Steven Soderbergh

Independent Form

60 | Steven Soderbergh that this exchange is possible and Tess that, although he may be a liar and a thief, such an elaborate and dangerous verbal game also proves that he loves her, while Benedict clearly prefers the money. Soderbergh’s use of dialogue to establish the main characters’ motives and at the same time arouse the curiosity and identification of the audience may sound like nothing new. Generating curiosity and expectation about narrative events and establishing identification with main characters have long been central to the Hollywood mode of storytelling . However, Soderbergh’s interest in such a “throwback” type of filmmaking offers an alternative to the contemporary predominance of adolescent comedies and action blockbusters in which exaggerated caricature, violent, digitally enhanced spectacle, and marketing have displaced well-constructed characters and narratives. Such allusion to Hollywood’s kinder, gentler past allows Soderbergh access to a larger audience for the social commentary associated with his version of independent cinema. Independent Form While Geoff King agrees that American independent cinema has always been a relational designation and therefore “not entirely separable from Hollywood,” he nonetheless presents three distinguishing characteristics : “lower budgets and less marketing-driven filmmaking,” to increase creative control; “challenging perspectives on social issues, a rarity in Hollywood”; and disruption of “the smoothly flowing conventions associated with mainstream Hollywood style” (1–2). Almost all of Soderbergh’s films fit into one or more of King’s criteria for independent cinema. Small budgets and aesthetic choices winning out over market considerations certainly describe his first six films, as well as more recent movies like Full Frontal, Bubble, and The Girlfriend Experience. As his budgets have grown, Soderbergh has retained a large measure of creative control, as demonstrated by the use of stars in roles that subordinate their images to characters and by how, even in highprofile films like Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and two of the three Ocean’s films, he hasn’t shied away from stories that critique greed and link crime to inequality. His control has also been demonstrated by fairly expensive recent movies like Solaris, The Good German, and Che, which The Films of Steven Soderbergh | 61 had limited commercial potential because of their subversion of genre or strong political positions. But just as his movies respond to social injustice both by representing its cost in alienated protagonists as well as with outsider heroes who succeed in fighting back, likewise Soderbergh’s formal style is varied, fitting together incongruent tendencies: the objective realism and stylization to express character psychology that coexist in the art film, but also a contemporary version of the continuity form typical of Hollywood linear narrative. Soderbergh refers to this hybrid approach when he talks about “‘infusing American material with a European film aesthetic,’” so that, with the help of genre stories—a biopic in Kafka, a kidpic in King of the Hill, noir in The Underneath, Out of Sight, and The Good German , the revenge story in The Limey, the social-problem film in Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and The Informant! and the heist picture for the Ocean’s series—“‘you can play on two levels. The audience is there to see a film of a certain type, . . . meanwhile you can indulge in some of your personal preoccupations without it becoming too pretentious or boring’” (qtd. in Biskind 191). To illustrate how this synthesis of art-film realism and stylization with Hollywood continuity works, allow me to start with David Bordwell’s descriptions of both types of form. According to Bordwell, three procedural schemata structure the plot and style of the art film: “‘objective realism,’ ‘expressive’ or subjective realism, and narrational commentary” (“ArtCinema Narration” 205). Location shooting, use of available light, and handheld camera—most pronounced in Traffic, Bubble, Full Frontal, Che, and The Girlfriend Experience but present also to some degree in Erin Brockovich, Out of Sight, The Limey, and even the Ocean’s films—demonstrate Soderbergh’s inclination toward objective realism. The veteran gaffer James Planette offered the following description of Ocean’s Eleven: “‘The lighting was very reality-based. First we looked at what the reality was, and then we tried to make it work. We may have needed to enhance a few things for dramatic purposes or just to get an exposure, but we wanted the movie to look as if it wasn’t lit at all’” (qtd. in Bankston). Soderbergh has described such objective realism as an important way to engage audiences: “[T]he more real it feels and the less it...