Author Archives: admin

LES festival guide to filmmaking on the cheap

Posted on August 2, 2012 by admin

Nothing wildly original, but a brief guide to low-budget production is provided by the LES Film Festival, a new showcase on New York’s Lower East Side for films costing $200,000 or less. Unsurprisingly, good writing and actors are seen as … Continue reading →

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Digital knocked by Nolan, but not by those who can’t afford anything else

Posted on July 3, 2012 by admin

Christopher Nolan has been bashing digital filmmaking, as he’s rather accustomed to do. There’s an interesting response to this from some indie filmmakers canvassed by the Latin Heat Entertainment website, here. The gist is that they put Nolan’s comment – that … Continue reading →

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Your Sister’s Sister, post-mumblecore and Joe Swanberg’s persistence

Posted on July 1, 2012 by admin

Lynn Shelton’s Your Sister’s Sister seems to have cemented her reputation as a significant presence in what might be termed a post-mumblecore tendency in some indie film, following her earlier titles such as My Effortless Brilliance (2008) and Humpday (2009). What characterises such … Continue reading →

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Tarnation sequel – not quite available to all

Posted on June 26, 2012 by admin

Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation is right up among my personal favourite indie films, so it’s exciting to hear news of his sequel, Walk Away Renee, in a review by Jana J. Monji on the Chicago Sun-Times website. For anyone who doesn’t know it, Tarnation is … Continue reading →

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African-American Film Festival Releasing Movement

Posted on June 26, 2012 by admin

Interesting piece on FilmSlate about a new initiative for the release of African-American indie films, which fits in with some broader recent trends relating to the building of links between festival screenings and (at least relatively) wider theatrical openings. I Will … Continue reading →

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Indie panel tomorrow

Posted on June 22, 2012 by admin

I’m giving a paper and chairing a panel on American indie film tomorrow at the Film and Media 2012 conference in London. For anyone who might be interested, the panel is titled ‘Contemporary American Independent Cinema: Change or Continuity’. I’ll … Continue reading →

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Auteurs, very much alive… but socially situatable

Posted on June 21, 2012 by admin

The announcement yesterday of the death of Andrew Sarris, the critic who did more than anyone else to propagate the ‘auteur’ notion in the United States, is a timely moment to note how large such a concept still looms, particularly … Continue reading →

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Coordinated international releases for indie films

Posted on June 19, 2012 by admin

Is it just me, or is it becoming an increasing trend for indie films to be released simultaneously in the US and it at least some overseas territories such as the UK? I posted a while back on this in … Continue reading →

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Cultural hierarchies

Posted on June 18, 2012 by admin

Cultural hierarchies, through which different media forms are for various reasons given higher status, can appear fixed and unbending. But far from always. One of the themes of Newman and Levine’s Legitimating Television, on which I posted below, is the way … Continue reading →

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Attention spans

Posted on June 14, 2012 by admin

Having just plugged Michael Newman’s new co-authored book on television, I also wanted to say something about his 2010 essay on discourses relating to the notion of ‘attention spans’ (‘New media, young audiences and discourses of attention: from Sesame Street to … Continue reading →

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