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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.

By way of conclusion and further development of the notion of a cinema of crisis, I will extend briefly this study’s theoretical framework to the work of Harmony Korine, Kelly Reichardt and the ‘Mumblecore’ movement – or, more specifically, the work of Lena Dunham. However, in order to outline these further facets of a cinema of crisis, it is necessary at this juncture to summarise what its salient features are. I argued at the beginning of this book that the dominant and established approach to American independent cinema in critical and scholarly studies is to categorise it in terms of economic, production and distribution strategies.1 While this is important and useful, this focus on the meaning and context of the very term ‘independent’ has resulted in a paucity of material on the aesthetics and poetics of this kind of cinema and its specific effect or affects. By focusing on the themes of crisis, liminality, transition, mutation and transformation, I have tried to emphasise the ways in which American independent cinema appropriates and transfigures the tropes of European ‘Art’ cinema (as set forth in Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2) for its own particular purposes in order to challenge entrenched modes of thought.

A look at the historical and theoretical underpinnings of art cinema, examining how viewers are conditioned to recognize an author’s presence in fictional cinematic narrative. Discussion of autobiographical impulses in fictional films by the directors of this study, introduction of the term “self-projection.” Brief discussion of cinematic self-projection and gender.

By using the Western as a genre ‘in crisis’, Dead Man counteracts the particular version of history it has perpetuated and come to be associated with. In its more traditional form, the Western is a genre that is associated with action, in particular purposive violent action that is rendered meaningful through a narrative context; indeed, a coherent narrative plays a crucial part in justifying the actions of the protagonists as it helps to sustain the particular vision of truth being promulgated within the film. When this logic that enchains generic images together fails or falters, the ‘grand narrative’ that the film upholds is thrown into crisis. Writing with reference to Deleuze’s assessment of the movement-image, Rodowick (2009: 107) notes that ‘these rational connections [between the images] also have an ethical dimension – they are expressive of a will to truth. They express belief in the possibility and coherence of a complete and truthful representation of the world in images.’

Overtly, the film is about the trauma these boys suffer after the girls’ suicides and their inability to deal collectively with their deaths. On a formal level, however, the film is concerned with something quite different: the implicit violence of the adolescent rite of passage that pushes individuals into prescribed roles, and the irreparable harm that this can cause. It is this ‘implicit violence’ or reality that the boys truly cannot face up to. The film contains a lot of dreamlike and fantastical imagery; Coppola deliberately draws upon advertising campaigns from the 1970s and the photography from this period by William Eggleston and Sam Haskins in order to create instantly recognisable images that are evocative of a particular kind of feminine beauty that is at once both infantile and pornographic. The abundance of these fantastical kinds of images is one of the film’s most salient features.

Somewhere focuses not only on a life-crisis, but also on an extended liminal moment in a character’s life. Johnny’s life is in suspension; his lack of focus and direction is visualised in the frequent scenes that are set in his car, which often seem to violate continuity of space and direction. In other words, the moments that the main character ‘drives’ forward actually convey circularity and confusion. Indeed, as in Broken Flowers, the notion of ‘making nothing happen’ becomes central to our experience of the film. The film’s presentation of time, space and character is deeply imbricated with Somewhere’s central character as each facet helps to articulate the severity of his apathy and inability to change.

Examination of directorial self-representation in two related genres: documentaries on the making of films and narrative films about directing, in which the director plays a fictional film director. Discussion of how these practices figure into the larger notion of self-projection, with the director performing self-consciously as author or artist.

The director’s relationship to his actors, and how that collaboration works within the framework of self-projection. Attention is paid to personal relationships between actors and directors (familial, sexual, hostile), with a special focus on the striking frequency with which art cinema authors employ their mothers as actors in their films. This section works toward a new theory of film acting.

Here the appearance of various attributes of the cinematic apparatus (projector, screen, photographic film frames) are linked to various parts of the filmmaker’s body and sensory apparatus, making the point, as early filmmakers do, that cinema creates a new kind of body (partly organic, partly technological) and thus a new way to conceive selfhood.

Analysis of the appearance of cinematic authors within their own fictional narratives and how this relates to self-projection. Theories of embodied spectatorship related to a discussion of embodied authorship. Particular focus on Woody Allen and self-caricature, François Truffaut’s roles, Ingmar Bergman’s voice, Pedro Almodóvar’s interest in gendered embodiment.

A brief conclusion that goes back over the major points of the study’s discussions and thinks about the implications of digital filmmaking. In the end, the imagined relationship between the spectator and the director is brought to the fore as the most significant moment in self-projection.