Independent Cinema

Almost most of the films we watch are made as conventional Hollywood movies, there are a significant number of independent films made every year. One reason why you do not see very many of them is because independent film makers cannot always afford the distribution costs. Another reason can be that multiplexes, in particular, do not show independent films because they are owned by major film corporations who do not wish to encourage independent films.
Audiences can also be resistant to non-Hollywood films. In the US and the UK, foreign language films rarely do well because the majority of the audience are not prepared to watch a film with subtitles.
Here, we examine the main codes and conventions of alternative films and some of the major non-Hollywood film movements.

Indie films
 The term ‘indie’ implies that a film will break the rules of traditional narrative and experiment with new or different ways of telling stories to create meaning in a non-realist way. By comparison, Hollywood film is almost exclusively realist in approach.
One of the first film makers to move away from realist film was French director Jean-Luc Godard. He wanted to expose the constructed nature of cinema and challenge his audience in order to make them reflect on their own lives as they watched.
Of course, indie cinema is often adapted by mainstream cinema, and some films with indie characteristics have become huge commercial successes. One of the most famous of these has to be the Blair Witch Project, with its use of unknown actors, handheld camerawork, direct address to camera, and lack of resolution.
Instead of the classic Hollywood narrative as suggested by Field, indie films use narrative in different ways:

• Action may be explicitly broken into chapters, as in a novel.
• Narrative sequence is disjointed in some way.
• The narrative is not resolved.
• Well-known actors are not used.
• Audience cannot empathise with characters.
• Close-ups are not used.
• Characters move ‘outside the frame’.

Non-realist conventons
In mainstream films, the narrative is constructed to reflect reality. In an indie film, the action may be non-realist because there may be multiple layers of narrative or time; flashbacks and dream sequences may be integrated into the timeline or characters may step ‘out of the frame’, or interact with the audience. Changes to normal time and space (such as flashbacks) are obvious so that they do not confuse the audience. Mainstream cinema tries to make the audience believe in the reality of the events on the screen, avoiding any techniques that would draw attention to the film making process. Indie film seeks to achieve the direct opposite.

European Art House
Many critics claim that European cinema’s greatest strength lies in producing art house films that offer an alternative to the popular genres (thrillers, action/adventure, sci-fi, romantic comedies, Westerns, etc.) produced by the major Hollywood studios. Art house cinema is closely associated with genres and form at odds with the perceived escapism of Hollywood productions. One key difference with European art house cinema is the greater emphasis on the imagination and vision of the film maker, including film makers such as Goddard, Truffaut, Fellini, Rossellini, Hertzog, and Kieslowski.
Art house cinema is, of course, not purely European and can be found in American cinema too, with directors such as Scorsese, Coppela, Tarantino, David Cronenberg, and Oliver Stone seeking to produce films more in line with European art house traditions in the auteur style.

British Cinema
There are many genres and traditions within the history if British film. the earliest British films were contemporary with the work of the Lumiere brothers and other pioneers and it was British directors who led many of the developments in constructing meaning in documentary and fiction films.

Among the particular traditions, institutions and genres of British film which you could explore are:

• Ealing comedies
• Hammer Horror films
• Carry On films
• British gangster films
• Angry young Men
• Social realism
• Merchant Ivory

Bollywood
Bollywood is gaining significant global audiences, supported by new technologies which allow the easy distribution of Bollywood movies worldwide.
The Bollywood studios began production at around the same time as the US and UK studios, producing a wide range of films, in many different languages. The Bollywood musical, which epitomises Bollywood in the West, is only one part of a tradition which includes surrealist films, social realism, and contemporary critiques of Indian society. It was the revival of the musicals filmed in Hindi in the 1990’s which brought Bollywood to mainstream attention.
Bollywood is important to study – not least because many directors, such as Luhrmann, have made great use of codes and conventions of Bollywood musicals in their films and the use of colour, sound and light has directly influenced many recent Western films.