american independent cinema

Steven Soderbergh took sex, lies, and videotape to Sundance in 1989, Miramax bought it, and it grossed several times anything the company had released before. Whit Stillman called it the apple-and-serpent moment, by which he meant the industry 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, premiere at Park City in January, sell to a specialty distributor in the room. Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater, Todd Haynes, Paul Thomas Anderson and Kevin Smith all came through it. What they had in common was the licence, and their 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.

Films here also carry Moral Ambiguity, Coming of Age, Found Family, Midlife Crisis, Identity Crisis · Most represented: Richard Linklater, Gus Van Sant, Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee.