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Roland Barthes’s writings were very positively received in the United States – in 1979 Wayne Booth called him the strongest influence on American criticism today – but America played a strange, often contradictory role in his work. In his middle years he visited the US four times – in 1958, 1961, 1966, and 1967 – but his initial enthusiasm for New York City was soon qualified by a range of negative comments about the country and its culture, and after 1967 he only returned once, very briefly, though he was much in demand. While opposing the knee-jerk anti-Americanism common among French intellectuals in his day, and especially resistance to America’s modernity, he soon made America a foil for Japan, which represented true exoticism, the opposite of bourgeois Western culture. There are relatively few references to America or American literature in his writings, though American cinema was a significant cultural reference for him, but these do help to reveal the complexity of Barthes’s affective and intellectual engagements, especially since there is often a comparative dimension to them. This chapter explores the varying attitudes and comments about America in Barthes’s letters and his published writings.

This chapter discusses films in the 1950s — a decade of contradictions in society as well as cinema, a decade in which ideals such as a middle-class lifestyle, the model home, and marriage and parenthood were complicated and undermined by anxieties over gender roles and cross-generational tensions. The nuclear family ideal was of particular importance in the postwar period as a site of hope and regeneration. The chapter also includes the study, ‘Popular Films and Colonial Audiences: The Movies in Northern Rhodesia’ by Charles Ambler, which focuses on the ‘Copperbelt’ mining district of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia following independence in 1964), in order to assess the circumstances in which American cinema, and by extension Western culture as constructed by the Hollywood dream factory, was consumed by a specific African audience.

This chapter considers the results of the questionnaire surveys and attempts to map out the general features of filmgoers’ experiences, and to draw attention to key questions that are raised and will be revisited in the qualitative interviews. The chapter also introduces three important features of the research location in order to contextualise the empirical research, providing a background against which the data generated by the respondent interviews may more clearly be seen. First, the nation of Uruguay is introduced. Second, there is an overview of the development and contemporary reality of Latin American cinema. Finally, there is a section about the Cinemateca Uruguaya, the cinema-club of which all the interview respondents were members. As the project develops it becomes clear that this institution is more central to this grounded account of revelation through film than might have been expected.

The chapter reviews a number of debates and arguments about contemporary American independent cinema. One of these arguments involves an examination of independent cinema as an institutional apparatus exemplified by the huge number of film festivals (with the massively popular Sundance Film Festival at the forefront), specialized theatre circuits, distributors’ associations, and even an Independent Spirit Award body, which have created a significant marketplace for low-budget films that differ from the blockbuster films and star vehicles of the major studios. Furthermore, it presents arguments about American independent cinema from an industrial-economic perspective focusing in particular on the ‘problem’ of the studios’ classics divisions and specialty film labels. As these companies traded heavily in the American independent film market, especially since the 1990s, it became extremely difficult to distinguish between ‘truly’ independent films (i.e. made by companies without affiliations with the majors) and films made with an ‘independent style’ by companies with corporate links with the majors. For those reasons, the chapter argues, critics, industry and audiences started using the label ‘indie’ instead of ‘independent’, which suggests a qualitative difference between the two.

This chapter discusses the historical and industrial context of City of God (2002). It examines World Cinema, Latin American cinema, Brazilian cinema, and Cinema Novo. From 1960 to 1964, the first phase of Cinema Novo established modern cinema in Brazil. It also transformed its image outside the country by reason of its critical success. Cinema Novo's image of Brazil was one of exploitation, violence, and deprivation. The chapter then details the production of City of God, from novel to screen. Anthropologist Paulo Lins, who grew up in the City of God, wrote the book on which the film was based. He began academic research on the drug dealers in the favelas and turned this into a 700-page novel. Director Fernando Meirelles then bought the film rights and wanted to make the film to bring attention to the poverty and deprivation of the slums. The ‘great international distributor’ was Miramax.

American independent cinema is certainly a cinema in crisis, but it is also a cinema of crisis. A great deal of useful scholarship has been carried out on the notion of independence and the definition of indie cinema as a hybrid industry (‘indiewood’). This study partakes of that conversation, but from the perspective of the aesthetics and poetics of crisis that figure or visualise notions of ambiguity and the in-between. The cinema of crisis delineated here is one that explores the difficulty or impossibility of progression through extended moments of liminality and threshold. In a cinema of crisis, the concept of a plot is subservient to the investigation of what it means to exist in a moment of threshold within the context of a rite of passage; this moment may usher in transformation, or it may lead to stasis and not offer any form of resolution. What the viewer sees on screen are bodies that may halt, falter, freeze and become-surface, or evolve, mutate, dissolve and merge: these are bodies in crisis because they are either atrophying or becoming-other.

The Chapter examines David Mamet’s position within the independent and indie cinema landscapes. It starts with an overview of Mamet’s work in American cinema and points to the problem that despite the fact that the majority of his work has been for independent companies and studio specialty film divisions, he rarely has been examined as an independent filmmaker. This is despite the fact that as a filmmaker he has produced aesthetically distinctive films that differ considerably from mainstream Hollywood productions. Furthermore, the independent and indie film companies that have financed and distributed his films have increasingly utilised his name as an auteur brand name for the independent sector, which begs further the question of why David Mamet has rarely been discussed as an independent filmmaker. Through an examination of the trailers and other promotional material that surrounded the release of his films, the chapter explores the ways in which Mamet has been associated with American independent cinema.

As the majors became one by one parts of multinational conglomerates in the late 1960s and 1970s, they gradually turned their attention to the production of fewer but considerably more expensive films with the potential to do spectacularly well at the box office. However, this trend created gaps in the film market which were exploited by independent distributors such as American International Pictures and the Samuel Goldwyn Company, which managed to carve a small niche, mainly for sensational /exploitation films and art-house films, respectively. The first part of the chapter discusses the effects of conglomeration on the independent film sector and cites a number of examples of exploitation and art film companies that benefited from these effects. The chapter then focuses on the development of new distribution outlets (cable television and home video in particular) and examines how they created a new demand for films in the late 1970s and early 1980s that created the conditions for the beginning of what has become known as contemporary American independent cinema. Case studies: Foxy Brown (Hill, 1974), Return of the Secaucus Seven (Sayles, 1980).

This chapter examines the influence of Italian postwar neorealist films on the so-called New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) of the 1960s, and narrates a story that goes from the 1950s cinema of Fernando Birri to the 1970s films of Glauber Rocha. It suggests that the neorealist “influence” on the NLAC was mediated by an intricate, complex network of cultural and political processes that developed throughout the years between the immediate postwar period and the 1960s.

This chapter studies Raúl Ruiz's cinema in the period leading up to and during the Allende socialist government in Chile, in context of the new Latin American cinema. Concerning the magical or social realism, Ruiz's films of this period can be seen as a micropolitical cartography of social gestures and behaviors, in relation to but critical of surrounding political and cinematic movements. After the Pinochet coup, Ruiz, like most of those working in Chilean cinema, was forced into exile—a condition that was treated in his first major film project, Diálogos de exiliados (Dialogues of Exiles, 1974). However, Ruiz soon embarked on an exploration of different styles, genres, and formats, producing both films of varying lengths and experimental television work. This enabled experimentation with visual and narrative rhetorics, increasingly distant from and critical of normative conceptions of political cinema.

For a small nation Cuba has been a major player in the context of the Caribbean region. Following the 1959 revolution Cuban cinema emerged at the forefront of cultural production, facilitated by the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC), the first organisation of its kind in Latin America. For thirty years it played a key role, both nationally where it provided the resources for Cuban film-makers, and in relation to the pan-continental New Latin American cinema movement. Beyond the institute alternative Cuban cinemas also emerged, some funded by bodies such as the Radio and Television Institute and even the armed forces. Amateur production, linked to regional cultural centres, also became significant in the 1980s. Even more important has been the Cuban International Film and Television School (EICTV), inaugurated in 1986 as part of they New Latin American Cinema Movement, which became an important laboratory for innovation and experiment. The cultural field in Cuba changed in the 1990s following the end of the cold war, leading to a reduction in local production. But it has also generated new kinds of cinematic engagement through allegories of disconnectedness, and low and no-budget film-making utilising new technologies, leading to a more porous national cinema in Cuba.

This chapter discusses two developments in the movie culture of New York that seemed to signal the dawning of a new era in American cinema. These developments were the regime of censorship that had controlled movies since their inception had almost completely unraveled and an underground sensibility became popular. It is noted here that during this time, a number of films that earned the designation “for mature audiences only” rose from six to forty-four. The discussion looks at how movies began evolving into brazen art, and the public began to expect a measure of controversy, even obscenity, among the popular arts.

Starting with a historical overview of the presence of Nordic directors in Hollywood, this chapter aims to explore the critical mass of Nordic directorial talents in contemporary American cinema. It interrogates their importance for the transnational dynamism of Nordic cinema outside its normative national borders and reveals how vitally Nordic directors have contributed to an increasingly globalised Hollywood. By configuring Nordic directors within different temporal and categorical groupings, this study charts differences and similarities of ‘Nordic’ stylistic and thematic traits when migrating into Hollywood cinema.