Cinema and Culture: Independent Film in the United States, 1980-2001 (review)

E. Deidre Pribram. Cinema & Culture: Independent Film in the United States, 1980-2001. Framing Film 2. New York: Lang, 2002. 305 pages + introduction, $32.95, paper.

Delimiting trends in film stands as a daunt- ing task for cinema scholars. Cinema theory is further complicated by its inextricability from film practice, yet scholars and filmmakers often do not acknowledge just how indebted they are to each other. Even less often do the two, theory and practice, coexist in a single artist. This is not to say that filmmakers do not utilize or ascribe to film theory as they create films. Furthermore, as the nouvelle vague and Dogme95 collectives attest to, there certainly are traditions of filmmaker theorists in cinema history. However, especially within the U.S. tradition, a separation is generally maintained between those who make films and those who write about them. In Cinema & Culture: Independent Film in the United States, 1980-2001, E. Deidre Pribram positions U.S. independent cinema as a promising site for just such discourse. As an independent filmmaker, university instructor, and published scholar of film theory, she seems an ideal candidate to speak to these issues from multiple perspectives.

From the outset, Pribram expresses her desire to link practice and theory: "My aim, then, is to pursue an integrated approach to cultural theory, cultural politics, and cultural production as they are applied to some of the parameters, limitations and possibilities of that system of cinematic representation known as independent film" (xxiii). The first question she addresses is the rather slippery term independent cinema, a category that many use, confident in their own minds that they know what it is, without there actually existing a hard and fast set of classification rules; depending on context, "independent film" has varying significance. Therefore, Pribram's work is as much about defining what independent film is in this case study as it is about what independent film may be capable of becoming in our culture. In her most basic definition, U.S. independent film in the 1980s and 1990s exists as a hybrid of Hollywood and alternative cinema, blending traits from both, often conceived of as a means for artists to have more control over their production than the Hollywood industry allows while offering the possibility for commercial success and financial security lacking in the avant-garde modes (xi, xxii). Throughout, however, she recognizes that the definition of independent film is most often measured against Hollywood production and therefore must change as Hollywood adapts to and co-opts independent practices (xiii). The relationship between the two is only fixed by the reality that, inasmuch as to exist as a category, independent film must remain markedly different from Hollywood. At the outset, Pribram outlines her theoretical framework, namely, her reliance on discursive formations to shape her arguments. The author identifies four main discursive fields relevant to independent film: representational; material and institutional; interpretive, audience, or reception; and cultural and historical (xii). The book is divided into two parts, with each of the constituent chapters incorporating at least one of the discursive fields. Part 1 details Pribram's approach to defining independent film within historical and institutional parameters. It is a broad survey, an overview of what she considers most relevant for her study. Subsequently, in part 2, she relies on close textual analysis to investigate each of the above-mentioned discursive fields.

Due in part to the subject matter, Pribram's work toward defining independent film involves continuous qualification. As acknowledged by the author, the debate surrounding what constitutes independent film becomes even murkier when discussions attach themselves to individual films. To make her task a little easier, Pribram first limits her current study to feature-length films that enjoyed some measure of theatrical release and are then available for rental or purchase; she then excludes documentary work, as she finds fiction to be the most dominant mode (xi). As the author...