Down to the Bone: Neo-neorealism and Genre in Contemporary Women’s Indies

This chapter examines a resurgence of the American independent tradition of documentary-style social realism that inspired and enabled women filmmakers in the 1980s in recent films by Debra Granik (Winter’s Bone, 2010), Courtney Hunt (Frozen River, 2008), and Kelly Reichardt (Meek’s Cutoff, 2011), among others. These films adapt an international ‘neo neorealist’ aesthetic and ethos to expose the detrimental effects of neoliberal austerity on working-class women’s lives. Such realism is by no means ‘pure’, however, Badley argues, as these filmmakers incorporate melodrama and reappropriate mainstream ‘male’ genre tropes in the interest of highlighting feminist characterisations and ‘moments’ within their films, while appealing to a wider audience than otherwise, to offer visible interventions within the Indiewood sector.

‘I’m Absolutely the Right Person for this Job’: Allison Anders and Mary Harron on Lifetime Television

This chapter examines the recent careers of Allison Anders and Mary Harron, who took off in the early-to-mid 1990s but subsequently turned to television and have found a workspace in the Lifetime TV Network’s made-for-television film aimed at women. Like Seidelman, Anders and Harron target an older female demographic and make films about women whose stories have been marginalised (June Carter in Anders’ Ring of Fire, 2013) or discredited (Anna Nicole Smith in Harron’s Anna Nicole, 2013). Harron, moreover, exploits the subversive potential of the celebrity biopic to expose the media’s role in constructing the self-destructing Anna Nicole.

Beyond the Screen: On Contemporary Feminist Media Re-articulations

In this chapter, Pederson and Zimmerman, programmers for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, a multi-disciplinary, multi-arts, cross-platform festival, examine women’s new feminist media environments, ventures and practices that reject the goal of producing a fixed object such as an analog feature film. Practitioners work within relational and participatory models, with the role of director yielding to that of designer or convener within place-based encounters and workshops. Highlighting intersectional connections between feminism and other issues, these projects range across media platforms as in The Lunch Love Community Project (2010-2014, an online mosaic promoting healthful food in schools) and Children of Srikandi (2012, a collaborative multimedia LBGT project in Indonesia).

The Feminist Politics of Collaboration in Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture

This chapter examines the feminist collaborative practices integral to Lena Dunham, television and film celebrity, showrunner, director and star, as illustrated in her breakthrough film Tiny Furniture (2010). Featuring family members and friends as well as their art and ideas (mother Laurie Simmons’ photography, for example), the film has characteristics of the autobiographical documentary and engages self-reflexively with the multiple communities that make up intersubjective and intertextual experience, including intergenerational feminisms.

Miranda July and the New Twenty-first-century Indie

This chapter singles out the brilliant, idiosyncratic multi-mediary work of Miranda July as exemplary of American independent cinema as it currently stands. Defining the latter in terms of the emerging indie culture of the twenty-first century’s second decade, McHugh argues that July’s oeuvre reframes the masculinist rhetoric that has dominated the discussion until now. Manifesting itself communally, through informal networks rather than through self-stylisation, July’s creative work is collaborative, improvisational, and distributed across a broad range of platforms including, besides film and video, writing, acting, performance and conceptual art, all of which are represented in her two feature films Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005) and The Future (2011).

Sexual In-betweener/Industry In-betweener: The Career and Films of Lisa Cholodenko

This chapter claims that Lisa Cholodenko’s work exemplifies the sort of ‘in-betweenness’ that resists and challenges established categories. Identified with the lesbian branch of the New Queer Cinema of the early 1990s, evoking both praise and divisive reactions, Cholodenko’s High Art (1998), about the professional and sexual relationship between a young straight female art critic and journalist and a brilliant lesbian artist/heroin addict, was controversial at a time when lesbian indies were usually lo-fi romances. Likewise, her more mainstream lesbian family drama The Kids Are All Right (2010) has been accused of compromise with heteronormative patriarchal values. San Filippo argues that rather than ‘betraying’ lesbian cinema, her characters and films traverse boundaries and resist sexual, ideological and industrial categories.

Not Just Indie: A Look at Films by Dee Rees, Ava DuVernay and Kasi Lemmons

This chapter explores the complexity and importance of intersectionality in feature films by Dee Rees, Ava DuVernay and Kasi Lemmons. Overlapping women’s, independent, black and black independent cinema, their films reveal how the independent sector remains socially relevant, providing a space for the critique of race, class, gender and sexuality in American independent cinema. Where their early films place black women’s subjectivities at the centre of intimate narratives, their recent work assumes a ‘womanist’ perspective that encompasses the lives and experiences of a people regardless of gender. Rees’s Bessie (2015), Lemmons’ Talk to Me (2007) and Du Vernay’s Selma (2014) are intimate portraits amidst historical contexts that convey the scale and impact of events on a range of black subjectivities.

From Documentary to Fictional Realism: Mira Nair’s Documentary Roots, Fictional Home and Production Politics

This chapter demonstrates how the transnational figure and twenty-seven-year career of Mira Nair is prototypical of female independent practitioners who negotiate diverse issues of identity and politics in their films and working practices. As an Indian filmmaker with a production company based in New York City, Nair makes films that cross multiple borders, whether of nation, race, class, sexuality or genre, to promote social activism. Highlighting her documentary film production, methods and career-long investment in non-profit organisations, Projansky and Ono explore how even her popular fictional features such as Monsoon Wedding (2001) or Vanity Fair (2004) share political and socially confrontational methods with her outreach programs.

My Effortless Brilliance: Women’s Mumblecore

This chapter investigates women’s infiltration of mumblecore, an indie subgenre associated with auteurs such as Andrew Bujalski, Mark and Jay Duplass and Joe Swanberg, for feminist ends. In representing relationships among twenty-something millennials, mumblecore’s cheap, lo-fi digital aesthetic and anti-mainstream values of ‘authenticity’ are congenial to indie female practitioners such as Lynn Shelton, So Yong Kim and Desiree Akhavan. Rather than simple appropriations of a ‘male’ genre, their work represents a ‘reframing’ not only of mumblecore but indie cinema generally, which mumblecore has recently epitomised. In films with a feminist focus on female aspirations and insecurities but that also accommodate queer and racial perspectives, these practitioners transpose the mumblecore ‘ethos’ to accommodate otherwise marginalised subjectivities and experiences.

Susan Seidelman’s Contemporary Films: The Feminist Art of Self-reinvention in a Changing Technological Landscape

This chapter spotlights Susan Seidelman, who came of age during the second-wave feminist movement and found success and acclaim in the 1980s indie wave but, like other female filmmakers of her generation (Julie Dash and Allison Anders), struggled subsequently when their follow-up projects failed through poor distribution or never reached production. Lane examines Seidelman’s long-term response to this dilemma through self-reinvention and by capitalising on new technologies, including digital, social and emergent media and micro-budget strategies such as crowdsourcing and self-distribution. Her most recent films (Boynton Beach Club, 2005, and The Hot Flashes, 2013) are low-budget ‘high concept’ endeavours marketed to niche audiences – seniors, Latinos and disabled rights groups – yet blend elements of commercial and independent film.