American Eccentric Cinema, by Kim Wilkins

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Ever since Jeffrey Sconce discovered the “smart film”—a late twentieth/early twenty-first century sensibility surfacing in the American cinema geared toward the Gen-X indie spectator—numerous studies have appeared to further delineate the typological and taxonomical contours of this recently emergent cinematic trend that markedly functions in “counterdistinction to mainstream Hollywood” (350). Sconce’s notion of the smart film has been directly expanded by Claire Perkins in her 2012 study American Smart Cinema, where she elucidates the larger ramifications of the reception side of smart cinema in order to focus on its “affective force” (4). Revising Jim Collins’s misnomer, the “New Sincerity”, Warren Buckland has, in turn, essentially articulated a new Sincerity, one which is not severed from post-modern irony.