Indie Reframed
Women’s Filmmaking and Contemporary American Independent Cinema
Edited by Linda Badley, Claire Perkins, Michele Schreiber
With the consolidation of ‘indie’ culture in the 21st century, female filmmakers face an increasingly indifferent climate. Within this sector, women work across all aspects of writing, direction, production, editing and design, yet the dominant narrative continues to construe ‘maverick’ white male auteurs such as Quentin Tarantino or Wes Anderson as the face of indie discourse. Defying the formulaic myths of the mainstream ‘chick flick’ and the ideological and experimental radicalism of feminist counter-cinema alike, women’s indie filmmaking is neither ironic, popular nor political enough to be readily absorbed into pre-existing categories. This ground-breaking collection, the first sustained examination of the work of female practitioners within American independent cinema, reclaims the ‘difference’ of female indie filmmaking. Through a variety of case studies of directors, writers and producers such as Ava DuVernay, Lena Dunham and Christine Vachon, contributors explore the innovation of a range of female practitioners by attending to the sensibilities, ideologies and industrial practices that distinguish their work – while embracing the ‘in-between’ space in which the narratives they represent and embody can be revealed.
AcknowledgementsNotes on ContributorsIntroduction, Linda Badley, Claire Perkins and Michele Schreiber
Part 1: Production and Distribution Contexts1: Women Make Movies: Gamechanger Films, Chicken and Egg Pictures and the Future of Female Independent Filmmaking, Sarah Sinwell2: Killer Feminism, Patricia White3: ‘A Woman with an Endgame’: Megan Ellison, Annapurna Pictures, and American Independent Film Production, James Lyons4: That's My Story and I'm Sticking to It: Pioneering Practices in the Frontier of Micro-budget Filmmaking, Christina Lane5: ‘I’m Absolutely the Right Person for this Job’: Allison Anders and Mary Harron on Lifetime Television, Michele Schreiber
Part II: Genres and Modalities1: Gender, Genre and More General Indie Dimensions in Megan Griffiths’ The Off Hours and Eden, Geoff King2: Down to the Bone: Neo-neorealism and Genre in Contemporary Women’s Indies, Linda Badley3: My Effortless Brilliance: Women’s Mumblecore, Claire Perkins4: Black Women, Romance, and the Indiewood Rom Coms of Saana Hamri, Shelley Cobb
Part III: Identities1: From Documentary to Fictional Realism: Mira Nair's Documentary Roots, Fictional Home, and Production Politics, Sarah Projansky and Kent Ono2: Having Its Cake and Eating It Too: Contemporary American ‘Indie’ cinema and My Big Fat Greek Wedding Reframed, Yannis Tzioumakis and Lydia Papadimitriou3: Not Just Indie: A Look at Films by Dee Rees, Ava DuVernay and Kasi Lemmons, Cynthia Baron4: Sexual In-betweener/Industry In-betweener: The Career and Films of Lisa Cholodenko, Maria San Filippo5: Miranda July and the New 21st Century Indie, Kathleen McHugh
Part IV: Collaborations1: Mutual Muses in American Independent Film: Nicole Holofcener and Catherine Keener, Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams, Chris Holmlund2: The Feminist Politics of Collaboration in Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture, Corinn Columpar3: The Director as Facilitator: Collaboration, Cooperation, and the Gender Politics of the Set, John Alberti4: Beyond the Screen: On Contemporary Feminist Media Re-Articulations, Claudia Costa Pederson and Patricia R. Zimmermann
A groundbreaking collection, with an all-star feminist cast of editors and contributors, Indie Reframed taps the many benefits of examining women’s agency in the production and distribution practices of independent cinema. Theoretically savvy and up-to-date, the volume satisfyingly redresses the gender imbalance of earlier indie film scholarship.'
