Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film

Independent Film
Maggie Cousineau-Arndt and David Strathairn in John Sayles’s Return of the Secaucus Seven (1980). EVERETT
COLLECTION. REPRODUCED BY PERMISSION.
It was counter to this Spielberg-Lucas template that a
renaissance of sorts in independent cinema took shape in
the 1980s. This indie scene became the site for a new
American cinema, one that again mirrored on a smaller
scale what had taken place in bigger films, for bigger
stakes, just a decade earlier. Consider, for example, the
top studio films of 1984: Ghost Busters, Indiana Jones and
the Temple of Doom, Gremlins, Beverly Hills Cop, andStar
Trek III: The Search for Spock, all of which depended on
special effects and/or star-power and were platformed as
event films in wide distribution strategies that only a
major studio could afford to mount.
The studios’ collective embrace of the so-called event
film enabled an independent film market to emerge, or
perhaps it just made necessary. At a time when the
studios were committed to a kind of bottom-line thinking
that emphasized cost–benefit analysis (typical of
production units under conglomerate ownership in any
business), independence became once again a matter of
cash and content. Independent films produced and
released in 1984 included Jim Jarmusch’s (b. 1953)
stagey, offbeat comedy Stranger Than Paradise (shot in
overlong single takes and in black and white); Wayne
Wang’s (b. 1949) small ethnic picture Dim Sum: A Little
Bit of Heart, a character study of Chinese Americans;
Gregory Nava’s (b. 1949) unflinching chronicle of
Mexican ‘‘illegals,’’ El Norte; John Sayles’s (b. 1950)
futurist parable Brother From Another Planet, which tells
the story of a drug-addicted alien loose in New York
City; Alan Rudolph’s stylish neo-noir Choose Me; veteran
independent filmmaker John Cassavetes’s melodrama
Love Streams; and Robert Altman’s adaptation of a oneman
stage play about Richard Nixon’s last days in the
White House, Secret Honor.
8 SCHIRMER ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM