Independent film
Independent films or indie films (English for "independent films") describe film productions that are implemented outside of established structures. Originally, these structures meant the American studio system , but the indie phenomenon has now gained global importance. Many independent works are made with small budgets, but some large productions - such as the Lord of the Rings film trilogy - are also independent films.
Instead of financing through equity and loans, a large part of the production costs is covered by the advance sale of foreign exploitation rights. That is why international film markets such as the Cannes International Film Festival , the American Film Market and the MIFED are important for independent productions. The Independent Film & Television Alliance classifies any film that has 51 percent funding outside the major studios as an independent. Although it is primarily a financing and distribution phenomenon, independent films are often ascribed artistic idiosyncrasies. In contrast to feature films , most short films are naturally produced independently.
development
As early as 1919, the then leading filmmakers Charlie Chaplin , DW Griffith , Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. founded the film company United Artists . This should enable the distribution of independent film productions beyond the strict rules of the large film studios. Well-known directors who wanted to implement their artistic visions independently of the influence of others were Orson Welles , Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray . They were often cut by Hollywood for these efforts and had to fall back on financiers in Europe to make their projects come true. Welles also took on roles in numerous films or worked off his debts, for example directing The Lady of Shanghai for Columbia Pictures .
The first pioneers of the independent film movement can be found in the underground films made from 1945 by innovative filmmakers such as Maya Deren , Kenneth Anger or Jack Smith , which often had an experimental character and were attributed to the so-called counterculture .
John Cassavetes is considered to be the father of modern independent film . Above all, it influenced the way filmmakers worked during New Hollywood in the 1970s, in the era of which many films were independent films by today's standards.
Another source of inspiration was the concept of the so-called auteurs in France, who - like Jean-Luc Godard - both wrote the scripts and directed. The filmmakers were also impressed by the uncompromising nature of Italian neorealism , for whose vision directors such as Roberto Rossellini also suffered major financial consequences. Sun founded Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas 's own studios and companies in order to secure the greatest possible independence. While Lucas succeeded in doing this and controlled the production of all Star Wars films himself, Coppola's American Zoetrope had to be sold later and the director survived to this day with commissioned works.
After the Hollywood studios felt safe ground again through the success of Rocky , Jaws and Star Wars at the end of the 1970s and set about creating a commercial success with blockbusters , sequels and camp films Producing cinema, the artistically oriented New Hollywood cinema experienced a decline. Symbolic for this are the commercial disasters of the boxer film Like a Wild Bull - in contrast to the much smoother Rocky - as well as the Western Heaven's Gate , which led to the bankruptcy of United Artists .
The independent films
The term indie originated in English-speaking countries in the 1980s, when the next generation of young directors began to make their films away from the studios, which proved to be independent in terms of content and form and triggered an explicit countermovement: John Sayle's " The Return to Secaucus " cost 1980 $ 60,000 and gross income of $ 2 million. Jim Jarmusch made two and a half million dollars with Stranger than Paradise in 1984 , Spike Lee's “ She's Gotta Have It ” even over seven million.
The most important cornerstone for the success of independent film productions was laid in 1989. With Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies and videotape the way were revolutionized how these films could be manufactured and marketed. Simultaneously with the success of this film, the popularity of the Sundance Film Festival , founded by Robert Redford - which is still regarded as the festival for broader reception, independently produced films - grew , as did the success of the Miramax company , founded by the brothers Bob and Harvey Weinstein.
Like Steven Soderbergh, successful directors such as Spike Jonze , Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson , David O. Russell and Alexander Payne manage to build a bridge between commercial and film inspired by the independent spirit.
Michael Moore helped the documentary film to a hitherto unknown popularity with his debut film Roger and Me in 1989 .
Inspired by the films of Jim Jarmusch and Soderbergh (Sex, Lies, and Videotape; Original title: Sex, lies and videotape ) emerged in the wake milestones of Independent Films like Slacker by Richard Linklater , the notoriously funded by credit Clerks - The shop keeper of Kevin Smith , as well as Robert Rodriguez's El Mariachi .
In 1992, Quentin Tarantino made his first mark with Reservoir Dogs before he achieved world fame with Pulp Fiction (1994). The success of this film for Miramax also aroused interest in other studios, which resulted in more and more films on the border between mainstream and sub- or counterculture.
Among the most important directors of independent film is one of Julie Dash , whose film Daughters of the Dust (1991) is considered one of the greatest works of independent film of the 20th century.
Mixing with Hollywood
After the great artistic and financial success of some independent films, the major Hollywood studios began to buy up independent productions in the early 1990s or to set up their own departments for the production of films of this type. The Walt Disney Company bought the independent studio Miramax in 1994. The controversial founders Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who changed the indie scene with their aggressive marketing strategy, left their own company and founded the film studio The Weinstein Company in 2005 . 20th Century Fox founded the Fox Searchlight Pictures label . Metro-Goldwyn-Mayers (MGM) subsidiary United Artists has also been involved in the independent film market since 1999 . MGM is now 20% owned by Sony .
In this way, the line between the big Hollywood studios and the alternative film producers blurred more and more. Upmarket mainstream films such as Shakespeare in Love and The English Patient were distributed by Miramax. Classic indies are finding it increasingly difficult to remain independent, especially after the boom triggered by Miramax.
Films like Sideways by Alexander Payne , Lost in Translation by Sofia Coppola or Forget Mine Not! by Michel Gondry based on a screenplay by Charlie Kaufman belong to the category of Indiewood films , as they were shot with money from the studios and partly with Hollywood stars, but they belonged to a somewhat different and mainstream narrative culture. This genre celebrated one of its greatest successes in 2005 with Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain with Jake Gyllenhaal and the late Heath Ledger .
The digital revolution
With the advent of digital video cameras and editing systems, the threshold to make a film dropped dramatically, as producers no longer had to rely on a lot of money to make films. The film Tarnation reportedly cost no more than $ 500 and was cut on an iMac .
While the first films made with digital cameras such as Chuck and Buck by Miguel Arteta could still be clearly distinguished from films made on analog 16 mm or 35 mm material, the cameras with up to 4K resolution developed by some suppliers offer budding and independent cameras working filmmakers sometimes have unimagined opportunities that are even used for Hollywood productions such as The Social Network by David Fincher.
Mumblecore
The year 2008 was the year at the South by Southwest Film Festival (SXSW) , in which the Mumblecore movement prevailed. Mumblecore describes films like Hannah Takes The Stairs , Quiet City or Funny Ha Ha , which are about the college-educated white middle class around the age of 30, and films made with little financial means in a very dialog-heavy manner and mostly with a video camera and a small crew. Filmmakers like Joe Swanberg, Andrew Bujalski or Greta Gerwig, who were grouped together by the press, made friends at the SXSW Film Festival, deepened their contacts and subsequently helped out with the others' films as crew members or actors.
Most of the members of this movement have since evolved. Greta Gerwig played with Ben Stiller in Greenberg and the Duplass brothers shot with Marisa Tomei , John C. Reilly and Jonah Hill Cyrus - without having to deviate from their way of working, which includes a lot of improvisation. Since many of these filmmakers have made the step into a wider public and the production conditions are becoming more and more professional - the bumpy staging was a distinctive feature of the films of this group - many critics and bloggers speak of the death of the Mumblecore movement.
Outside the USA
All films that implement artistically ambitious ideas on a small budget, regardless of which country they come from, are now referred to as “independent”.
In Germany , with the Junge Deutsche Film and the Oberhausen Manifesto , a reorientation of film began in the early 1960s, which endeavored to present a realistic representation of the present and society. Their filmmakers strove for financial and intellectual independence and consciously set themselves in opposition to the mainstream of the time . These include above all Rainer Werner Fassbinder , Wim Wenders , Volker Schlöndorff , Werner Herzog , Jean-Marie Straub , Alexander Kluge and Eberhard Fechner . This wedding of German cinema came to an end around the same time as its American (New Hollywood) and British ( Free Cinema Movement ) counterparts.
At the moment, Das kleine Fernsehspiel is primarily offering young filmmakers a platform for low-cost, committed films on television. X-Films Creative Pool , a German film and television production company that was originally founded by directors Tom Tykwer , Dani Levy and Wolfgang Becker and producer Stefan Arndt , plays a prominent role in German independent film .
According to the financial resources of German film festivals , most of them concentrate on indies . The best known are the Hof International Film Festival , the Oldenburg International Film Festival as well as in Saarbrücken -based film festival for young filmmakers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland , under which every year the renowned Max Ophüls Prize is awarded.
In Scandinavian cinemas in particular , Dogma 95 propagated a cinema far removed from the escapes from reality that are focused on effects.
Festivals and prizes
The main festivals for independent films are the Sundance Festival and the Cannes Film Festival . The most important international film awards in this area are the American Independent Spirit Award and the British Independent Film Awards . The Tromanale took place in Germany from 2005 to 2006 .
literature
- Peter Biskind : Sex, Lies & Pulp Fiction. Behind the scenes of the new American film. Rogner & Bernhard at Zweiausendeins, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-8077-1004-3 .
- Jim Hiller: Independent Cinema. A Sight and Sound Reader. BFI Publishing, London 2001, ISBN 0-85170-759-9 .
- James Mottram: The Sundance Kids. How the Mavericks took back Hollywood. Faber & Faber, New York NY 2007, ISBN 978-0-86547-967-8 .
- Jason Wood: 100 American Independent Films. 2nd edition. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke et al. 2009, ISBN 978-1-84457-290-8 ( BFI Screen Guides ).
Web links
- Filmmaker Magazine New York (English)
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Kristin Thompson: The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood , University of California Press, Berkeley 2007, p. 258.
- ^ Kristin Thompson: The Frodo Franchise: The Lord of the Rings and Modern Hollywood , University of California Press, Berkeley 2007, ISBN 9780520247741 , p. 257.
- ↑ Darlene Clark Hine (Ed.) Black Women in America, 2nd Ed. 2005, https://www.academia.edu/2645714/Julie_Dash
- ^ Tarnation (2003) - Box office / business . In: imdb.com. Retrieved February 10, 2013 .