Death dance for the indie?

Is independent cinema dead in the United States -- or, is it just playing possum? That question came to me during the recent Sundance Film Festival after watching a documentary on the Weather Underground. Earnest if reductive, the documentary held my attention but was nowhere as interesting as what happened afterward, when former Underground fugitives Bernardine Dohrn and husband William Ayers were greeted with enthusiastic applause.

“What advice,” asked one woman, could Dohrn “give to a young revolutionary?” (Be born privileged and stupid, I fumed to myself.) For Sundance surrealism, the moment would only be matched by the news that a Park City street had to be partially shut down when J.Lo and Ben Affleck decided to go shopping -- two perfectly twinned happenings that made me wonder what any of this had to do with Jim Jarmusch.

For those who came of age after Quentin Tarantino, it may be worth mentioning that Jarmusch is one of the guys who put indie film on the map. In 1984, the writer-director’s second feature, “Stranger Than Paradise,” which he made for $100,000, went to Cannes and became a stateside hit. To budding cinephiles like me, the film was a revelation. At once droll and melancholic, “Stranger Than Paradise” is about three young people adrift from the Lower East Side to Cleveland. There’s a story of sorts, but what struck me the hardest was the film’s moody cinematography and how each scene ended with a blackout. I was moved by the film’s beauty as well as the embarrassing yet true sense of purposelessness that Jarmusch tapped into and which hung over the film like cigarette smoke. Jarmusch seemed to know firsthand how easy it is to get lost in your youth. More incidentally, I noticed that his characters didn’t just dress in the kind of thrift-store clothes my friends and I wore; like us, they lived on the margins.

Jarmusch wasn’t the only one to rock my movie world. Between 1984 and 1985, Joel Coen’s “Blood Simple” was released, as was John Sayles’ “The Brother From Another Planet,” Jonathan Demme’s “Stop Making Sense,” Wim Wenders’ “Paris, Texas” and Bette Gordon’s “Variety.” In 1986, I was mesmerized by Bill Sherwood’s “Parting Glances” and Gus Van Sant’s “Mala Noche,” which would lay the ground for New Queer Cinema. That same year, I watched Spike Lee launch a revolution with “She’s Gotta Have It,” a movie I saw at a pocket-size theater where the sound was piped through a single speaker while the , mostly black audience cheered in surround-sound. Some other films that opened in the same period: Wayne Wang’s “Dim Sum,” Victor Nunez’s “A Flash of Green” and Alan Rudolph’s “Choose Me.”

Any juice left to squeeze?

In the years since, Coen, Demme, Van Sant, Wang and Lee have each, to varying degrees and with variable success, directed movies with bigger budgets and recognizable stars; some of their films have been nominated for and even won Academy Awards. (Tragically, Sherwood died in 1990.) Meanwhile, their peers have remained fixtures in independent cinema, for the most part financing their films with non-studio money and remaining safely below the radar of most of the American moviegoing public. Jarmusch hasn’t directed a dramatic feature since 1999’s “Ghost Dog.” Last year, Nunez’s “Coastlines” received a lackluster welcome at Sundance; at this year’s festival, Rudolph’s “The Secret Lives of Dentists” barely stirred the air.

What did stir the air were features like “American Splendor,” a fine adaptation of the comic-book series by Harvey Pekar that was directed by Robert Pulcini and Shari Springer Berman, and which won the dramatic competition. Two other notable films were Tom McCarthy’s “The Station Agent,” about three loners in rural New Jersey, which picked up two awards and a distribution deal with Miramax, and my favorite entry, “Camp,” an exhilarating musical from Todd Graff that came to town with a distributor and left with a lot of goodwill but no prizes. As much as I liked these films, “Camp” was the only one that felt new. Ironically, even though it riffs on well-trodden material, namely the summer camp movie and the musical, it was the only Sundance feature I saw that bristled with the urgency of expression -- it felt like a film that had to be made.

Like the year before, I returned from Sundance with the feeling that the juice had been squeezed out of American independent film. Not that you’d know it from the crowds that thronged Main Street during the day and the screaming drunk kids who broke out in spring break fever at night. Like independent film itself, the festival has gone through an incredible growth in the decade I’ve been coming to Sundance, not all of it pretty. In 1993, festival founder Robert Redford told the press that he didn’t think there was “anything to be gained from expanding the festival because I think it serves the filmmakers pretty well. If it goes much bigger than this, you begin to lose control.” The festival attracted 5,000 participants that year; this year, more than 20,000 descended.

They came because in today’s consumer youth culture independent film is cool, hip, edgy. They came because everyone comes -- the stars and the studios, the press and the players. They came because companies ranging from American Express to Skyy Vodka put money into the festival, while Adidas, Chrysler and Levi’s tried to siphon off the vibe. They came and partied to Frou Frou and Beck, and listened to Slash play backup for Gina Gershon, the star of the raucously overheated “Prey for Rock & Roll.” If they were lucky, they grooved to George Clinton and De La Soul at the Warner Bros. party. Why was Warner Bros. there? Because you had to be.

“Why does Chrysler want to make independent films?” asks Bob Berney, president of the recently formed Newmarket Films, the distribution arm of Newmarket Capital Group, a financing and production company. It was a rhetorical question, and we both knew it. “The kids aren’t buying their cars anymore, they’ve got to seem hip. It’s a giant branding thing, to try to attack a young demographic. ‘Independent’ means something to them, it just does. It’s almost generic, some lifestyle thing.”

Berney is best known for being the whiz who, while working in distribution and marketing at IFC Films, shepherded “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” into independent history. More impressive, however, as far as movie lovers are concerned, he helped turn Alfonso Cuaron’s “Y Tu Mama Tambien” into a bona-fide hit. Still, because its returns were larger, “Greek Wedding” attracted the bulk of media interest, inspiring finger wagging about ostensibly out-of-touch distributors. What often went unsaid amid the blather about the numbers is that “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” is a big, fat lousy movie. It may have been made outside the studio system -- if partially bankrolled by Tom Hanks and his wife, Rita Wilson -- but the only thing independent about this feature-length sitcom was its money.

What’s in a word?

So, what do we mean when we talk about independent film these days? It depends on who’s doing the talking.

“I define independent film as the product of a singular vision,” says John Sloss, the New York-based lawyer who represented “The Station Agent,” along with six other features at this year’s Sundance. “I’m in the financing business, and financing can come from a million different places. To define it by financing is completely irrelevant, especially as financing evolves. To me, independent films are not the product of a committee but the product of a person. Most of the best films of the year are independent. ‘Adaptation’ is a completely independent film; ‘About Schmidt’ is a completely independent film. Scorsese’s films are independent. We’re talking about auteurism, otherwise it’s a slippery slope.”

It’s a slippery slope for even the most independent-minded veterans. During the late 1980s and through much of the 1990s, my movie friends and I spent a lot of time trying to define what independence meant when it came to film, much as our music friends fretted over alternative rock. Our problems with getting a bead on independence were, to an extent, reflected in the changes that the Independent Feature Project, the largest independent film organization in the country, made to the eligibility requirements for the Spirit Awards in 1994. The IFP’s new rules deemed that features that screened in six designated festivals could be eligible for nomination. More important, however, the IFP decided that studio-financed films could now join the party, a change partially influenced by Disney’s purchase of Miramax the preceding year.

Over the last two decades, independent film has changed dramatically, making it tough for everyone to define.

In his 1995 book “Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes,” John Pierson, who represented films such as “She’s Gotta Have It” and “Clerks,” wrote that when it comes to independence, “like the landmark Supreme Court pornography case, you may just have to know it when you see it.” I’m not sure that’s true anymore.

“It’s totally blurred,” says Berney. “Is independence spirit? Is it the freedom of the final cut? Fox Searchlight is independent in terms of attitude and style; Sony Classics definitely has autonomy but it still uses systems of the parent company. ‘Independent’ has become strictly a marketing term to describe something, but even that is undefined. It’s more of an attitude, because, truly, the financing is so convoluted that nothing is truly independent. I consider us independent because we’re self-financed -- we’re buying movies and putting up the money -- but we’ll hook up at some point with some video company and it will probably be part of a studio.”

Does any of this matter, or is the quarrel over what constitutes independent cinema a “sophistic debate,” as Sloss impatiently put it to me when I pressed him for a clearer definition? “What does that have to do with anything?” he asked. “There’s been a sea change in the structure of the industry in recent years, and basically what the studios have done is that they’ve turned into event-film creators with tie-ins that can generate hundreds of millions of dollars. And the stuff that they used to do that was more character-driven, that filled in between the event films, they’ve now relegated to the studio specialized divisions. The studios don’t make movies like that anymore.”

“It’s just kind of berserk,” Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, says of the current scene. “The ‘independent’ should be taken out of ‘independent cinema’; commerce and capitalism have pretty much taken over. When someone made a movie in the early 1980s, it was truly an independent film with a unique voice and a unique style. Those movies were very distinct, and commerce really wasn’t an issue for them. What I see in Sundance now is that for a lot of filmmakers a huge payday is very important. They’re in it for the money.”

A crypto-Marxist critique sounds strange coming from the distributor who has made a killing with mainstream fare such as “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” but Sony Classics has stayed close to its art-house origins. Even so, like Miramax, New Line, Focus Features and Fox Searchlight, Sony Classics is owned by a studio that, in turn, is owned by a multinational corporation, affording it the security and muscle unknown to a company that isn’t.

The haves and the have-nots

All these companies put out good movies, but their success and high commercial profile only proves that when it comes to the independent film world there’s a deep divide between the haves and the have-nots. On one side of the divide are filmmakers with indisputably independent vision like Alexander Payne, who make movies like “About Schmidt” for big companies like New Line with big stars like Jack Nicholson that get released into hundreds of theaters and are supported by a powerful marketing and publicity infrastructure.

On the other side are the have-nots like Przemyslaw Reut, whose “Paradox Lake” won passionate admirers at last year’s Sundance but failed to hook a U.S. distributor willing to release an expressionistic digital feature with no stars about a camp counselor’s encounter with autistic children. The have-nots don’t come to Sundance with lawyers and publicists who know every press person by their first name; instead, they flood the festival with posters and postcards with desperate entreaties (“Please come!!!”). The have-nots flop together in the cheapest accommodations they can secure in a resort town where even a dingy room goes for $200 a night. Sometimes, if they’re lucky, talented or both, the have-nots spend the months after Sundance traveling the festival circuit, which has emerged as a parallel distribution route for work deemed too uncommercial for theatrical release.

For the 1991 Sundance festival, 854 dramatic features and 2,174 short films were submitted; this year, the number of dramatic feature submissions rose to 2,012 and short film submissions jumped to 3,345. Now more than ever, it’s incredibly easy to shoot a feature -- all you have to do is buy, borrow or steal a digital camera. Lowering barriers is great for filmmakers, but it doesn’t make them any smarter or more creative. There may be a lot more independent movies being made now, but there aren’t anywhere near enough good ones, which brings me back to the 1980s and Jarmusch, Sayles and Spike Lee.

It isn’t only nostalgia that keeps me in thrall to the earlier days of the independent film movement, but a longing for better, more formally innovative, challenging movies. Over the last decade, Harvey Weinstein has stormed the gates of the academy and Steven Soderbergh, the patron saint of independence, has remade a Rat Pack movie for one of the oldest studios in town. There are independent visions still out there, but the world that Weinstein and Soderbergh -- and Jarmusch, Sayles and Lee -- helped to create is gone. Nobody knows exactly what will come next or what should.

“There’s a tide that raises all boats from time to time,” says Sloss, “whether it’s Quentin Tarantino or Scorsese, and there are inescapable fallow periods. There are still great films being made, but now they’re on the margins instead of in the center.”

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Manohla Dargis is a Times film critic.