Another Steven Soderbergh Experience: Authorship and Contemporary Hollywood

8. Boutique Cinema, Section Eight, and DVD

213 As argued in the previous chapter, Soderbergh’s television work further exemplifies a creative practice attuned to topical discourses such as politics and current events as well as to formal experimentation in the parafictional mode. The execution of this creative sensibility involves a range of practitioners across different projects. The output, meanwhile , addresses different groups of viewers based on subject matter, tone, genre, exhibition venue, and other distinguishing characteristics. While no precise pattern connects Soderbergh’s multifarious output to the diverse communities drawn to that work, we might characterize this relationship as that of a boutique sensibility catering to boutique tastes, and with boutique exhibition spaces a frequent site of mutual encounter. In his own late-1990s work on authorship, James Naremore argues that directors circulate as markers of distinction in contemporary film culture partly because of “the presence of a well-organized boutique cinema, geared to an up-market audience,”1 promoted by film festivals , film-review journalism, and advertising such as Miramax’s in the 1990s that hails film connoisseurs. Though not elaborating on this suggestive label, Naremore’s points about festivals, mini-major distributors , and cineliterate viewers implicitly define boutique cinema as a conjunction of aesthetic predispositions and consumption sites. Through its positioning of directors and other figures, the category can link the efforts and interests of a range of specialized groups. Indeed, another name for “boutique” is “specialty,” the term used to categorize particular industrial units and markets to circumvent the presumed intellectual demands made of viewers by the more polarizing “arthouse ” label. A vague industrial descriptor, “specialty” denotes only Chapter 8 Boutique Cinema, Section Eight, and DVD 214 Soderbergh and Screen Industries something narrower than an abstracted mainstream. Meanwhile, the “arthouse”labelnotonlycarriesnegativeindustrialconnotationsbutalso remains strongly tied to a perceived high-water mark of cinemagoing in the 1960s and 1970s, when particular exhibition venues did function explicitly as arthouses. Among other developments, the rise of multiplex cinemas in the 1980s and 1990s, the proliferating screens of the new century, and the myriad services to which all these screens are put render the “arthouse” construct a crude marker of conditions of film culture today. As Section Eight’s output demonstrates, boutique cinema can include not only traditional “arthouse films” but also popular star vehicles and offbeat genre films aimed at niche audiences. This latter category includes films labeled as “indie films” or “smart films” (among other industrial and critical designations), films often exhibited at venues that in the past showcased foreign-language films.2 The concept of boutique cinema joins industrial agendas with those of a range of taste cultures. Production entities utilize directors, A-list or otherwise, as essential components of project development and financing.3 Existing arthouse cinemas and franchises such as Landmark Theatres and the Angelika Film Center, both of which have screened and promoted Soderbergh’s features, identify directors prominently in their own promotional material as they reach out to selective potential audiences. Specialty home-video distributors such as the Criterion Collection, New Yorker Films, and Home Vision Entertainment cater to similar constituencies and likewise employ auteurist, directorcentric framing; Soderbergh has been involved in the output of each of these companies as well. Print-media advocates such as the New York Times and the New Yorker and culturati or specialist websites such as Salon and indieWIRE promote these cinemas and distributors through their own reviews and feature stories, again with directors as a frequent currency. Finally, educated or film-literate audiences may read reviews, patronize specialty venues, and consume the output of boutique companies and divisions. Following Naremore, I offer “boutique” as an overarching construct uniting creative personnel, producing infrastructures, distributors of special-interest works, and cinephile reception frames. These reception milieus include both physical spaces (specialty cinema and domestic viewing surrounds) and the more abstracted, mutable cartographies of personal, institutional, and collective taste. In this chapter, I examine boutique cinema from two vantage points, studying Soderbergh and Clooney’s production company Section Eight as well as Soderbergh’s discursive performances on specialty DVD releases. These categories might initially be regarded as polar opposites—the Boutique Cinema, Section Eight, and DVD 215 before- and aftermarkets of film culture—but can be better understood as imbricated sectors in extended fields of artistic engagement. One way to apprehend boutique cinema is to consider the operations and output of Hollywood’s many small production companies. Even when supported through major-studio production deals and...