1. Stranger Than Paradise (1984)
While still just a speck on the festival circuit,
the 1985 Sundance Film Festival introduced two major filmmaking forces in its
competition section: The Coen brothers, Joel and Ethan, who won the Grand Prize
for their debut feature Blood Simple, and Jim Jarmusch, who was there with his fine
minimalist comedy Stranger Than Paradise. Both parties went on to do extraordinary
things, but Stranger Than Paradise had arguably the stronger impact on the
independent scene, because in form and content, it broke more radically from
the American mainstream. While studios looked for the extraordinary, Jarmusch
settled on the lives of New York City's most banal and disaffected, following
two loveable losers and a Czech immigrant as they venture to Cleveland and
Florida—though existentially speaking, they never get anywhere. In the
year of Back To The Future, Jarmusch got to his destination one static shot
(and a cut to black) at a time.
2. Sherman's March (1986)
Though documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee had been
making quirkily personal essay films for over a decade before bringing Sherman's
March to
Park City, something about the film's combination of Cold War anxiety,
relationship woes, and McElwee's conflicted feelings about his Southern origins
clicked with a wider audience, dragging McElwee (and, arguably, Sundance) out
of the "regional film" ghetto and into multiple festival appearances and PBS
airings for the next couple of years. Sherman's March won the Grand Jury Prize
in the documentary category in 1987, setting the stage for the likes of Michael
Moore and every other first-person filmmaker who, in years to come, would use
the Sundance forum to turn the camera on themselves and express their
concerns—though usually with little of McElwee's wit or deftness.
3. sex, lies, and videotape (1989)
Steven Soderbergh's 1989 jet to success took off
in January at Sundance, where Soderbergh brought a print still wet from the lab
and won the Audience Award, on his way to the Palme D'Or at Cannes a few months
later, and a late-summer platform release that brought in 20 times the film's
million-dollar budget. Soderbergh's debut feature is in many ways a typical
"regional film," set in a Southern suburb, and populated by soft-spoken
characters in spiritual crisis. But it's slicker in style and franker in tone
than the more primitive proto-indies, and the use of budding young character
actors James Spader and Peter Gallagher in lead roles helped establish the new
Hollywood star system, in which semi-celebs bounce between the contractual
perks of big-budget studio fare and two weeks in a dingy motel in BFE, doing
"one for myself."
4. The Unbelievable Truth (1989)
A few years before Quentin Tarantino came along,
writer-director Hal Hartley sparked what has been called the "cinema of cool"
with his debut comedy, which looked at modern relationships through
distinctively stylized dialogue and performances. In telling the slight story
of an ex-con who returns to his home town and falls for his employer's
daughter, Hartley serves up hyper-literate language, which he coached his
actors to deliver in a near-robotic cadence. Yet the film—and subsequent
Hartley gems like Trust, Amateur, and Henry Fool—struck a chord with
self-selected viewers and introduced the late Adrienne Shelly, who was for a
time the thinking person's obscure object of desire.
5. Poison (1991)
Winner of the Grand Jury Prize in 1991, Todd
Haynes' triptych of Jean Genet-inspired vignettes proved to be a watershed
moment in gay cinema. Haynes' NC-17-rated feature was a commercially dicey
prospect, but it landed in the sure hands of still-active New York specialty
distributor Zeitgeist, which patiently rolled it out and found a market that
few thought existed. Poison grossed more than $1 million, which isn't much by
today's standards, but it blazed a trail that hundreds of gay-themed
independent films have followed in the 17 years since.
6. Slacker (1991)
Low budgets and small subjects were common to
independent filmmaking from the beginning, but Richard Linklater's Slacker expanded the
possibilities for a lot of budding filmmakers, showing that it's possible to
find an audience with a plotless film about people who hang out and
philosophize on a lazy Texas day. Kevin Smith famously said that when he first
saw Linklater's acclaimed, elliptical portrait of college-town hangers-on, he
realized he
could make a movie too. But try not to hold that against Slacker.
7. El Mariachi (1992)
Sundance has been host to many DIY success stories
over the years, from Clerks to The Blair Witch Project to Primer, but it all started with
Robert Rodriguez's remarkable homemade production, which was shot on 16mm for a
mere $7,000. The commentary track on the El Mariachi DVD is like an 80-minute
tutorial on no-budget filmmaking, with Rodriguez telling stories of improvised
wheelchair dollies, constantly recycled extras, and other ingenious shortcuts.
Though Rodriguez more or less remade the film a few years later with Desperado, that remake is missing
the playfulness of the original, which had more to do with the sheer joy of
filmmaking than the forgettable genre fare it was supporting.
8. Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Because so many indie films in the mid-'90s tried
to follow Reservoir Dogs' model of hip talk, casual violence, and twisty narratives, a
lot of people forget that the Quentin Tarantino revolution was slow in
developing. The movie won no awards at Sundance—though it was a Grand
Jury Prize nominee—and it had a weak, under-$3 million showing at the box
office, in large part because it repulsed the arthouse audiences of the day.
But select critics and audience members started spreading the gospel of
Tarantino as soon as Reservoir Dogs debuted, and some young cineastes who'd been
making a habit of seeing every tasteful sub-Merchant-Ivory film that came down
the pike in the late '80s and early '90s started salivating at the prospect of
a down-and-dirty American independent film with balls. That emerging audience
would become the Tarantino generation of filmgoers, craving pulpy stories told
with style.
9. Crumb (1994)
In the age of reality television, having cameras
poke into other people's private lives has become de rigueur, but Terry Zwigoff's
documentary remains extraordinary for its creepy intimacy and for expanding the
limits of screen biography. Given unlimited access to cartoonist R. Crumb, his
family, and assorted weirdoes and hangers-on, Zwigoff discovers the
co-existence of genius and madness, with Crumb finding a kind of salvation on
the artistic fringe. The film also showed how a documentary could be a
collaboration between director and subject, with each pushing the other to
question their impulses and better define their art in the process.
10. The Brothers McMullen (1995)
Ed Burns' slight comedy about his Irish-American
roots isn't terribly distinguished or memorable as a film, but it epitomizes
the co-option of independent films by the studios. Picked up by the nascent Fox
Searchlight, The Brothers McMullen was basically a mainstream movie on a cut-rate
budget, accessible to millions for the low, low price of $25 grand. Though
Burns has continued to labor independently, at least as a writer-director, McMullen inspired a flood of
"calling-card" movies that continue to this day, as opportunistic young
filmmakers shoot what are essentially quirkified Hollywood films as an entrée
into the business. Any think-piece on the death of independent film would do
well to start here.