Current Forum: Session 12: Independent Films & Overall View	Read 5 times 	
Date: 09-Apr-2001 23:14:03	
Author: MCKAHAN, JASON G. <jgm8530@garnet.acns.fsu.edu>	
Subject: Independent Production = Independent Form 	
 [Remove]	
		
       The initial problem of delineating the Independent from Hollywood filmmaking resides in understanding it as film production “outside” of established production modes and capital. If it were merely on account of production modes and capital, then it would be impossible to provide an identical product and still be “Independent”, as many films (Being John Malkovich and Pi) indeed do. Such is the way Independent film production is commonly viewed. Therefore, critics have a false sense of liberalism when using such categorization, just as subjects do when they try to speak confidently about public versus private property. This is because it is always in relation to dominant modes that such lines are drawn. I would argue that a more reliable notion of Independent filmmaking must not only take production, but also form and content into account. In this way, Independent as a description would also include different modes of narration and form, which must be the result of truly different modes of production. 
       At first glance Pi would seem to fall within Independent production: the narrative is seemingly non-linear and the characters and form non-conventional. Unlike traditional 
Hollywood narratives, PI does not deliver the goods we come to expect in linear and cohesive plotlines and traditional heterosexual subplots. The protagonist wanders through a series of flashbacks and his psychology seems ridden with paranoia and uncertainties. So too, the editing style of Pi seems ostentatious rather than invisible. However, is this just an example of how the exception proves the rule? For instance, the editing and flashback seems quirky, but its purpose is very much conventional: the notion that such forms (including a camera attached to move with the subject looking into its face) give subjectivity, whatever the instability of the subject. The 
female love interest is thwarted, but all the same is introduced simply to reinforce the rule. 
       A more vicious attack would focus on how Pi fetishizes humanist knowledge and mastery over nature, which is obtained through conflating constructs such as mathematics with nature and trying to fool us into thinking that mathematics precedes nature (moreover that nature precedes social categorization of difference between nature and ersatz). The plot is cliché in the relations of men – the tutor and the student who share this dream of mastery over nature (a la Karate Kid). In this, Pi’s politics are seriously dated and show the product of film students unfamiliar with film theory. Another point of hegemony could be seen in the captivity subplot of the white subject complemented with vicious others, represented by a black woman and Jewish mystics (mafia?).
       An independent movement in my opinion ultimately would have to be meta-fictional, until it destroys the pleasure of bourgeois realism. This is a terribly difficult feat, insofar as we all operate within the symbolic and do not have a meta-language (everything must be described at on point or another through every day language). However, breaking rule really only proves the rule. We must strive for meta-form, rather than binary opposites of hegemonic constructs. Eisenstein sought to do as much with dialectical montage; he did not potificate, he tried to explode and collide images into abstraction. Michael Snow’s Wavelength also comes to mind, because it really attempts to show the structural nature of film narrative. Consisting of a 45 minute zoom, it moves us into a picture of waves on a wall that all the sudden appears to be a freeze frame thing itself. Is there really reality to “capture” or are the image and the referent collapsed in bourgeois realism? These, in my humble opinion (that's bourgeois rhetoric for you), are the proper lines of investigation for “Indies.”