"What is an Independent Filmmaker?"

Over the years I have had something to say of "independent film," and certainly American independent film from the 1990s, as not simply film made on certain financial terms, but film embodying a certain spirit. Summing it up some years ago I basically deemed it a cinema of pseudo-maturity--of young people of hazy ideas, vague rebellious impulses, essential conventionality posing and posturing as smarter and more tough-minded and cooler than they really are, trying to impress us and in the main failing as they rework the same themes and devices over and over again in that spirit of cheap edgelordism, with Quentin Tarantino embodying the extreme limitations of the tendency, and some three decades after its breaking onto the scene, still seeming to me to stand as its symbol (even as he has become the Cranky Old Man talking about the theatrical experience).

Of course, not every independent film was like that (even if the more talked-about movies leading the movement were), while one can add that this spirit soon came to pervade non-independent film, such that there was room for observations such as David Walsh's quip that an "independent filmmaker" is simply "a director whose films have not yet made anyone a great deal of money--a hack commercial filmmaker in training" (a conception not necessarily exclusive).

Still, discussing many of the more ballyhooed independent filmmakers Walsh and his colleagues have suggested certain patterns evident in the more prominent indies as well, with Joanne Laurer recently raising the observation again in her review of The Holdovers (part of their comprehensive coverage of the past year's Best Picture Oscar nominees). As she observed, Alexander Payne, like his fellow indie movie stars Steven Soderbergh, David O. Russell, the Coen Brothers et. al. tend toward "cynicism and misanthropy" as, reflecting the prevailing politics of their formative years, they tended toward "'neutral' or non-commital'" responses to the troubles of the world, As an assessment this seems to me to be entirely fair--and another way in which that generation of filmmakers is, like the rest of their generation, showing its age, persisting in '90s irony even as the 1990s, in many ways, its mood included, recedes into the past.