american independent cinema

Steven Soderbergh's first feature reached Sundance in January 1989, and Miramax bought it and made several times anything the company had released before. Whit Stillman called it the apple-and-serpent moment, by which he meant the industry had just worked out that these films could be a business. What followed for fifteen years was a production route that did not exist in 1988: shoot cheap outside the studios and on real streets instead of a backlot, premiere at Park City in January, sell to a specialty distributor in the room. Richard Linklater proved the route could run on nothing but a location and talk, a cast of unknowns drifting around actual Austin arguing philosophy in Slacker, no plot to justify the camera being there beyond the town itself. Once the money that proved could move, Quentin Tarantino spent it on structure instead of geography, running three crime stories back and forth across each other's timelines in Pulp Fiction. What the directors had in common was the licence, and the films look nothing alike.

Distinguish from New Hollywood is the earlier American case, and the resemblance is real but the mechanism differs: that generation was handed studio money, and this one raised its own and sold the result afterwards. New Queer Cinema runs inside the same festival circuit in the same years and is the narrower claim, defined by subject and politics rather than by a route to market. Mumblecore is what the route becomes once the equipment gets cheap enough that Park City is no longer required.