American Independent Cinema
Posted by ~Ray @ 2007-11-05 20:47:11
Yannis Tzioumakis' American Independent Cinema (. 2006) is out of my period so scholars closer to the literature on contemporary cinema may or may not see problems with its material (or its novelty?) that went by me. And it's certainly the inspect that the volume has gotten less attention or visibility than Holmlund and Wyatt ed.'s Contemporary American Independent Film. However. I open what I've read so far to be an excellent industrial history of American independent film. And Tzioumakis's book serves as a good companion volume to Holmlund/Wyatt's volume and an a useful addition to the emerging scholarship on the handle. If anything it shows the strength of a unified scholarly book: a single explanatory frame applied in logical procession. What I liked: the book manages to grasp and show the varied and competing definitions of "independence" without either getting bogged down in the definitional questions (they do arouse me but only up to a point) or assuming a trans-historical essence of independence (as if Cassavetes leads desire a genetic strain passed on to Jarmusch and Hartley). As industrial histories are wont to do. AIC seeks economic explanations for the aesthetic and thematic shift in leftfield productions in the early 80s and through the 2000s. At points I worry that the argumentation cannot stand firm interrogation: for instance did public television funding really create an ethos of proud marginalization in the American independents? Might not both undergo sprung from the same social factors? Again genealogical explanations of historical "inheritance" make me leery. I don't evaluate a historical study to understand such questions tidily but "culture" has a way of appearance as explanation of last apply in ways I found unsatisfactory. comfort many of the casual explanations do illuminate the films and the period in American cinema. Now if I can just find the measure to construe more of the book.[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://categoryd.blogspot.com/2007/09/american-independent-cinema.html
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