An Independent Film Hall of Fame

Cybill Shepherd in "The Last Picture Show."

By David Ross. “Independent film” is defined by its circumvention of the Hollywood production mechanism, but this is incidental. The issue is not process but content. Independent film is an indigenous American genre just like the science-fiction film, the noir film, and the Western. Its chief attribute is loquacity. Talk is cheap – literally – and independent movies have made a virtue of necessity by rediscovering what Hollywood can afford to forget: that dialogue is the basis of drama. Less cardinal but still defining attributes include gritty naturalism (almost always urban), cultural and moral skepticism, a penchant for irony and deadpan, identification with pitiable outsiders and addled anti-heroes, impatience with traditional sequential narrative, appreciation for the retro, and a certain seated or merely ambulatory anti-kinesis (not a few films, like Slackers and Before Sunrise, narrate a literal walk). Independent film disdains the happy ending and could not care less about sex or sexiness or conventional good looks (hence Steve Buscemi). The operative politics tend to be amorphously anti-establishmentarian, but too skeptical to be actively liberal. I could make an excellent argument for the conservatism of films like Annie Hall (1997), Metropolitan (1990), Barcelona (1994), and A Serious Man (2009).

The films of the “Easy Rider, Raging Bull” era – films like John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969), Peter Bogdanovich’s Last Picture Show (1971), Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), and Sydney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon – heralded the independent film movement, but were not strictly seminal. They yearned to be epic, mythic, and culturally central, with John Ford, Howard Hawks, and John Huston  in mind. Independent cinema would later snort at these manly pretensions, settling for a peripheral and ironic self-awareness, like the satirical wallflower at the high school dance.

The first true – and possibly best – independent film was Annie Hall. Inspired by European conversationalists like Ingmar Bergman and Eric Rohmer, Woody Allen created an aggressively small and verbal film in an era of equally aggressive hypertrophy and hyperactivity. Perhaps even more to the point, Annie Hall was a quietly scathing critique of the post-sixties liberal and pop-cultural order, setting the tone for a whole generation of filmmakers united by the instinct that “something is wrong,” though skeptical of their own capacity for overt social statement in the style of seventies masterpieces like A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Network (1976). Gabby symposia like Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre (1981) and Barry Levinson’s Diner (1982) further crystallized the verbal and essentially seated nature of the genre. Continue reading An Independent Film Hall of Fame

Russia at a Crossroads: LFM Reviews A Bitter Taste of Freedom

By Joe Bendel. Last week, the obedient Russian “press” dutifully “reported” a silly story about Putin, Russia’s gangster-in-chief, “discovering” Greek urns while on a diving trip. Anna Politkovskaya never wrote such propaganda pieces. As a result, she was assassinated nearly five years ago. While Politkovskaya’s murder has become a symbol of Russia’s regression back into Soviet-style dictatorship, for those close to the crusading journalist her loss is a more personal tragedy. Longtime friend and filmmaker Marina Goldovskaya mourns the Politkovskaya she knew in A Bitter Taste of Freedom (trailer here), which screens this Friday in New York during the Oscar-qualifying DocuWeeks 2011.

In happier times, Goldovskaya had previously profiled Politkovskaya and her future ex-husband Alexander, who was then better known than she for his work as a television presenter. During the filming of A Taste of Freedom, Perestroika was in its endgame, when constitutional democracy seemed like a very real future prospect. The Yeltsin disappointments and the Putin repression would add the bitterness to Goldovskaya’s second documentary featuring Politkovskaya.

As one of the few (perhaps only) journalists willing to challenge the government’s official lines on the dirty war on Chechnya and the raid on Moscow theater, Politkovskaya earned a fair degree of celebrity as well as powerful enemies. To a degree, she has become an iconic figure.  However, Goldovskaya makes a concerted effort to capture the muckraker’s private side. The audience gets a fuller sense of her humor and her self-effacing nature in personal conversations Goldovskaya fortuitously recorded on film. There is also something unexpectedly alluring about the intelligent and spirited woman that never comes across in the familiar photos of Politkovskaya peering owlishly through her eye-glasses. Continue reading Russia at a Crossroads: LFM Reviews A Bitter Taste of Freedom