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This chapter examines the emergence of “independent” film and KIFA’s negotiations with newfound contributors of capital (e.g., conglomerates and venture capitalists), the state, and new cultural venues. New cultural spaces where new political sensibilities were expressed emerged as a result of such negotiations and compromises. This chapter analyzes how activist cultural production and consumption has been reconfigured in the postauthoritarian context. The chapter sets up a backdrop against which a new crop of independent filmmakers and their different narrative strategies emerged. It also shows the changing context in which newly defined activist films have been produced and consumed and the ways alternative filmic spaces have emerged.

This chapter elucidates how neosurrealist aesthetics has permeated audiovisual practices in so-called independent films. The discussion begins with a review of theories on recent cinema, included the new “smart film,” digital cinema and the impact of MTV's accelerated or “intensified” aesthetic. A broad theorization of neosurrealism in cinema is follow by two case studies on Richard Linklater's Waking Life (2001) and Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind (2008). The first discusses how Glover Gill's neuvo-tango score works with corresponding rotoscoped images to produce an experientially rich and immersive narrative world. The second highlights how Gondry's Be Kind Rewind can be interpreted as metafilmic commentary on recent technological and cultural changes. In each of these films an element of wonder is conveyed through the use of audiovisual devices that blur the boundaries between narrative levels, combined with an aesthetic of “repurposing” that draws attention to the cultural memory of objects.

This chapter explores the aspects of Memento's marketing in both the US and UK to assure what signifiers of independence were used, particularly in early print advertisements. Marketing independent films required ingenuity to reap the largest rewards from a small budget. The marketing of independent film developed a public discourse of independence. While the older, upscale educated consumer had resonance for the marketing of certain independent products, the strategies employed for Menace II Society, Like Water for Chocolate and Memento recognised other social identities. Memento's platform release broadly followed the independent release patterns for indie films on the art-house circuit. Its crossover success was also due to the targeting of a young college audience and its strategic placement in cinemas close to large campuses. Its marketing strategy also concentrated on the complex plot.

This introductory chapter discusses the problems involved in defining the term ‘independent filmmaking.’ By citing several examples of 'unlikely' independent films (such as Star Wars: Episode 1 The Phantom Menace) alongside more likely label carriers (such as Memento and Palindromes) the chapter introduces the various problems associated with attempts towards defining the term (independent of what?) and raises the question of why study American independent cinema in its own right, that is, separately from Hollywood cinema, especially as key companies like Disney started as independent producers only to become later vertically integrated studios and more recently global entertainment conglomerates. Finally the chapter approaches American independent cinema as a discourse that expands and contracts when authorised institutions contribute to its definition at different historical junctures and offers brief examples of how the discourse has changed since the early 20th Century

This chapter addresses some of the issues of independent film to investigate the practice of sequelisation, and subsequently its meaning and currency. The specific commercial strategies inherent in the indie sequel cooperate with a variety of artistic and personal aims. The sequel is utilised to express an interdependency of meaning and viewing positions. The chapter then highlights the trilogy's heritage in cinema. The sequel can be seen as a vital niche mechanism, informing the continuous transformation of the trilogy and heightening its currency. The forms of ‘sequel’ and ‘trilogy’ can be seen as taking on entirely new guises and contexts within the intermedial environment. The independent film sequel brings a sense of authorial progression or development, at the same time as it enables a filmmaker to re-explore the same theme or critical issue throughout a range of different scenarios.

This chapter analyzes the consumption and circulation of the works of independent filmmakers at Korea’s burgeoning international film festivals. New activist cultural production and consumption take place in the film festival venues created by the unprecedented alliances among the postauthoritarian state, new media capital, and the independent film circuit. And these venues, in turn, operate as platforms where festival audiences express their upwardly mobile class identity and individuality, which were not expressed through the consumption of either mainstream or traditional activist films. Here, the audience is an important element in understanding how activist cultural production and consumption have been reconfigured in Korea.

This chapter focuses on alternative models of cinema, which flourished beyond the exclusive control of the major studios. This was related in no small part to occasional funding sources and specialised forms of institutional support that emerged for independent film. The video market, in particular, became a crucial source of funding through cassette presales. At the same time, international film festivals such as Cannes, Venice, London, Berlin, Toronto, Hong Kong and Pusan became an important showcase for raising public awareness of films produced outside Hollywood. The chapter also includes the study, ‘Gone With The Wind Plus Fangs’: Genre, Taste and Distinction in the Assembly, Marketing and Reception of Bram Stoker's Dracula by Thomas Austin, which examines the particular means by which film in the early 1990s was distinguished by a so-called ‘industrially motivated hybridity’. This describes the means by which film creates appeal not through any singular or unified style, but through promotional and conversational processes of fragmentation, elaboration and diffusion.

In India, ‘independent documentary film’ is a term that signifies a body of films that first appeared in 1975 during the Constitutional Emergency, a period when the repressive exercise of state authority threatened the democratic political foundations of the nation. The initial usage of the term ‘independent’ to denote a production category located outside of state structures is now a misnomer. In the post-economic reform landscape, independent filmmakers operate with greater flexibility and various interdependent and mutually cooperative forms of organisation between filmmakers, the state, international and domestic NGOs, private institutions and individuals are commonplace. My attempt here is to construct an ongoing critical dialogue between broader concepts of documentary studies and the situated perspectives that emerge from individual accounts and the analysis of films produced and circulated using diverse modes and architectures. Emphasising the historical significance of documentary as a space of oppositional representation, the accounts produce a grounded theory of independence structured in relation to institutions, industry practices, individual subjectivities and technology in post-reform India. Combining the study of independent film practice and textual analysis, the mixed methods study investigates how independent Indian documentary is a practice that not only produces political representation but opens up new material relations between culture, society and the individual.

In recounting the last fifteen years of the independent film movement in Hong Kong, it is impossible not to mention Tammy Cheung's name. Even though she does not make narrative films, she has nevertheless made inroads with documentary films. She focuses on social and human problems as her subject matter and uses direct cinema as her approach. Without the use of voice-over narration, she explores the limits of objectivity and what she calls the “freedom of movement” in the direct cinema style. Her works such as Secondary School and July have elicited a significant response from the community. Even though finding capital and support is incredibly difficult, she claims she will continue filming into the future. Likewise, Hong Kong most certainly needs a documentary culture that records both major historical events as well as reflections from the streets.

Memento emerged into the new landscape of twenty-first-century independent film. This book is centrally concerned with placing Memento within that terrain constituted of the various discourses which construct independence. It explores the context of the film's production, the practices used in its marketing and distribution, its negotiation of narrative norms and its public reception. Discourses of independence are historically specific and unfixed, and describe relations of power. The Fimmaker Top 50 draws attention to the contested nature of independence within different authoritative groups. Memento provides a route to thinking about the ways in which the forces shaped late American independent cinema. Finally, an overview of the chapters included in this book is shown. It can be stated that this film defies easy comprehension and continues to be regarded by many as an example of independent creativity and innovation.

This chapter wrestles with the question of independence in the Hong Kong context, looking at the ways that independence is constituted and circulated, arguing that independence originates less from the production side—a lack of studio financing—and more from the independent community's self-styled imaginative construction of the independent film ideal, a counter-public embodying the so-called “indie spirit” through attempts to define itself as distinct from the mainstream. The imagined community of cinematic independence facilitates the circulation of these texts among a critically receptive community both in Hong Kong and around the world, and in the process of circulation, the notion of independence is further refined, mutated, and contested. Throughout the chapter, the public sphere is mobilized as a vehicle for understanding the circulation of film texts in a variety of contexts. In his 1989 book Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jürgen Habermas asked under what social conditions a public sphere is created.

This chapter examines the claims of independent Chinese filmmakers to truth and reality as well as their experiments with various documentary modes and styles. Focusing on the issues of truth, subjectivity, and audience, it explores truth claims as well as the dilemma of self-positioning and audience interaction in Chinese independent filmmaking and videomaking. It also discusses the extent to which independent production and overseas investment and distribution affect the reception of independent films and videos as documents of truth, and how to reconcile the politics of such unusual circulation of the truths and poetics of independent film- and videomaking in contemporary China. Using the film Xiao Wu as example, the chapter describes a pattern of drastic difference in the reception of “truth” inside and outside China. Finally, it considers the origins, styles, problems, solutions, and directions of the Chinese independent documentary.

This chapter explores the public discourse on Memento. It also examines how this developed within Internet communities. It then returns to the issue of categorising Memento as an independent film and explores the extent to which its independent status figured in its public reception and eventual success. Activity on Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is established by communal practices. Both critical and public responses to Memento unsurprisingly focused predominantly on the reverse ordered narrative. Memento was a mainstream film disguised as an indie, having high production values and a Hollywood feel that masqueraded as art house. This film is now recognised as an exemplification of twenty-first-century indie filmmaking. Christopher Nolan claimed to be a ‘mainstream director’ during the marketing of Memento and an ‘independent’ when filming Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.

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.

This chapter offers a description of Romanticism and the Romantic movement and delineates the primary arguments of the book. It interrogates the question ‘what is Romantic?’ by investigating historical Romanticism and its relationship to imagination, the problem of identity and selfhood, and Romantic irony, linking these principles to the twenty-first century theory of metamodernism. It then connects these concepts to the films discussed, drawing on historically relevant film movements and previous scholarship on American independent film. It concludes with overviews of subsequent chapters.

This chapter examines questions of media and mediation in Chinese independent films in a reception context of polylocality where domestic neglect contrasts with overseas celebration. It argues that we must approach the contemporary Chinese independent documentary as a troubling case of information. The case is troubling not only because certain types of intended information may trouble age-old normative concepts in Chinese culture and society, but also because the status of images and information in Chinese independent documentaries raises critical questions regarding interpretation, access, mediation, ethics, affect, and agency. The chapter analyzes the 2001 documentary The Box to bring the issue of performance into critical scrutiny and challenge the conventional framework of truth and reality. It also considers film piracy in China, with particular emphasis on the production of alternative meanings through the “pirated” intertextuality in recent Chinese independent filmmaking.

The final section of the book considers the future prospects for future development of the alternative public sphere of independent documentaries, in light of increasing censorship and a hardening government attitudes towards unsanctioned representations of China’s contemporary reality. Recent events in China’s independent viewing and production culture are discussed in detail, including a wave of independent film festival shutdowns since 2011. Speculative comments are offered about the state’s evolving attitude towards the independent documentary realm.