Indiewood+in+the+1990s

Production/Distribution/Consumption, Cultural Taste, and Viewer Responses   [|Pulp Fiction Trailer] = = =[|animatedtimeline]=

=[|U.S. Timeline] = = = =Indiewood Defined: "Coined in the mid-1990s to denote a part of the American film spectrum in which distinctions between Hollywood and the independent sector appeared to have blurred" (3). =

 --May be seen as a disparaging label by those in independent sector: too close to the activities of the studios to be deserving of independent label.

 --May also signify an upsurge of more creative filmmaking that has found space inside, or on the edge of, the Hollywood system--like a return to the so-called Hollywood Renaissance period of the 1960s and 70s.

 --Institutional base of Indiewood is constituted by indie/specialty-oriented distributors and/or producers owned by the major studio companies: either studio-created subsidiaries (Sony Pictures Classics, Fox Searchlight, Paramount Classics) or formerly independent operations taken over by the studios (Miramax under Disney from 1993; Good Machine under Universal Pictures in 2002 as part of Focus Films). (See problems with Weinstein/Disney connection--Miramax abandoned stake in Michael Moore's //Fahrenheit 9/11// (2004)--Weinstein Company in 2005.

 --A cross-over phenomenon, a product of the success of a number of breakout features that marked the indie sector from the early 1990s (//Pulp Fiction// (1994), //Blair Witch Project// (1999)).

 --Also includes films made or distributed by the major studios themselves: //American Beauty// (DreamWorks 1999), //Three Kings, Fight Club// (Fox 1999)

 --Advantages for studios:  a) bring in emerging new filmmaking talent  b) supply attractive vehicles for stars  c) Provides prestige value to studios and corporate owners: particularly prominent in achievement of Academy Awards (James English: "the single best instrument" for negotiating transactions between cultural and economic capital (for converting prestige into financial returns) is the Academy Awards.  d) Gives impression that studios not just involved int he business of maximizing revenues--can claim involment in more elevated, challenging, and /or ambitious work: created specialty divisions in which the identity of the studio parent was clearly advertised in the name of the subsidiary <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> e) In case of Mirimax, when not tied in with studio, makes the business appear more plural and open to competition than it is.

=<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Indiewood as Subsidiary Capitalism: a move from Fordist (mass production/mass consumption) to post-Fordist (more flexible and fragmented (niche) production/consumption) approaches to markets (see Lee). =





<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> --Connections with cable, video, quality television output of HBO, IFC, etc. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> --Slow response to "Long Tail"--the substantial market that can result from the aggregation of large numbers of much smaller niches (Chris Anderson) through the internet, etc.



=<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Niche-Market audiences, Indiewood, and taste cultures: =

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> --Pierre Bourdieu: Cultural Capital, the resources and disposition required for the ability to gain access to (and, importantly, take pleasure in) more specialized realms of cultural production.

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<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> --Jean Baudrillard, consumption is understood as a way of establishing differences as much or more than as a way of signifying distinctions that already exist on other grounds: preferences for particular kinds of products (including specialty cinema) are not individual choices that exist in isolation, but hte outcome of wider more objective fields of forces. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">[|baudrillard]

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> a) Habitus: a durable matrix of shared dispositions, perceptions, and appreciations, a crucial link between the objective conditions of existence of groups or classes and the schemes of lifestyles. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> b) Preference is a product of habitus, and each habitus, and the lifestyle to which it leads, is a historical construct, the product of objective historical conditions and the fields of relations in which one set of schemes is related to another--but experienced as natural and immediate. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> c) Preferences might be for avant-garde or experimental cinema, Indiewood, or what Jeffrey Sconce calls smart cinema, but distinctions are made based on ability to appreciate such dimensions --> hip consumerism? <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> d) Who has cultural capital? Distinctions on the basis of class and education? regular visits to art cinemas or exhibitions for those higher in cultural than economic capital? <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> e) Distinct taste-preferences found in different fractions of the middle classes: Intellectual (Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation), Middlebrow (Shakespeare in Love), Modest touches of distinction within otherwise familiar/conventional frameworks (with shifts from high to low) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">f) Lawrence Levine: distinctions between popular and elite cultural products established in US towards end of 1800s <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">g) Collins: Four-phase: 1. late 19th C distinctions, 2. sacralization of culture partially undermined by growing eclecticism and flexibility in late 20th C, Pop Art from late 1950s in which separation of artistic/cultural realms under attack, 4. high-pop in which aspects of recognized high culture are desacralized by being transformed into mass entertainment (adaptation of literary works by Miramax and Sony?).

=<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">Locating the Indiewood Audience: = =<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; line-height: 0px; overflow-x: hidden; overflow-y: hidden;"> = ==<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">"Postmodern perspective that highlights certain tendencies in post-war consumer-oriented capitalism in which consumption has gained increased prominence as a medium through which social identities can be constructed and reconstructed, a process that results in some blurring of boundaries between different cultural categories and products" (23). ==

<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">--Herbert Gans' five taste publics/cultures:
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> a) range from Innovation and experiment at the level of form (high culture) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> b) to emphasis on substance rather than form involving fiction with an emphasis on plot more than mood or character-development (growth area of upper-middle culture), <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> c) and the more melodramatic assertions of dominant values at the lower-middle and low ends of the spectrum. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">(aesthetic disposition of intellectuals and artists with high cultural capital and popular aesthetic of lower classes, according to Bourdieu). <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">For American audiences, highlight certain broad tendencies, within which many complications and/or contradictions are likely to arise--mix of high and popular cultures, sometimes. Transcendence for many of the long-standing oppositions between ethics of the bourgeois (rooted in Protestant work ethic) and the bohemian (artistic, creative, expressive, hedonistic). Consider other demographics, as well: age, gender, ethnicity

=<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">The Indiewood Field of Cultural Production: Other Mirimax Offerings =

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