American independent cinema

Targeting American Women: Middle-Class Female Audiences, Marketing, and the Women-in-Danger Pictures of 1978-84

by Richard Nowell

(Forthcoming)

By invoking the figure of the working-class male spectator, cultural elites and film scholars have tended historically... more By invoking the figure of the working-class male spectator, cultural elites and film scholars have tended historically to reduce so-called “women-in-danger” films to sinister fantasies celebrating the most sadistic, brutal, and depraved of responses to second-wave feminism and to those American women seen to benefit from the social and economic upward mobility it facilitated. In contrast, this article reveals the extent to which films like Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), Dressed to Kill (1980), and Visiting Hours (1982) were actually framed to appear relevant and of interest to middle-class thirty-something-plus women, particularly those who held, or envisaged themselves holding, positions of professional influence. Cultivating this potentially lucrative audience, it is argued, involved spotlighting sympathetic female protagonists, high-end fashion, heterosexual romance, female participation in the culture industries, and gender relations discourse. Accordingly, the article reveals that what are often deplored as the most misogynist films in American history were in fact framed contemporaneously in the US public-sphere as in part glossy, topical dramas warning middle-class women of a misogynist seem running deep in American society – in short as cautionary tales of a purported backlash.

Bach and Cigarettes: Imagining the Everyday in Jim Jarmusch’s Int. Trailer. Night

by Carlo Cenciarelli

twentieth-century music 7, no. 2 (2010), 219-243

In Jim Jarmusch's Int. Trailer. Night (2002) a young American actress, alone in her trailer for a ten-minute break,... more In Jim Jarmusch's Int. Trailer. Night (2002) a young American actress, alone in her trailer for a ten-minute break, lights up a cigarette and puts on a CD of the Goldberg Variations. In this short, almost plotless experimental film Bach sounds outside the frameworks that typically motivate the diegetic presence of so-called ‘classical music’ in cinema, detached from the places and signifiers of high art and from high-level meanings and pointed occurrences. This unusual representation of listening opens up two complementary lines of enquiry: first, into the way in which Jarmusch draws on Bach to invent a reality that is strange and irreducible, marked by unexpected cultural affiliations and by an elusive affective realm; second, into the way in which, by thus channelling Bach into his poetics of the everyday, the director reinvents the music's own identity, putting forward a de-essentialized image of its cultural placement and aesthetic status.

Teenage Traumata: Youth, Affective Politics, and Contemporary American Horror Cinema

by Martin Fradley

co-authored with Pamela Craig, in Steffen Hantke (ed.), "American Horror Film: The Genre at the Turn of the Millennium" (Mississippi UP, 2010), pp.77-102.

US ‘Indie-Horror’: Critical Reception, Genre Construction and Suspect Hybridity

by Jamie Sexton

‘A Kind of Bacall Quality’: Jamie Lee Curtis, Stardom, and Gentrifying Non-Hollywood Horror

by Richard Nowell

Forthcoming

This article offers a radically revised vision of the nascent star personae of quintessential American scream queen... more This article offers a radically revised vision of the nascent star personae of quintessential American scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis (refocusing attention towards her widely circulated credentials as young career woman, Hollywood insider, and self-confident humanist), in order to reveal key ways in which the star personae of on-screen talent are utilized industrially to expand the potential audience of low-cost horror films through the premption of deeply entrenched discourses which historically have framed non-Hollywood horror as sexist, amateurish, male-geared product.

“Private Sch♥♥l … For Girls: Young Female Theatergoes, Early-80s Teen Sex Comedies, and the "Make-out Movie”

by Richard Nowell

Forthcoming

This essay counters the prevailing notions that teenaged males were targeted at the expense of other audiences during... more This essay counters the prevailing notions that teenaged males were targeted at the expense of other audiences during the "New Hollywood" years of the late 1970s and early 1980s, and that the commercial potential of young female Americans was only fully recognized by the culture industries in the mid-90s, by showing that, in terms of production, content, and promotion, the New Hollywood youth market was so heavily underwritten by a date-movie mentality that even the period's sexually explicit R-rated teenpics - notably raucious teen sex comedies and melodramatic tales of adolescent sexual awakening - were conceived for and pitched aggressively at teenage girls and young women.

Erickson, Mary. (2008). KingKong.com versus LOLTheMovie.com: Toward a framework of corporate and independent online film promotion. In The business of entertainment, vol. 1: Movies. Robert Sickels (Ed.). Westport, CT: Praeger Press.

by Mary Erickson

Process of Assimilation: Rodriguez and Banderas, From El Mariachi to Desperado

by Martin Flanagan

A draft with very minor differences from the later peer-reviewed/edited version. Appeared in special Bakhtin issue of IXQUIC, Journal of Hispanic Studies (2001), edited by Jorge Paredes.

IXQUIC 3 (2001), 41-59

Re-Making Time: Chronotopes of the West in Lone Star (1996) and The Searchers (1956) / Martin Flanagan

by Martin Flanagan

A much expanded version appears in my 2009 book, 'Bakhtin and the Movies'.

Teen trajectories in Spider-man and Ghost World

by Martin Flanagan

in Ian Gordon, Mark Jancovich and Matthew P. McAllister (eds) (2007) 'Film and Comic Books'. University Press of Mississippi

“The Good, the Bad, and the Un-American: The Czechoslovak Film Monopoly, Hollywood, and American Independent Distributors"

by Jindriska Blahova

Post Script, Essays in Film and Humanities, vol. 30, no. 2, (Winter/Spring 2011), pp. 9-20.

This essay examines the role that American independent distributors and the concept of “independence” played in... more This essay examines the role that American independent distributors and the concept of “independence” played in strategies of Hollywood studios (represented by the Motion Picture Export Association, MPEA) and those of the Czechoslovak state-controlled film industry in their battle to take control of the Czechoslovak film market in the early years of the Cold War. It argues that American independent distributors became a discursive battleground for the MPEA and the Czechoslovak Film Monopoly. The essay combines analysis of primary documents housed in Czech and US archives and of Czechoslovak and American trade and popular press coverage to reveal that discourses of “independence” were mobilized rhetorically by the two organizations in an effort to protect their respective economic and political interests. The Monopoly, along with the Czechoslovak Ministry of Information and the MPEA linked notions of independence to communism and anti-capitalism, but in quite different ways. This essay thus reveals the extent to which notions of independence are deployed as part of political strategy, in addition to their oft-discussed commercial and cultural functions as markers of institutional, aesthetic, and thematic distinction from an imagined Hollywood mainstream.
The essay also expands our understanding of the relations between the majors and independents after WWII. It demonstrates that when it came to Hollywood’s attempts to overwhelm its competitors, political rhetoric was used to complement the economic power examined by Staiger and others. Discrediting independent distributors was bound up with Hollywood’s broader efforts to maintain control over the domestic film market and to dominate markets in Eastern Europe.

“'Where nothing is off limits': Genre, Commercial Revitalization, and the Teen Slasher Film Posters of 1982-1984

by Richard Nowell

Post Script, vol. 30. no. 2 (Winter/Spring 2011), pp. 53-68.

Whereas scholars, commentators, and industry-insiders emphasize commercially compromised film-types are re-energized... more Whereas scholars, commentators, and industry-insiders emphasize commercially compromised film-types are re-energized at the level of production (through the mobilization of supposedly innovative content), this article show the extent to which distributors repackage economically weakened product-types by using promotional posters to reposition films generically.

• Review of Geoff King, Indiewood, USA: Where Hollywood Meets Independent Cinema (I.B. Tauris, 2009)

by Martin Fradley

in "Film Quarterly" (forthcoming, Winter 2010-11)

Review of Gary Needham, "Brokeback Mountain" (Edinburgh University Press, 2010)

by Martin Fradley

in "Canadian Journal of Film Studies" 19:2 (Fall 2010), pp.143-146.

Biopics, docudramas et documentaires: chroniques de l’hyperréalité

by Santiago Juan-Navarro

Published in Cinéastes 10 (2003): 18-19.

Sexe, mensonges et DV: un indie à Hollywood

by Santiago Juan-Navarro

Published in Cinéastes 7 (2002): 15-16.

Lost Budget: La planète indépendante

by Santiago Juan-Navarro

Published in Cinéastes 13 (2004): 18-19.

A la recontre de Gus Van Sant

by Santiago Juan-Navarro

Published in  Cinéastes 9 (2003): 16-17.

From the" Hegemony of the Eye" to the" Hierarchy of Perception": The Reconfiguration of Sound and Image In Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven

by Charlotte Crofts

Peer-reviewed draft prior to corrections / typographical setting, published in Journal of Media Practice, 2:1, 19-29.

Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978) has been hailed as 'one of the most beautiful films ever made', but the film's... more Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978) has been hailed as 'one of the most beautiful films ever made', but the film's immense cinematic beauty has detracted from the impact of its experimental soundtrack. Drawing on interview material with editor Billy Weber (who worked on all three of Malick's films), the original screenplay of Days of Heaven and detailed sequence analysis, the paper examines the film's manipulation of the traditional relationship between sound and image. Indicating that Malick's experimentation with sound largely developed in post production, Weber confirms that the dialogue-heavy screenplay was transformed in the cutting room with the addition of Linda Manz's haunting voice-over. Ridding the film of dialogue created a different emphasis on sound and Weber's states that he and Malick were disappointed that this aspect of the film was critically overlooked. This article redresses this lack of critical recognition, whilst arguing that it is reflective of the general under-theorisation of sound within a body film theory and criticism which tends to emphasise the visual image. With reference to Jean-Louis Comolli, Mary Ann Doane and Kaja Silverman, amongst others, I underpin my discussion of sound in Malick's film with a look at the wider context of the marginalised position of sound within film theory.

Cited in Thomas Deane Tucker and Stuart Kendall (eds),Terrence Malick, Film and Philosophy, Continuum Int. Publishing Group, 2011.

Hal Hartley and the re-presentation of repetition

by Steven Rawle

Film Criticism, Fall 2009