CIN270Y1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 11: Spike Jonze, Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson
11 May 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Thursday, Feb. 1, 2018
CIN270Y1
CLASS 2.8
“Taste” and the Popularization of “Indie” Film
- Spike Lee has been very controversial
- Named his company to remind everyone of a promise broken
“Smart Cinema?”
• A MODE of filmmaking; the 1990’s
• Has to be distinguished from 1980’s independent cinema
• Films beginning to joy the benefits of studio financing (although there are still
limitations)
• Began as a semi-independent practice
• Subsumed by Hollywood’s specialty divisions: “indie”
• Often called “dependies” or “Indie-wood”
• Hollywood financing is a key to Smart Cinema’s profile & practice (so the two were
involved with each other)
• “Smart” is typically opposed to mainstream films, “dumb” cinema
• But “smart” is a matter of “sensibility” and “tone”
• “smart” = demands being made upon spectators
• “smart”: knowing or clever, not “intellectual”
• “smart”: a film’s stance, its superior relation to what it represents
• Enid offers a running commentary on “taste”
• A knowing distance from the world; she ridicules it
• A GROUP of films and filmmakers
• Quentin Tarantino, Alexander Payne, Wes Anderson, Sophia Coppola, Spike Jonze
• A sense of disaffection & ironic distance
• A shared SET of “stylistic, narrative, and thematic elements”
Generation X
• Post-baby boomers born in the 1960’s and 1970’s
• Work within Hollywood, but their films retain qualities of “Indie”
• A “dispassionate” and “ironic” sensibility is attributed to Gen X’ers
• Slackers?
1. Blank Style (Sconce)
- Sconce: “dampened affect”
- This is most evident in acting styles
- Familial battles rarely reach an emotional crescendo (Ex. Wes Anderson)
- Instead one sees “dispassion” or “disengagement”
2. Narrative Experimentation (Sconce)
- Films jumble the temporality of their narratives
- “modular narratives”, “database narratives”, or “network narratives”
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