Introduction

Like so many cultural categories, indie cinema is slippery. The same term refers not only to a diverse body of films spanning more than two decades, from Stranger Than Paradise (1984) to Synecdoche, New York (2008) and beyond, but also a cultural network that sustains them. This book is about American indie cinema as a film culture that comprises not only movies but also institutions -- distributors, exhibitors, festivals, and critical media -- within which movies are circulated and experienced, and wherein an indie community shares expectations about their forms and meanings. Its topic is the American independent cinema of the era of the Sundance Film Festival and the Hollywood studio specialty divisions. It is not especially concerned with telling the indie story as an unfolding history, but it is nonetheless historical in at least one sense: indie cinema itself is a mode of film production and a film culture that belong to a specific time. Roughly speaking, this era stretches from the emergence into wide public consciousness of this formation in American movies in the middle-to-late 1980s to the indie industry crisis and the demise of many of the indie film companies and studio divisions at the end of the 2000s.

To capture the period succinctly, we can think of indie as the cinema of the Sundance-Miramax era. Beginnings and endings are hard to mark, but two events giving shape to the history of indie cinema are the 1989 Sundance Film Festival, where sex, lies , and videotape launched itself improbably to commercial and cultural success, and Disney's shuttering of Miramax, which had been so influential over more than two decades in defining and promoting independent cinema, in 2010. While indie cinema has no clear moments of origin or conclusion, these two moments help to set a historical frame. Following many other critics, I am limiting my discussion to the period when the category of indie cinema began to function not just as a scattered minority practice but as a viable system that parallels that of Hollywood and in some sense has been incorporated by it.

Most centrally, indie cinema consists of American feature films of this era that are not mainstream films. Its identity begins with a negative: these films are not of the Hollywood studios and the megaplexes where they screen, and are generally not aimed at or appreciated by the same audience segments. We will soon see that this is an inadequate definition and understanding, but it is necessarily our starting point, and everything to follow in some way elaborates on indie's identity as a form of cinema that is constantly being distinguished from another one which is more popular and commercially significant, but less culturally legitimate.

The importance of its distinction in relation to Hollywood reveals a tension at the heart of indie film culture between two social functions. The value of indie cinema is generally located in difference, resistance, opposition -- in the virtue of alternative representations, audiovisual and storytelling styles, and systems of cultural circulation. In many quarters, difference from Hollywood itself can be a mark of significant value. Indie film culture profits from its alterity, which sustains it and has the potential to be politically progressive and even counter-hegemonic. At the same time, this same culture functions to reproduce social class stratification by offering an elite, culturally legitimate alternative to the mass-market Hollywood offerings of the megaplex. The audience for specialty films -- a film industry term which covers indie releases -- is generally urban, affluent, well-educated, and fairly narrow by comparison with the audience for studio pictures. By positioning itself as artistic and sophisticated in comparison to mainstream cinema, indie culture functions as an emergent formation of high culture -- or perhaps more accurately, high-middlebrow culture -- inheriting the social functions previously performed by foreign art films. In some cases we might also see indie cinema as a vanguard subculture, offering its youthful community a sense of insider knowledge and membership through its critical stance toward the dominant culture, which it holds in some measure of contempt. Subcultures, like high and middlebrow cultures, often also reproduce class distinction through their negation of mass or popular culture. The emergence of a high-profile American cinema of theatrical feature films parallel to Hollywood that fulfills these two contradictory missions of resisting and perpetuating the dominant ideology marks indie cinema from earlier iterations of alternative filmmaking and exhibition in the United States.

Economically speaking, independent is a relational term describing businesses that are smaller than and separate from bigger competitors. For instance, locally owned record stores are called independent as a way of comparing them favorably to regional, national, or international chains. In this sense, as in any, the term has a positive valence: to be independent is to be free, autonomous, and authentic. Calling a business independent also implies that if it is to succeed it must be more clever and innovative than more powerful competitors, like David facing Goliath, and innovation in any field is taken for an unambiguous good. In business, bold new ideas that change the way people think about an industry and its products often come from outside of more conservative established firms, from upstart independents unafraid of taking risks and trying untested strategies to fill underserved needs. This dynamic of change from the outside challenging conservatism on the inside describes American cinema as well as it does many competitive industries.

The term independent has been used in the American film industry since before the establishment of the studio system in the 1910s and 1920s, and has undergone a series of shifts over the decades since then, though it has always referred to production, distribution, and exhibition outside of the Hollywood studios and mainstream theater chains. At different times in film history it has described varied and heterogeneous industrial and textual practices, including filmmaking of high, medium, and low budget and cultural status. In every period of American cinema there have been feature films made, distributed, and exhibited by independent entrepreneurs rather than the majors. In the Sundance-Miramax era, however, independent cinema has taken on rather different meanings from those it had before. It has been transformed from mainly an economic category into one with a broader ambit, which does not necessarily hold up to scrutiny when applying solely economic criteria. If for no other reason, this is because the specialty divisions, also known as mini-majors, are divisions of Hollywood studios owned by media conglomerates and thus are not independent of Hollywood companies. In the process of shifting meanings, indie and independent have taken on connotations that are not easily encapsulated, and much of what had previously defined these terms no longer applies. Thus in the Sundance-Miramax era, the idea of independent cinema has achieved a level of cultural circulation far greater than in earlier eras, making independence into a brand, a familiar idea that evokes in consumers a range of emotional and symbolic associations. Although it is a good start, then, a definition of indie cinema centered on an industrial distinction between big and small businesses does not offer us a satisfying understanding of the concept of independence in American cinema of the Sundance-Miramax era. It does not tell us everything we might want to know and prevents us from understanding much of what people consider indie to include. In this era, indie cinema is understood according to a cluster of associations about film texts and contexts that go beyond industrial distinctions to include many facets of the cinematic experience.

The shift from "independent" to "indie" is one marker of the emergence of this new cluster of associations. Although it likely originated in the world of popular music, indie gained salience as a more general term for nonmainstream culture in the 1990s, and applies not only to rock or pop music and feature films but also in some instances to video games, news media, zines, literary magazines, television shows, crafts and fashion, and retail businesses from booksellers to supermarkets. To an extent, the diminutive indie is simply a synonym for independent with an added connotation of fashionable cool. But it also functions as a mystification of the more straightforward category "independent." This mystification diminishes or makes vague the significance of economic distinctions and injects added connotations of a distinguishing style or sensibility and of a social identity. The introduction of "indie" also allows for a separation between a strict and loose sense of the idea to which both "indie" and "independent" make reference, so that something might seem indie without actually being independent by whatever strict definition one adopts, or alternately might be independent by that definition without seeming indie. We must be sensitive to shifting and inconsistent criteria which include both textual and contextual considerations, and grant that, as a cultural category, indie cinema is the product of indie film culture's collective judgment about what counts -- or does not -- as indie.

This judgment depends as much on understandings of Hollywood as mainstream cinema as it does on conceptions of indie in relation to it. I consider "mainstream" to be a category that niche cultures or subcultures construct to have something against which to define themselves and generate their cultural or subcultural capital. I do not believe that there is a mainstream that exists independent of this process of classification. Thus mainstream cinema is itself as much a product of expecting certain kinds of experience at the multiplex and making certain kinds of sense of Hollywood movies as it is anchored in textual practices. The mutability of mainstream classifications is confirmed in cases of crossover indie successes such as My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) and Garden State (2004) (or in music, alternative rock acts such as R.E.M. whose popularity threatens their authentically independent status). The appeal of a product that originates from the indie sector to a wider public potentially indicates that it belongs in the mainstream rather than the marginal alternative spheres. The "indie blockbuster," so crucial to the development of the mini-majors in the 1990s and 2000s, aims to bargain away some outsider credibility in exchange for commercial reward, calculatingly nudging some indie films toward the mainstream to occupy negotiated terrain, part outside and part inside. But even in such exceptional cases as Nirvana's Nevermind (1991) and Pulp Fiction (1994), it is often possible to retain the credibility and integrity associated with independence while also appealing to a wider audience. This is evidence that "mainstream" is always a product of collective judgment no less than "indie" is.

The shifting meanings marked by the rise of indie cinema have made an industrial definition of indie (and of mainstream) cinema less descriptive and apposite. First, independent cinema is not used merely as a business term. Like independent music, independent cinema originally made its artistic authenticity contingent on the autonomy of its production from major media companies, and as such was distinctive as a cultural genre defined as much by industrial criteria as textual features. But also like indie music, over time its autonomy from major media companies ceased to be so central to its identity whether because of the mainstream's incorporation of indie style or because of indie culture's greater investment in aesthetics and identity than economics. Whatever the reasons, at this point indie had become recognizable as a distinct form of cinema and a promotional discourse supporting it (or, more accurately, a cluster of styles, cycles, subgenres, and promotional discourses surrounding them), and this is evident even in the simple fact of the widening currency of "indie" beyond the industry and the cinephile audience. For instance, the Keystone Art Theater in Indianapolis has an Indie Lounge, and a section of DVDs in American Target discount stores beginning in 2006 used an "INDIES" sign to indicate categorization of movies for sale. When media consumption is guided by this kind of categorization, indie film has become a cultural category with its own life outside of the world of people who read Variety or indieWire. It refers more to films than to corporate structures and interrelations in the media trade, although the origin of the term in an economic distinction is part of its wider cultural circulation. As it is used in the Sundance-Miramax era, independent cinema describes aesthetic and social distinctions as often as industrial ones. It is a matter of cultures of consumption as much as those of production.

This is not to deny that industrial or economic distinctions are part of the cluster of criteria applied in constructions of indieness. Especially among more cinephile and passionate audiences, economics might factor in quite a bit. For instance, one critic divides up indies industrially into five categories. From smallest to largest: house indies which are fully DIY operations based out of people's homes, micro-indies earning under $3 million annually in theatrical revenue, mid-indies like Magnolia Pictures and IFC, full indies like Summit and Lionsgate, and dependents like Fox Searchlight (see fig. I.1). He tellingly considers all of these categories to be along the spectrum captured by the term indie . But economics is always considered in relation to other considerations. Even the use of the term indiewood , which can pejoratively mock films of Hollywood mini-majors that aim to position themselves as "indie," recognizes at once cultural and economic factors in categorization.

It follows that economic and aesthetic criteria may converge, but not necessarily. Thus a film produced outside of the Hollywood studios may not be considered indie according to prevailing cultural criteria. For instance, in 1989 the independent producer Carolco made the action blockbuster Terminator 2 , no one's idea of a 1980s indie. George Lucas financed the production of his Star Wars prequels himself?; their production credit goes to Lucasfilm, not 20th Century Fox. And no one considers those films indie either. But Miramax (under its Dimension Films imprint) and Lionsgate have followed strategies of combining the production of "genre" films that are not typically called indie with classier pictures aimed at the festival and art house circuits that are. If indie were being used strictly as an economic category, then Lionsgate's torture porn films like Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005) and Summit's Twilight series would count no less than films by Jim Jarmusch and John Sayles. But as indie is used in the Sundance-Miramax era, it might make no more sense to think of low-budget "genre" films as indie any more than it does high-concept blockbusters, though exceptions such as indie horror blockbusters The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007) -- marketed as much on the basis of their heroic production legends as of more conventional appeals -- certainly test this distinction. In any instance, factors such as style and implicit audience address and exhibition context and promotional discourse matter as much as who the distributor is.

Cultural categories like indie cinema function through repeated use in multiple discursive sites, and are best understood as they are implemented by communities invested in their meanings. A good way of tracing the contours of the category is by looking at the various popular surveys of American indie/independent cinema, books like The Rough Guide to American Independent Film and 100 American Independent Films and magazine features like Empire magazine's "ultimate indie lineup" of fifty "greatest" films. Many of these do include outlier cases. Empire has an action blockbuster, The Terminator (1984), in its top ten, and most surveys of independent film stretch back to independent cinema from before the Sundance-Miramax era, such as films by John Cassavetes, Andy Warhol, and John Waters. But the most central and recurring instances are likely those around which the category has been fashioned in the popular imagination.

Categories are often maintained by the identification of such prototypes and exemplars, those instances that are especially salient for making judgments about what the category means and what belongs or does not belong in it. Indie cinema has certain central instances, films like sex, lies , and videotape and Pulp Fiction , that have not only influenced later works but, equally important, have influenced indie film culture's conception of itself. Films find their way into the category through discursive positioning, which is partly a matter of locating a film's similarity to established central instances of indie film -- whether by textual or contextual (including industrial) criteria. Thus some films might be stronger or weaker examples of indie cinema; some are more central, and some more peripheral or problematic. There is no formula for inclusion, no fixed set of textual or contextual conditions we can apply. Films like Lionsgate's genre releases might be weaker examples, while those of key indie auteurs like Richard Linklater or Hal Hartley might be stronger ones. Textual and economic criteria figure into these judgments, but they will not function as necessary and sufficient conditions for inclusion.

In this way indie cinema shares much with indie music, a similar cultural formation that mixes the economic and aesthetic. Some indie rock artists, like Sonic Youth, have unassailable credibility despite migrating from independent to major labels. Some, like Liz Phair, begin indie in terms both of label and aesthetic, but are eventually rejected from the category not just because of signing to a major label, but because of adopting too much of a pop sound. And other acts like Radiohead may originate on majors but gain credibility among those who identify their tastes as indie and authentic, and eventually turn to DIY distribution, the quintessential indie culture move. Judgments about indie authenticity rely on multiple and sometimes contradictory factors and are best understood within cultural contexts.

Just as independent film distributors like Summit or Lionsgate may release films or recordings that don't count culturally as independent, there are many films that do count culturally that would not be admitted to the category according to a strict economic criterion. As with indie music and major labels, distinction between films made by major studios and films made by independent entrepreneurs does not effectively mark indie cinema off from the rest of American film. This is in large part a function of the rise during the 1990s of the mini-majors, the subsidiaries of the Hollywood studios whose role is to produce and more often finance and distribute what the industry calls its specialty or niche products, lower-budget films aimed at more affluent and urban art house audiences. The cinema under consideration in these pages is to a large extent that of Miramax, New Line and Fine Line, Fox Searchlight, Sony Pictures Classics, Paramount Classics, and Focus Features. These are (or in a number of instances, were) Hollywood companies, boutique labels under the corporate umbrellas of Disney, Time Warner, News Corp., Sony, Viacom, and NBC Universal, respectively (see fig. I.1). While T2 , The Phantom Menace (1999), Hostel , and Twilight (Summit, 2008) would be "independent" according to a strict industrial definition, the numerous films released by the mini-majors over the years would not. At the same time, indie cinema also includes releases by many smaller distributors such as Lionsgate, Summit, The Weinstein Company, and IFC, and audiences and filmmakers may not distinguish very critically among mini-major films and those considered more "authentic" when considering industrial criteria. And this is not even to consider the films by artists whose work is understood to have come out of the indie movement, like the Coen brothers and Spike Lee, who have had many films distributed by majors (rather than their subsidiaries) such as 20th Century Fox and Universal. Even mini-major release and markers of "quality" may not be the right conditions for indieness, as many of Miramax's biggest successes in terms of box office revenue and high-profile awards might not seem very centrally indie within late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century American film culture (e.g., The English Patient , 1996; Good Will Hunting , 1997; Chicago , 2002). Determining what indie means requires that we be attentive to its cultural circulation as well as to economics, storytelling, and thematics.

In the era of indie cinema and mini-majors -- which is also the era of home video and Netflix, of Hollywood as a resurgent commercial power, of intensified globalization of media, of rapidly proliferating film festivals and festival films, and of a mass culture steadily fragmenting into so many niches -- there has been a fairly stable conception of what an independent film is, and this conception is distinct from those that applied at earlier moments in American film history. Broadly speaking, indie cinema is produced in the context of these various developments. Its identity comes into being in comparison to other categories of cinema contemporaneous to it, such as Hollywood blockbusters and prestige pictures, foreign imports, and avant-garde works. Indie cinema is a product of its contexts large and small. It is itself a form of niche media, a reaction against conglomerate gigantism and at the very same time, considering its mini-major producer-distributors, a symptom of it. But independent cinema circulates as a concept principally within its specific institutions; it is most specifically within these institutions that its meanings and values are produced and understood. This knowledge is contextual and contingent, which is to say, it is a product of historically specific conditions.

I argue in these pages that what makes this iteration of independent cinema -- the indie iteration -- cohere as a cultural category is not only a set of industrial criteria or formal or stylistic conventions. It is most centrally a cluster of interpretive strategies and expectations that are shared among filmmakers; their support personnel, including distributors and publicists; the staffers of independent cinema institutions such as film festivals; critics and other writers; and audiences. All of these different people are audiences who employ these strategies, and it is only because filmmakers are also film spectators that they are able to craft their works to elicit particular responses from the audience. Indie constitutes a film culture: it includes texts, institutions, and audiences. Indie audiences share viewing strategies for thinking about and engaging with the texts -- they have in common knowledge and competence -- which are products of indie community networks. These viewing strategies will be the subject of the pages to follow.

To think in terms of viewing strategies requires a shift away from the approach that writers, whether scholars or not, often take to analyze cultural categories or genres. It is tempting to try to define a category according to its attributes, identifying essential characteristics and centering a definition on them as conditions of inclusion or exclusion. But by focusing on texts alone we miss much of what makes categories significant to our encounters with media. Categories are ways of organizing experience, guides to finding order in the world. Cultural options always threaten to overwhelm, and it is only by categorizing them that producers and consumers of culture can manage to know where to pay their scarce attention. I locate media categories not only in texts but also in audiences and the institutions through which texts and audiences are brought together.

Sideways (2004) is a comedy about two friends who take a trip to a wine region of California. It stars Thomas Haden Church, Paul Giamatti, Virginia Madsen, and Sandra Oh. It was shot on 35mm color film and runs 126 minutes. The story is by turns funny and sad. It is about love, friendship, loneliness, and passion. It follows conventions of continuity editing and canonical storytelling, with clear exposition and causal narration pushed along by character conflict. Its comic style is generally subtle and character-focused, though in the final act it turns somewhat more farcical and broad. These traits are facts of the film's textuality. But its indieness is not to be found entirely by examining its textual features; indieness is the product of a judgment that we make about the film, or which comes premade for us as part of the film's promotional discourse and its contexts of consumption. Some viewers experience the film in a condition of total ignorance of the existence of something called indie cinema, and for them nothing is at stake in determining whether it belongs in this category or not, and it is simply irrelevant. Some are aware of indie's existence but refuse to allow Sideways entry into the category, perhaps because of textual features, but more likely because it cost more to make than was considered reasonable for a film to be indie in 2004 ($16 million) or because it was financed and released by a mini-major, Fox Searchlight. And many consider it to be a very good example of indie cinema, so much so that the film won six 2004 Independent Spirit Awards, including Best Picture. What made it indie might have been its storytelling and style, or the background of the director Alexander Payne (whose previous films include Citizen Ruth , 1996, and Election , 1999) in the indie movement, or its release in art houses, or its cultural positioning in trailers, reviews, and other forms of publicity and promotion. The fact that different knowledgeable and competent people can legitimately disagree about whether or not a film counts as indie suggests that this is an oft-contested category, and one that cannot be understood without considering the people who use it and their habits of textual engagement. Texts may be indie or not, but the only way of determining if they are is by looking at whether people think of them this way. Categories like indie cinema arise and maintain their significance through a process (actually a cluster of processes), and so in the pages to follow I will look at indie cinema as process as well as product.

Much of this cultural and cinematic terrain is already the subject of books such as John Pierson's Spike , Mike, Slackers & Dykes , Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures , Emmanuel Levy's Cinema of Outsiders , E. Deidre Pribram's Cinema & Culture , and Geoff King's American Independent Cinema , among many other writings. Studies of this large field of cinematic practice have shed considerable light on some of its industrial and cultural features, and Geoff King has considered indie cinema not only as an industrial designation but also as a corpus of texts, establishing general aesthetic tendencies and some contexts to which they respond. King has also written about the films of the mini-majors in particular as "indiewood" rather than independent cinema. E. Deidre Pribram's Cinema & Culture is admirable in its combination of the contextual and textual and in the array of cinema it canvases, moving from discussions of distribution to narrative to politics and thematics. Her work overlaps historically with my study, but it begins and ends earlier, covering the 1980--2001 period rather than the Sundance-Miramax era which privileges constructions of independent cinema as indie rather than, as earlier, as a more political and aesthetically adventurous challenge. It also diverges in thinking about independent cinema as multinational (including British examples) and as more intrinsically political and aesthetically confrontational in relation to classical narrative. My effort to unify indie cinema's culture through the rubric of a cluster of interlocking interpretive strategies overlaps in many ways with her analysis, though mine emphasizes indie film culture's role in setting terms through which films are understood.

Jeffrey Sconce's influential essay on "smart cinema" of the 1990s and early 2000s is another work that covers some similar ground as this study, identifying a trend in American specialty filmmaking which relies on irony and nihilism as a way of distinguishing itself against Hollywood film. Sconce argues that a specific "smart" tone or sensibility unifies the aesthetic interventions of many indie filmmakers to be discussed in these pages, including Todd Solondz, Todd Haynes, Wes Anderson, and Richard Linklater. He is careful to distinguish this category from indie cinema, a culture with which smart cinema overlaps. Smart cinema offers its audience a sense of distinction in relation to mainstream cinema, as I have argued of indie cinema more generally, and its ironic address splits the audience into those who get it and those who do not, which allows the ones who do a sense of their distance from the mainstream other. But the smart film is a more specific category than the indie film, one that has little currency outside of academic discourse, and Sconce makes no claim that smart-ness is essential to indieness. My approach is thus more expansive than his both historically and also by considering indie films that might lack the ironic or nihilistic sensibility of a Ghost World or Happiness , such as many of the films of the strain of indie cinema I will identify in chapter 3 as socially engaged realism. And yet I do rely on some of Sconce's ideas about the Off-Hollywood audience and the functions of certain kinds of textual difference within indie contexts.

Thus as a cultural category and a film culture, indie cinema still is open to further critical analysis as a formation which includes but is not limited to the releases of the mini-majors (since indie culture does not consider an economic criterion to be necessarily above any others). Although there are many books on independent film, they often catalog rosters of savvy producers, heroic auteurs , and distinctive "schools" without unifying them within contexts of cultural production and consumption. Independent cinema needs consideration as a corpus of works with not only underlying aesthetic conventions but also shared audience expectations. King offers a clear and persuasive overview of the industrial and formal terrain, and he also considers some of the sociopolitical dimensions of alternative cinema; I aim to consider indie film from a complementary perspective that is concerned primarily with describing the modes of engagement it solicits and encourages within the context of its institutional discourses. My project is to consider how American indie cinema is invested with significance and given unity and coherence by a cluster of assumptions and expectations about narrative form and the cinematic experience that producers and consumers of independent films share. Independent filmmakers, films, and their critics and audiences function in a circuit of meaning-making. The mode of interaction between audience and text is the product of discourses effected through a collaboration between all of the participants in constructing and maintaining "indie" as a cultural category. In tracing the contours of this category and arguing for its significance, I am most concerned with thinking about how its users make sense of it and how their sense-making is a product of cultural forces, which both enable and constrain potential meanings. Thus my approach to thinking about indie films as a coherent category is a pragmatic one, considering how it functions within the contexts of its use.

This approach seizes on the nexus of film and spectator, text and audience. It is concerned with how films are experienced but not very much with how they are made. Of course, to understand everything we might want to about indie cinema, we would need to look at production practices as well. (Some scholars have done this, though much work remains to be done.) But this is not a book that aims to understand everything. Its ambition is to understand how audiences and films engage one another, and it assumes that pursuing this issue is a good way of understanding how indie cinema functions as a category and concept. Thus its approach has both sociological and psychological dimensions.

In the case of independent cinema, a sociological approach can help us understand the way that the indie audience uses culture for the purpose of distinguishing itself -- its taste -- against the other of mainstream culture and its audiences. In this sense, indie cinema is a means of accumulating cultural capital, the forms of knowledge and experience that social groups use to assert and reproduce their status. Indie culture is comparatively urbane, sophisticated, and "creative class," and it uses cinema as a means of perpetuating its place in a social and cultural hierarchy. It thus succeeds art cinema in the history of cinematic taste culture in the United States as a mode of filmmaking that those aspiring to certain kinds of status adopt as a common point of reference, a token of community membership. At the same time, a psychological approach can explain how, within the audience formation that has an investment in indie cinema, text and viewer engage one another. In the following pages I will elaborate on a cluster of viewing strategies that the indie audience has in common. These strategies and the textual forms that solicit them are best understood as psychological dimensions of the cinematic experience, which arise alongside conventions of storytelling. They are means of framing the comprehension and interpretation of films. If my discussion of viewing strategies describes the phenomenon of indie cinema well, it will only be because these strategies have both sociological and psychological validity. That is, they are descriptive of both the audience as a social phenomenon and of the spectator as an idealization of that audience in an individual whose mind is engaged by cinematic culture and its surrounding discourses.

In this book, I first establish indie film culture as a body of works that call on shared knowledge and expectations within their institutional contexts. I then canvas three viewing strategies, relating to three prominent aspects of independent cinema in this era -- character-focused realism, formal play, and oppositionality -- and analyze their functioning through discussions of specific examples. The first part of the book discusses these strategies and the institutional contexts within which they are mobilized, in particular film festivals and art house theaters. It argues that in the Sundance-Miramax era, indie film essentially filled the role previously occupied by imported art cinema.

The second part considers four films as examples of how indie films represent character and make it a central aesthetic appeal. Nicole Holofcener's Walking and Talking (1996) , Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003) , Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996), and John Sayles's Passion Fish (1992) each illustrates some key elements of the prominence of character in independent cinema storytelling. It positions these films within a strain of indie cinema that I identify as socially engaged realism, an approach to storytelling and thematics that distinguishes character-centered indie cinema from mainstream narrative and representation.

The third part considers the viewing strategy of finding in the forms of indie films an invitation to play, of seeing unconventional or prominent formal appeals as game-like. The discussion in this section turns to the Coen brothers' films as examples of pastiche as a playful indie aesthetic, and then to Pulp Fiction and the many films which in various ways share some of its unconventional narrative logic, which may be said to play with narrative form itself. The emphasis on the Coens offers one significant example of indie auteurism, an ideology distinguishing alternatives from ordinary film practice, and a key approach to appreciating independent cinema. The Coens are also an excellent example of indie negotiating between the margins and mainstream, as directors whose origins in independent cinema have authorized appropriating their entire oeuvre as the work of outsiders, even as many of their films have been released by major studios to quite wide appreciation. The subsequent chapter, on ludic narrative forms, begins with Pulp Fiction but canvases many examples of different kinds of play with narrative conventions and expectations that function as distinction between mainstream and alternative practices.

The final part treats the topic of indie cinema as a form of opposition to the mainstream, but by looking as much at the contexts of film releases, including discourses in the popular and trade press and on cinephile Web sites, as at the film text itself. In considering the release of two films in particular, Happiness (1998) and Juno (2007), it contrasts a film whose credibility as alternative culture was constructed as practically unassailable with another whose indieness met challenges as it succeeded commercially and "crossed over." This concluding chapter about indie as anti-Hollywood argues that opposition to the mainstream is animated through the discourse of authenticity that affirms some films' indieness while denying that of others.

Although indie and independent are often terms used to describe more than just American fiction feature films, with certain exceptions I have limited the discussion in the pages that follow to fiction feature films made by U.S. directors and producers (though financing might come from abroad). Documentaries are different in a number of important ways from fiction films, especially their modes of representation and narrative exposition and their economic positioning within the American film market. Many of my claims apply to them as well, but many would not, and thus including documentaries would excessively complicate matters. The exclusion of films from outside the United States is perhaps a more contentious matter. Aesthetically, many qualities of Canadian, Latin American, European, and Asian films positioned as alternatives in local or international markets are quite similar to the aesthetics I describe in relation to American independent films, and they often call upon the same viewing strategies. American indie distributors, moreover, distribute many imports; some of the most high-profile independent releases in this era, including The Crying Game (1992), Secrets and Lies (1996), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), The Piano (2002), Once (2006), and The Queen (2006), have been foreign-made indie releases. However, while I believe many of my claims do apply to films from other countries, I have still limited the discussion to American films. In part this is to make my task manageable, but also because, as chapter 2 will show, indie cinema in the United States has functioned as an alternative American national cinema. The discursive construction of American indie cinema that I have considered is largely a product of national media institutions, not only American film festivals like Sundance but also American blogs like indieWire, magazines like Filmmaker , trade publications like Variety , and theater chains like Landmark. The mini-majors that control much of the cinema called indie are American companies releasing mainly American films. All of this suggests that indie culture is to some significant extent a national culture, even if it is not essentially concerned with thematizing national identity. This is not to deny that it is also a local, regional, international, or global culture, but only to defend its configuration here as American first of all. (It is also my sense that indie culture in the United States keeps imports at the periphery in its constructions of indieness.)

By describing indie cinema as a film culture, I am insisting that we think of it not just as a collection of cinematic works with similar textual features but also as a set of practices and a body of knowledge with certain privileged meanings. Our ways of thinking of indie cinema are not simply issued by the publicity departments of media companies, nor are they products merely of critical discourses in the popular, trade, or scholarly press. Indie culture is a category that belongs to all of the people who make up its community of users, which includes filmmakers and tastemakers and ordinary filmgoers. Indie can only function as a coherent term as long as there is some agreement about what it names. Only by locating indie cinema within the integrated web of text, audience, and institutions can we hope to understand this category and the concepts it calls to mind.

...

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