally, American independent film can be compared to most other national cinemas, whether European, Australasian, African or 'Third World', whose sustainability depends on government assistance. However, in America's case, such institutional support was arguably (and ironically) even more vital, often helping to assure local companies a valuable source of revenue in an era defined by the exodus of Hollywood productions to territories beyond U.S. borders. Here, much to the disgruntlement of New York and L.A.-based unions, major studios began to shift their production bases to Canada where, thanks to the low dollar and tax credits afforded them, they could shoot at a fraction of U.S. budgets. The result of this continued tendency was that, by 2000, film production in Toronto alone was valued at well over $600 million, with films based in Canada accounting for a disproportionate 37 percent of those shot in North America.

If the application of the term 'national' cinema with reference to mainstream Hollywood would already appear dubious in terms of finance and production - with films being shot outside the U.S. thanks to foreign management and investment - then changes in the way such material was distributed and exhibited would see it compromised only further. This would be particularly striking by comparison with the, again, more nationalistically-minded independent sector.

In 1980, Robert Redford set-up the Sundance Film Institute in Utah with the aim of offering filmmaking labs to untried directors. To ensure their material gained exposure, however, the Institute required an exhibition arm. Five years later, the Sundance film festival was born, screening works by both Sundance Institute scholars and independent directors from across America. The initial success of Sundance illustrated to emerging independent production companies (e.g., Castle Rock, Good Machine and October Films) as well as independent distributors the potential profitability of titles like Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies and videotape (1989), Hal Hartley's The Unbelievable Truth (1991) and Bill Duke's A Rage in Harlem (1991), films engaging with the concerns of contemporary American society. The result was not only a host of like festivals, among them IndieFest in San Francisco and Sundance's Utah rival Slamdance, but a small network of domestically owned and run distribution companies akin to those found in national cinemas elsewhere. The likes of Cinecom, Island/Alive, Vestron, Miramax and New Line were hereby entrusted with the flow of independent films to both art-house cinemas across the U.S. and overseas festivals where, again like other localised cinemas, they represented their nation on the world stage, describing the real state of America and thus partaking in what Bill Nichols describes as "the circulation and exchange of image culture".

The approach taken to international exhibition by the new Hollywood majors was not quite so noble. For the same reason they had sought out an international source of financing and pursued the lowest labour dollar at the production end of the film-making process, studios entered into partnerships with European and Asian television producers, broadcast stations and cable networks to ensure escalating costs were also covered at the exhibition end. To guarantee favourable box office returns in evermore culturally disparate territories, however, narratives dealing with specifically American anxieties had to be sacrificed. These were gradually replaced, as Charlie Keil acknowledges below, by undemanding, uncontroversial stories relying on the lingua franca of star names, emerging technologies, high-profile marketing and saturation booking.

"By internationalising culture to the extent that it has done so, the U.S. [mainstream film industry] has loosened its claim to defining that culture. ... The U.S. is now in the business of making international movies, and the question becomes, at what point does 'inter' overwhelm 'national'?"

The 1980s and 1990s, for many Americans, was a time of great social and political unrest. As was the case elsewhere in the world, tensions surrounding race, sexual inequality, homophobia and poverty all predominated. However, where other, similarly inflicted national cinemas tried, characteristically, to contain such differences by articulating the concerns of their people and even argue for change, mainstream Hollywood resisted such internationally unmarketable images. Indeed, the growing conservatism of the American majors meant issues like these, particularly by contrast with popular British, French and Australian films of the period, those by Stephen Frears, Chantal Akerman and Sally Potter, for example, were treated only in the blandest, most inoffensive terms.

Racial tensions, for instance, were addressed either in the form of mawkish melodrama like The Color Purple (1985), Driving Miss Daisy (1989) and Beloved (1998), vehicles for white directors, or lightweight comedy, such as Coming to America (1988) and Made in America (1993). More common, though, was the near total denial of any such conflicts. Consider in the same era as the notorious L.A. race riots, for example, the highly idealised (and hence effortlessly exportable) Lethal Weapon franchise. Only in the emerging independent sector, in fact, were filmmakers, often from ethnic minorities themselves, allowed the freedom to explore the realities of the situation in America. The influence ideologically of earlier independent directors like Charles Burnett was discernible, for example, not only in African-American film-makers like Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust, 1991), the Hughes brothers (Menace II Society, 1993), John Singleton (Boyz N the Hood (1991), Poetic Justice, 1993) and the aforementioned Spike Lee and Matty Rich, but also, at a time when the average American was a product of many ancestries, Asian-Americans like Ang Lee (The Wedding Banquet, 1993) and Wayne Wang (Eat a Bowl of Tea (1989), The Joy Luck Club, 1993).

Similarly, this independent sector gave rise to a number of female directors, among them Julie Dash, who were able, again because of the creative control afforded them, to raise equally challenging questions of, among other things, sexual identity and sexual inequality. Approaching their subjects with the same sensitivity as those directors mentioned previously, film-makers like Alison Anders, Nicole Holofcener and Rose Trotche here transcended traditional representations of women in American cinema with Gas Food Lodging (1991), Walking and Talking (1996) and Go Fish (1994), each foregrounding strong, multifaceted female characters. It was also tribute to the groundbreaking work of Trotche together with the self-styled 'New Queer Cinema' that AIDS and homophobia finally became a contemporary issues deserved of Hollywood's attention. Some years before Philadelphia (1993), Todd Haynes (Poison, 1990) and Greg Araki (The Living End, 1992) had already begun exploring homophobia in American society, with Bill Sherwood (Parting Glances, 1985) and Norman René (Longtime Companion, 1990), devoid of Demme's more palatable sentimentality, highlighting the debilitating effects of AIDS.

Likewise acting as a mouthpiece for an American society increasingly denied a voice by mainstream Hollywood were so-called 'white male' independent directors. The agonies and ecstasies of growing up in Middle America were the focus of, for instance, Hartley's The Unbelievable Truth, Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995) and Harmony Korine's Gummo (1997), while John Sayles explored the experience of political corruption in the American South. Perhaps even more rebellious still, however, were the virtually non-existent narratives of Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984), Richard Linklater's Slacker (1991) and Smith's Clerks, with their depictions of the sheer monotony of working-class life - and, more specific still, American working-class life. "I think the film is very American," Jarmusch said on his film's release. "I'm an American, it's a story about America, the acting is American [and] the characters are very American."

Thus, where the best political intentions of Hollywood were invariably thwarted by concessions to foreign audiences, the social often being imagined on an international scale, the independent sector stood firm in its commitment to an American cinema of relevance. As in other national cinemas of note, a number of key stylistic characteristics were also born of this advance. Indeed, given his film's status as a visual antecedent to the independents of the 1980s and 1990s, Jarmusch's insistence on Stranger Than Paradise being an American film, in terms of story, characters and performances, is revealing in this regard. For his rejection of the goal-oriented classical narrative, together with the tendency towards naturalistic acting styles, formal minimalism and iconographic post-industrial landscapes, is also apparent in the work not only of Linklater and Smith, or even just Hartley, Solondz and Korine, but virtually all those aforementioned directors. Perhaps even more important than these formal characteristics to the question of American identity in American independent cinema, however, are the above directors like character descriptions. Here, just as international audiences equated the Australian cinema with certain quirky 'Australianisms' and the British cinema with a gritty 'Britishness', so, with the independent cinema, they began to see the idiosyncrasies, the 'Americanisms', underpinning the American response to life, whether their passivity, their darkly comic humour or their failed attempts at 'cool'.

Stranger Than Paradise, though, also created a model for American independent cinema in other, less fortunate ways. Having travelled the festival circuit of Cannes, London and Venice, Jarmusch's film grossed only $3 million on its U.S. release. Indeed, but for 'crossover' hits like sex, lies and videotape, The Wedding Banquet and Pulp Fiction (1993), early independent films received little exposure to mass audiences in America. The earnings resulting from a boom in the home-video market during the mid-1980s, for example, remained only relative by comparison with the Hollywood majors, a sudden fall in demand proving the main reason for lack of sustainability and the exit from the market of companies like Island, Alive and Vestron. Independent film, in fact, remained a largely art-house affair throughout the 1980s; a potentially problematic factor if a degree of popular acceptance domestically is to be judged a qualification for any national cinema. The turn of the 1990s, however, thanks to growing critical and institutional acceptance, would bring a sea change in popular opinion.

Acceptance among mainstream reviewers in the U.S. had never been quite so elusive as that among mass audiences for the independent sector of the 1980s. Even before the emergence of the Sundance film festival and the notion of the crossover, mainstream reviewers were championing a new wave of independent directors. As early as 1984, in fact, the National Society of Film Critics in America presented its film of the year award to an independent (again, Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise). With this backing, renowned American film institutions felt increasingly obliged to acknowledge the work of independent filmmakers. Here, after a decade or so in which the honours went solely to mainstream Hollywood films like Driving Miss Daisy, Philadelphia and Single White Female (1992), social dramas allowed for by American independent cinema, their more hard-lined antecedents began to win the recognition of New York film festival, Golden Globe and Academy Award jurors. Not until 1998, however, did this institutionalisation appear to be cemented. One of the few independent companies to have weathered the boom and bust 1980s, Miramax Films, earned four Best Picture nominations at the Academy Awards and, in so doing, heralded a new era. Such was the climate, even debutants such as Kimberley Peirce (Boys Don't Cry, 1999) and Alexander Payne (Election, 1999), directors apparently in a long line of independent filmmakers, were picking up Oscar nominations.

American independent cinema by the end of the 1990s had it seemed, no matter what the approach, achieved every requirement to make it eligible for national cinema status: economic sovereignty, a genuine concern for the nation and, with the approval of great domestic film institutions, popular as well as critical acceptance. Unfortunately, all was not as it initially appeared.

As early as 1992, Hollywood majors were recognising that in order to capitalise on the potential mainstream success of independent films they needed not only to continue winning the distribution rights to unexpected, alternatively financed hits, but actively seek out the important directors with whom to collaborate. Sony Classics, Paramount Classics and Fox Searchlight were thus created by their respective, internationally co-owned, parent companies to deal with requests for funds. The result of such diversification was that, by the late-1990s, those 'independent' films and film producers winning plaudits were in fact conventionally financed, mainstream pictures; Boys Don't Cry and Election being funded and distributed by multinationals News Corporation and Viacom, with Miramax now a 'major independent' attached to the transglobal Disney corporation. With this, the criteria by which art-house films were marketed and exploited was also fundamentally changed. Higher budgets, increased advertising and wider platform releases all brought the 'independent' sector closer to the high stakes movie-making of the commercial cinema than ever before. Indeed, the connection of this new breed to the old independents was purely textual, a preoccupation with transforming Hollywood's internationally derived depictions of American life. For many, however, among them Justin Wyatt, even this was thrown into question.

"The economic centrism of independent film embodies a disturbing ideological shift to the morals, values and credo of the majors. ... At the mid-point of the decade [the 1990s], independent cinema was largely an illusion. Even supposedly groundbreaking and iconoclastic 'indie films' were firmly located within the safe domain of dominant ideological and commercial practices."

Clearly, with the crossover to mainstream, a degree of artistic anonymity has set in with the likes Ang Lee, Steven Soderbergh and Gus Van Sant. What one must avoid, however, is dismissing out of hand any film with the name of a major Hollywood studio on it, hereby fuelling the perception of national cinema as a bourgeois cinema. Every national cinema owes a debt to the standards created by Hollywood, inflections of particular generic conventions in the American independent film, for example, frequently calling on our shared Hollywood literacy. One cannot disregard, either, the precedent for emerging directors like Peirce and Payne of auteurs like Woody Allen, Robert Altman and Martin Scorsese, all of whom produced films voicing the concerns of genuine Americans from within the mass media.

At the end of world cinema's first century it was unclear how true Tom O'Rourke's observation that "there is Hollywood and there are national cinemas" would be at the beginning of its second. Could those independent-spirited filmmakers, with all the aforesaid preoccupations, draw on Hollywood's international base of finance and not compromise their commitment to creating a valid national cinema? Would the major studios possibly be content returning to the modestly budgeted, socially relevant features of earlier decades?

To begin to consider this, perhaps, one could do worse than observe another, more recent precedent. Here, after winning Cannes' International Critics Prize for Best Film, director Todd Solondz returned to America only to find his U.S. distributors, the once independent October Films, would not be releasing Happiness (1998). Parent company Universal were it seemed unhappy with its paedophilic material. "They were always supportive." Solondz said of October. "They were great champions of the movie. But such is the way of the world, they have learned that they are not quite as autonomous as they once were." The film was instead released through the still independent Good Machine.