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If the first chapter in the book focused on a series of master-slave-like relations between director and spectators, the feel-bad films in the second chapter create unease precisely by dismantling this dialectic framework. The chapter begins with Gus Van Sant’s film about high school killings (Elephant). The topic appeals to our desire to understand, judge and move on; but all this is precisely what the film prevents us from doing. Instead, Van Sant ethics consists in reminding us that we can never fully know the situation that we are judging. A second part of the chapter develops this argument about the temporary suspension of judgment via a discussion of two texts by Judith Butler and two films by Claire Denis and Michael Haneke that similarly frustrate our desire for judgment and action. Finally, the chapter considers a couple films where the unease and the suspension of judgment are more difficult to pull back into the ethical sphere: Hadzihalilovic’s Innocence and Brakhage’s Kindering. In these cases a form of ‘affective disturbance via indeterminacy’ invites us to rethink our ways of being (a spectator) beyond the security of any clearly defined spectatorial position.

This chapter begins by revising and reassessing the Italian neo-realist movement as a filmic renaissance that, along with the French New Wave, has had the most profound impact on post-war cinema. It then considers how Harmony Korine, Larry Clark, Edward Lachman, and Gus Van Sant rework Italian neorealist aesthetics.

This chapter turns to Elephant, Gus Van Sant's film about the Columbine killings, which may be regarded as interactive and which provokes consideration of non-linearity as a new form of composition, rather than as a form of decomposition or simple disruption. This opens the way to a broader consideration of the cultural forms and practices of everyday life within informational culture. The logic of narrative as an ongoing response to information may be generalized: there is an elephant called narrative in the room.

In recent years various filmmakers have come along who have been influenced by punk culture. Many of these filmmakers operate within what can loosely by described as ‘indie’ film. This chapter discusses several independent films, including Gus Van Sant's Elephant, Michael Winterbottom's In This World, Christopher Nolan's Memento and Tom Tykwer's Run Lola Run.

Chapter 4 explores the sensuous dimension of contemporary soundtracks through examples of soundtrack musicality drawn from diegetic sounds such as physical activities, walking, or environmental sounds. The chapter argues that the overall musical effect produced by the interaction between repetitive sound and rhythmicized visual movement creates musicality of an inherently cinematic nature, a type of audiovisual musique concrète. This approach is theorized through the concept of the erotics of art, contending that the practice of blurring the boundaries between music and the soundtrack’s other elements is intimately connected to the emergence of a trend that emphasizes the sensuousness of film form—its sonic and visual textures, composition, rhythm, movement, and flow—without confusing it with sensory overload.

The official memorial for the Columbine High School shootings was a modest structure located near the school but invisible from it. It was a strictly local enterprise built without federal funds. This chapter considers the almost immediate demolition of the library where most of the deaths occurred and the refusal to acknowledge or even name the two shooters, who also killed themselves, anywhere in the memorial or in anniversary ceremonies. Arguably, the local faith-based cemeteries with their commemorative markers for the victims function as equally (if not more) important memorials as the official complex. In this highly religious community with a strong evangelical Christian base, spiritual interpretations dominated the various narratives that emerged to explain the shootings. However, two films by award-winning directors, Roger Moore (Bowling for Columbine) and Gus Van Sant (Elephant) suggest alternative interpretations, raising issues that might have been explored in a memorial museum.

Shilts finally addresses his addiction to alcohol and marijuana, including in-patient rehabilitation and Alcoholics Anonymous. Shilts grapples with the death of his friend Gary Walsh from AIDS, and the unexpected death of his mother. Shilts offers a first-person account of physical abuse he suffered as a child for an anthology edited by actor Suzanne Somers. Shilts is passed over for inclusion in the documentary version on the life of Harvey Milk, while rights sold to his Milk bio languish and a film is never produced.

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.