Conclusion: The Crisis Image – Mumblecore and Beyond

By way of conclusion and further development of the notion of a cinema of crisis, I will extend briefly this study’s theoretical framework to the work of Harmony Korine, Kelly Reichardt and the ‘Mumblecore’ movement – or, more specifically, the work of Lena Dunham. However, in order to outline these further facets of a cinema of crisis, it is necessary at this juncture to summarise what its salient features are. I argued at the beginning of this book that the dominant and established approach to American independent cinema in critical and scholarly studies is to categorise it in terms of economic, production and distribution strategies.1 While this is important and useful, this focus on the meaning and context of the very term ‘independent’ has resulted in a paucity of material on the aesthetics and poetics of this kind of cinema and its specific effect or affects. By focusing on the themes of crisis, liminality, transition, mutation and transformation, I have tried to emphasise the ways in which American independent cinema appropriates and transfigures the tropes of European ‘Art’ cinema (as set forth in Gilles Deleuze’s Cinema 2) for its own particular purposes in order to challenge entrenched modes of thought.

Chapter Three

Somewhere focuses not only on a life-crisis, but also on an extended liminal moment in a character’s life. Johnny’s life is in suspension; his lack of focus and direction is visualised in the frequent scenes that are set in his car, which often seem to violate continuity of space and direction. In other words, the moments that the main character ‘drives’ forward actually convey circularity and confusion. Indeed, as in Broken Flowers, the notion of ‘making nothing happen’ becomes central to our experience of the film. The film’s presentation of time, space and character is deeply imbricated with Somewhere’s central character as each facet helps to articulate the severity of his apathy and inability to change.

Chapter One

Overtly, the film is about the trauma these boys suffer after the girls’ suicides and their inability to deal collectively with their deaths. On a formal level, however, the film is concerned with something quite different: the implicit violence of the adolescent rite of passage that pushes individuals into prescribed roles, and the irreparable harm that this can cause. It is this ‘implicit violence’ or reality that the boys truly cannot face up to. The film contains a lot of dreamlike and fantastical imagery; Coppola deliberately draws upon advertising campaigns from the 1970s and the photography from this period by William Eggleston and Sam Haskins in order to create instantly recognisable images that are evocative of a particular kind of feminine beauty that is at once both infantile and pornographic. The abundance of these fantastical kinds of images is one of the film’s most salient features.

Chapter Two

By using the Western as a genre ‘in crisis’, Dead Man counteracts the particular version of history it has perpetuated and come to be associated with. In its more traditional form, the Western is a genre that is associated with action, in particular purposive violent action that is rendered meaningful through a narrative context; indeed, a coherent narrative plays a crucial part in justifying the actions of the protagonists as it helps to sustain the particular vision of truth being promulgated within the film. When this logic that enchains generic images together fails or falters, the ‘grand narrative’ that the film upholds is thrown into crisis. Writing with reference to Deleuze’s assessment of the movement-image, Rodowick (2009: 107) notes that ‘these rational connections [between the images] also have an ethical dimension – they are expressive of a will to truth. They express belief in the possibility and coherence of a complete and truthful representation of the world in images.’

Introduction

American independent cinema is certainly a cinema in crisis, but it is also a cinema of crisis. A great deal of useful scholarship has been carried out on the notion of independence and the definition of indie cinema as a hybrid industry (‘indiewood’). This study partakes of that conversation, but from the perspective of the aesthetics and poetics of crisis that figure or visualise notions of ambiguity and the in-between. The cinema of crisis delineated here is one that explores the difficulty or impossibility of progression through extended moments of liminality and threshold. In a cinema of crisis, the concept of a plot is subservient to the investigation of what it means to exist in a moment of threshold within the context of a rite of passage; this moment may usher in transformation, or it may lead to stasis and not offer any form of resolution. What the viewer sees on screen are bodies that may halt, falter, freeze and become-surface, or evolve, mutate, dissolve and merge: these are bodies in crisis because they are either atrophying or becoming-other.