American Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis Image

Edinburgh Studies in Film and IntermedialityMartine Beugnet and Kriss RavettoFounding Editor: John OrrA series of cutting edge scholarly research monographs covering core aspects of film studies. The series' internationally respected authors contribute analytical and often controversial volumes, offering a critical intervention into their subject'American Independent Cinema offers a welcome original take on US indie films. The first book-length study to engage with this most popular of forms using Deleuze, it provides a refreshing political engagement with the aesthetics of US indies. Backman Rogers' deft argument insightfully illuminates how US indie's manifold bodies in crisis (for example, consider Bill Murray's ubiquitous deadpan lethargic characters) produce a radical or cerebral critique of neoliberal USA. A sophisticated scholarly endeavour, the engaging prose enables Deleuze's complex ideas to be realised in the most lucid way, and in relation to some of the most important films of recent decades: from Dead Man through Elephant and Broken Flowers to Somewhere.'David Martin-Jones, University of GlasgowAmerican Independent Cinema: Rites of Passage and the Crisis-ImageAnna Backman RogersIs American independent cinema in crisis? Does it offer viewers an art experience? How does it draw upon American cinematic heritage?Anna Backman Rogers argues that American independent cinema is a cinema not merely in crisis, but also of crisis. As a cinema which often explores the rite of passage by explicitly drawing on American cinematic heritage, from the teen movie to the western, American independent films deal in images of crisis, transition and metamorphosis, offering a subversive engagement with more traditional modes of representation.Examining films by Gus Van Sant, Jim Jarmusch and Sofia Coppola to highlight their use of cinematic time as a mode of philosophical thought and foregrounding the inherent crisis of the cinematic image as the mode of being as change, this book brings new and exciting perspectives to American Independent Cinema.Anna Backman Rogers is a senior lecturer in Film Studies at University of Gothenburg, Sweden.Cover image: Kirsten Dunst, The Virgin Suicides, 1990 © American Zoetrope/The Kobal CollectionCover design:[EUP logo]www.euppublishing.com