Indie Film Research Articles

Regional film in the dynamics of the national film industry

Background: In the last ten years, the Indonesian film industry has experienced significant growth. The national film industry and the regional film industry, one of which is indie films produced in the city of Makassar. The development of films in Makassar began to receive national public attention with the explosion of the film Uang Panai in 2016. Also, in 2017, the success of the movie Silariang received an audience of 183.340 people. Purpose: Examining the impact of Makassar-produced films on the dynamics of Indonesia's domestic film industry is the main objective of this study, including examining its impact on cultural identity, economic variables, and its role in enhancing the uniqueness of national film. Methods: This study employs a qualitative methodology and gathers data through content analysis, observation, and interviews. Results: According to the study's findings, regional films—like those made in Makassar—are essential to the growth and advancement of the country's film industry. This demonstrates how crucial it is to acknowledge and encourage filmmaking outside of the major industrial hubs. Conclusion: Research shows that regional films have the potential to positively impact economic growth, especially in the regions where they are produced. It encourages the creative economy, creates local employment opportunities, and offers direct and indirect financial benefits. Implications: There is a need to recognize and promote regional films to encourage the diversity of Indonesian films; this study is also expected to provide a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between regional films and the dynamics of Indonesian films.

Pulp Fiction in the Press: 1990s Film Culture Writing and the Creation of Influence

Abstract: This paper argues that the enormous amount of 1990s in-print press coverage of Quentin Tarantino and Pulp Fiction (1994) was a crucial factor in establishing the film's early legacy. Trade journalists, film reviewers, and cultural commentators all built a sense that Pulp Fiction was the defining indie film of the 1990s, aligning it with the financial and cultural expansion of the indie film sector throughout the rest of the decade. Through the privileged positions these writers held in film culture, they circulated opinions and knowledge about Tarantino and Pulp Fiction , all the while imbuing the film with immense cultural value.

Indie film entitled Pugon: Reflecting the experiences of the modern Indio in the current formulation of Philippine society

This study introduces the indie film titled "Pugon: Reflecting the Experiences of the Modern Indio in the Current Formulation of Philippine Society." It investigates the nuanced experiences of contemporary Indios within the evolving landscape of Philippine society, offering a profound exploration of their challenges, endeavors, and triumphs in the quest for identity amid societal transformations. The researchers aim to provide a deep and meaningful examination of the struggles, aspirations, and accomplishments of the Indios as they navigate their personal battles, dreams, and the realities they face as individuals in society. Employing qualitative research methods, the film emphasizes the intricate experiences of the Indios, showcasing personal narratives, dreams, and the societal formulations that pose challenges and limitations to their progress and the pursuit of their aspirations. The findings encapsulate the multifaceted stories and characters representing the modern Indio, fostering a profound understanding of the social, cultural, and personal issues they grapple with in contemporary times. The film serves as a testament to the capability of indie cinema as a powerful instrument for broadening understanding and discourse on the social, cultural, and personal experiences of the Indios. In conclusion, "Pugon" stands as a unique indie film, serving as both a mirror and a spokesperson for the experiences, efforts, and hopes of the modern Indio in present-day Philippine society. It values its identity, aiming to open doors for deeper comprehension and appreciation of films that celebrate the culture, society, and individuals of the Philippines. The study suggests avenues for further exploration in the realm of cultural identity, discrimination, and the challenges faced by the Indios in Philippine society.

American indie cinema between DIY cultures and global Hollywood: Exploring the paradigm of Slacker

A landmark of the 1990s independent cinema and emblem of Generation X, Slacker (1991) is a significant event in the genealogy of Austin, Texas DIY scenes, with a long-lasting impact on the city's film industry and cultural history. The article applies research on DIY to the realm of American independent cinema, using Richard Linklater's iconic film to define indie cinema as a complex idea, linking the global media industries to cult performers emerging from intense subcultural contexts. After touching upon the history of American independent cinema, the film's content is read against its production networks, suggesting the historical role of DIY media ecologies in the value chain of Hollywood. The flexible career pathways emanating from Slacker chart various fates that creative labour undergoes in today's media industries. This methodological perspective reinforces a relational approach to the study of independent cinema, suggesting possible lines of inquiry for future research.

Intimacy and Failed Solidarity in the Teen Girl Film Lollipop Monster (2011)

Abstract: In this article I analyze the 2011 German indie film Lollipop Monster as a contemporary model for what Lauren Berlant calls "intimate publics." This film twists the genre of the teen girl film by portraying female friendship as a catalyst for unleashing suppressed emotions and subverting oppression. Instead of directing their aggression internally as self-harm, the protagonists of Lollipop Monster use violence against others to reinforce their strong social bond. By employing cinematic techniques from the popular multimedia genre of the music video, Lollipop Monster harkens back to the imagined sisterhoods of Riot Grrrl culture. In its nostalgic celebration, the film fails to address the racism of this movement, ultimately remaining focused on whiteness and failing to fully explore possibilities for solidarity between Black and white women. Overall, Lollipop Monster updates Berlant's cautionary theory, illustrating how gendered intimate publics co-create neoliberal landscapes of digital, multimedia music and social media stardom.

Building a Timeline for LGBTQ+ Global Cinemas (1910–2019): Movie Production Trends from a Collaborative Internet Cinema Database

Building a Timeline for LGBTQ+ Global Cinemas (1910–2019): Movie Production Trends from a Collaborative Internet Cinema Database

Queer Childhood Sexuality in Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros

Queer Childhood Sexuality in Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros Celine Parreñas Shimizu (bio) Global circulations of cinema produce intimate attachments to subjects located elsewhere, whose different lives across the distance come into proximity. The English title of the Philippine indie film Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros (Auraeus Solito, 2005), The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, is quite beautiful yet imprecise in its translation of the original Tagalog in the worldwide release. Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros literally converts to "the blossoming young womanhood of Maximo Oliveros." The original Tagalog title is gendered: the word dalaga means young woman and the conjugation of pagdadalaga indicates becoming. To translate growing womanhood as blossoming in the sense of flowering goes beyond developing as an adult woman in the community. Flowering can also be read as a vaginal reference in the sense of burgeoning labia.1 The film is thus so much richer than its English title suggests in its representation of the adolescent child's sexual development and how it is situated in a larger constellation of gendered identities, a complexity that I will parse for this film that circulates widely in Filipinx and queer diasporas today. [End Page 170] Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros concerns a young genderqueer Filipinx youth named Maximo, or Maxie (Nathan Lopez), who may be an effeminate boy, a boyish girl, or someone in-between. At twelve years old, the adolescent may express themself in an aggressive effeminacy that troubles the spectator's categories, but in their neighborhood slums of Manila, no one is confused or discomforted by their defiance of gender boundaries. There are other children like Maxie, so their gender expression is normalized as one available option among many. That is, they are not alone as genderqueer in this film, so they do not represent a singular anomaly or embody an individual perception of perversity. While Maxie's gender obscurity makes them vulnerable to harassment outside the home, especially after dark, their family is composed of a kind and doting father named Paco and two protective older brothers, the quietly intense Boy (Neil Ryan Sese) and the lighthearted and flirtatious Bogs (Ping Medina). All are locally known criminals—petty thieves working in the underground economy—selling stolen cell phones or running the numbers. The Oliveros clan, in their cisgendered macho countenance, loves and protects Maxie, who has taken on the feminine role of cooking, cleaning, and maintaining the household since the death of their matriarch. But when Maxie develops an interest in the rookie policeman Victor Perez (J. R. Valentin), who eventually seeks to arrest their family after a local murder, their affection and care for this man of the law threatens to fragment the family. This film is extraordinary for the way it privileges the child's perspective, including the full-blown vulnerability in their desire for another, but it is not a coming out narrative. Maxie's queer sexuality remains ambiguous. Because Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros is not a film about coming out, Maxie's sexuality is not the primary social category of experience in their development. Indeed, Maxie's sexuality is situated within a larger set of formative feelings and experiences, specifically mourning, grief, and poverty. Maxie seems to be heading in the direction of criminality. Their future aspiration to sell pirated DVDs is unlawful. The film does not present this path as something to which they are intrinsically prone but as the most viable, as it is exemplified and encouraged by the adults in their life. Maxie's limited choice is contextualized by the family's extreme lack of resources as poor people in the Global South. While Maxie's pursuit of a different life may be seen as a sexual one, due to the primacy of sex in defining queer identities, this film presents different kinds of queer desire that, while not denying erotic attachment, provide a broader map. In looking at the film through the lens of object relations theory—a branch of psychoanalysis focused on relations with others and their representative inanimate objects—we can see how the child's feelings exceed sexual instincts and include romance, loyalty, and grief. This allows us to examine the interpersonal relationship...

A Tale of Two Indies: Amazon Studios and A24 in the Streaming Age

This article tracks the evolution of the US indie film sector in the 2010s by examining as case studies two newly formed film companies, Amazon Studios and A24. Through historiographic and industrial analyses, I reveal how the companies simultaneously embraced new streaming technologies, thus destabilizing long-standing notions of indie film culture, and established brand identities around the culture’s traditional hallmarks, auteur filmmaking and theatrical exhibition. This examination of the separate but intersecting trajectories of A24 and Amazon Studios provides insight into a decade of indie filmmaking marked by the incredible rise in global importance of streaming services.

Are Art Films Interesting? Examining the Relationship between Review Quality, Source Credibility, and Usefulness of Information on Watching Intention

This paper investigates review quality, source credibility, and information usefulness as antecedents of intention to watch indie films. Data were collected from respondents in Jakarta. Structural equation modeling were employed to test the proposed model. Only movie review quality significantly affected their watching intention. This study extends our understanding of this relationship by highlighting the important roles of movie review quality, source credibility, and information usefulness as antecedents of watching intention.

Sugiharti Halim (2008): A Cinematic Portrayal of Chinese Indonesian's Ambiguous Identity

Sugiharti Halim (2008) provides a cinematic insight into the lives of Chinese Indonesians whose identities are perpetually labeled as liyan (other) in the eyes of the inlanders (pribumi). It narrates the story of Sugiharti Halim, a Chinese Indonesian girl, who struggles with her Indonesian sounding name which, instead of successfully assimilating her Chinese identity, makes her even more Chinese than before. This study aims to investigate the cinematic portrayal of Chinese Indonesian’s ambiguous identity as experienced by the female protagonist. The writer employs close textual analysis of the indie film and approaches the issue by the reading of cinematic codes (mise en scene) and the theoretical perspective of name giving developed by Watzlawik in 2016. The conflict highlited in this “indie” criticizes the position of Chinese filmmaker for being pigeoholed on the ground of their ethnicity as portrayed in most commercial films which put Chinese more as a marginalized group. Therefore, the study reveals that films have become a new means of politicizing the interest of certain ethnic group which somehow puts the Chinese Indonesians in their most vulnerable position. The study also concludes that independent films help the young Chinese filmmakers to reconnect with their Chinese heritage as they begin to pick up bits of their Chineseness which were previously miscontrued by the inherited ideals of the New Order regime.

On Women of Rido: A Film Analysis of “Women of The Weeping River” by Sheron Dayoc (2016) Through the Lens of Hamm-Ehsani, Wang, Feldman, and Hsu

Several films today include the narratives of Muslim communities. Due to the vast array of movies on the subject, Muslim communities’ representation has opened many representations and interpretations, whether positive or negative. The independent film “Women of the Weeping River” (WOTWR), by Sheron Dayoc, is one of the many indie films in the Philippines that includes the Muslim community. Using the lenses of Stuart Hall (1997) “Theory of Representation,” the researchers focused on how producers utilize elements of the film in crafting their representations towards cultural groups. This study focuses on this film to elaborate the potential of independent cinema in terms of minorities and highlight social issues. In the case of WOTWR, the study also emphasizes how the Muslim community throughout the film also portrays Islamic women and the film’s influence regarding the formation of viewers’ perspectives towards the selected cultural group. Through an analysis of WOTWR, this study also aims to discuss how indie films can break away and are capable of breaking away and alluding to mainstream cinema milestones. Several frameworks like Yihan Wang’s “Ethnic Boundary and Literature/Image Representation,” Mark B. Feldman and Hsuan L. Hsu’s “Introduction: Race, Environment, and Representation,” and Karin Hamm-Ehsani’s “Intersections: Issues of National, Ethnic, and Sexual Identity in Kutlug Ataman’s Berlin Film Lola und Bilidikid,” were utilized in close reading, providing the reader with several perspectives. The study proved that independent film such as WOTWR is a powerful tool when it comes to representation because of having the privilege of autonomy.

Interrogating Patriarchy: Transgressive Discourses of ‘F-Rated’ Independent Hindi Films

Since its inception at the Bath Film Festival 2014, the ‘F-Rating’ has been adopted as a yardstick to foster equitable representation of women in film. The rise of a new sub-genre of Hindi ‘Indie’ cinema (Devasundaram, 2016, 2018) has been augmented by an array of bona fide Female-rated independent films. These films fulfil the triune criteria for F-Rating, featuring women both behind and in front of the camera – as directors, actors and scriptwriters. I argue that these distinct female voices in new independent Hindi cinema have engendered discursive filmic spaces of resistance – alternative articulations that transgress India’s patriarchal national master narrative. Indian cinema thus far has been presided over by Bollywood’s hegemonic bastion of male-dominated discourses. The mainstream industry continues to propagate gender-based wage disparity and hypersexualised representations of the female body via the serialised song and dance spectacle of the ‘item number’. The increasing presence of F-Rated Hindi films on the international film festival circuit and through wider releases, gestures towards these films’ melding of the global and local. Drawing on my curation work with the UK Asian Film Festival (UKAFF) and discursive analyses of seminal F-Rated films, this essay highlights the pivotal role played by F-Rated Hindi Indie films in opening up transdiscursive dimensions and creating national and global conversations around issues of gender inequities in India.

КИНОПРОИЗВОДСТВО ТОМСКИХ РЕЖИССЕРОВ-ЛЮБИТЕЛЕЙ КАК ПРОСЬЮМЕРСКАЯ ПРАКТИКА

Regional amateur film production is discussed in the article. The specifics of this phenomenon are determined by two factors: the territorial affiliation and the unprofessional nature the amateur filmmakers activities making films outside the official film studios systems. The spread of film ama-teurism in the 21st century is driven by the development of digital technologies that simplify the film production process. However, the place and importance of amateur filmmakers in modern culture are not adequately investigated, which actualizes this study. The purpose of the article is to reveal the specifics of the production and artistic activities of Tomsk amateur directors. The author's hypothesis is that regional cinema is not only a form of amateur creativity but also prosumers activity. The novelty of the study is determined, firstly, by the attention to the film industry of the Tomsk region, secondly, the original author's approach, considering the activities of amateur directors in the context of the new production paradigm of prosumerism. The methodological basis of the study is the sociocultural approach, film appreciation and study of empiric material (short features, indie cinema, documentary, web-series). The study is constructed as follows: signs, which point to the prosumer character of the Tomsk cinema environ is identified. As a result a set of assertions confirming the involvement of amateur film makers in new forms of DIY practices is formulated. 1) Amateur filmmakers multifunctional activities redound to the blurring of the distinction between production and consumption. 2) It is not in doubt, that is voluntary labor, but the fact that it is unpaid labor is not an essential condition, due to the large economic costs of film production. 3) For Tomsk's amateur directors an unstructured and decentralized organization of the production process is typical. 4) Almost all filmmakers have their own or given means of production. 5) The product specifics (film text) are determined by the individual optics of the author and by his regional belonging. 6) The transformative role of film amateurism is expressed in influencing the identity of its participants and in shaping the cultural identity of the region. The authors conclude that the activity of Tomsk's amateur film production contributes to the cul-tural specifics of the region, influences the development of regional identity, and contributes to the formation of new social ties. This non-profit environ based on the personal enthusiasm of people inter-ested in creative self-realization leads to the prosumers practice extension as a way to overcome the negative manifestations of a consumer society.

Women’s indie television: the intimate feminism of women-centric dramedies

ABSTRACTWhen HBO’s Girls debuted in April 2012, it was unlike anything else on television, but today there are echoes of Girls’ indie tendencies and feminist sensibility across the Anglophone television landscape. In retrospect, it is clear that Girls is the flagship series of a recent cycle of women-centric dramedies on US television, which includes (but is not limited to) Transparent, Broad City, Insecure, One Mississippi, Catastrophe, Divorce, Better Things, SMILF and Shrill. These series are inspired by, in conversation with and/or reacting to the aesthetic, generic and/or feminist template established by Girls. This cycle represents the dialogic flow between and across film and television in the convergent era and is enabled by cultural, industrial and political conditions specific to the “peak” television moment. Owing to the centrality of production-based spectacle to both contemporary definitions of cinematic television and popular media feminisms, this cycle is rendered somewhat invisible to both categories. This article argues that the cycle and its series are perhaps best understood in relation to women’s indie cinema, or as a televisual manifestation of women’s indie cinema that could be called women’s indie television.

Hip Nostalgia

The opening episode of season two of the AMC series Preacher begins with a big reveal that sets in motion the season’s subsequent action: God has come to earth and gone missing. The protagonists—a preacher possessed by the powerful, but amoral offspring of the illicit coupling of an angel and a demon, his contract killer girlfriend, and an Irish vampire—track the almighty to a small town strip club in East Texas he has been rumored to frequent. God is not there, mayhem ensues, and in the club’s office the manager—before succumbing to a gunshot wound—tells the preacher, with a sigh, ‘God didn’t come for the girls, you idiot. He came…for the jazz.’ The show then cuts to the club’s performance space where a piano-less trio led by veteran New Orleans drummer Johnny Vidacovich offers a Coltrane-inflected, hard bop-style tune while pole dancers writhe at the edge of the screen. Jazz is here partly, it turns out, to give the showrunners an excuse to set the season in New Orleans, but it is also here for more than simple exigency. This article plumbs the place of jazz in three contemporary American television shows’ soundtracks: AMC’s Preacher, Showtime’s I’m Dying Up Here, and F/X’s Louie. Together they represent a distinct cultural phenomenon in a distinct historical moment: the embrace of jazz as a music signifying creativity and the new; hipness and the bohemian margins of polite society; and elite, left wing intellectualism in an America riven by hope, change, and retrenchment. It is perhaps no surprise that each of these shows has a similar soundtrack—not only inasmuch as each includes new jazz recordings, in fact, but also in the range of other music compiled for their scores. They share a format—the ambivalent ‘dramedy’—an auteurish quality, an embrace of indie film aesthetics on the small screen, and a target audience. God aside, each of these shows participates in a signifying chain that links jazz to other aspects of American entertainment that once thrived together in a kind of demimonde, and which have since largely become uncoupled from each other; a Cold War-era world of Playboy clubs and the Rat Pack.
 What, this article asks, might be at stake in reattaching jazz, stand up comedy, and strippers in these television shows? What does their target audience want from that set of associations? Answering those questions requires a close look not only at the narrative frames in which jazz is made to participate and the televisual techniques with which it is shown, but also at the particular sonic qualities that define jazz for these shows. Jazz is, of course, a famously varied genre label. Each of these shows features the same kind of jazz: an eclectic style based in Miles Davis’s approach to texture and form and in John Coltrane’s harmonic explorations as elaborated since the 1970s. Notably, in using this style of music they have found a jazz that is neither strongly associated with the middleclass Black project of the ‘neo-traditional’ resurgence of historical styles starting in the 1990s, nor associated with the Black radical project of hip hop and R&B-tinged Afrofuturist jazz growing in popularity at the time the shows were released. It is not so much that the vision of jazz these shows produce is white, as that it occludes its racial signifiers altogether. In the most critical assessment one might say that this is a (mostly) white, (mostly) male attempt to recapture a moment of white hipness: a chance to make Bohemian America great again. A more sympathetic interpretation may use Svetlana Boym’s distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia to argue that the desire is to recapture the possibility of a different future offered by a selective memory of the past. These shows all make gestures toward a more multicultural world, and a world impacted by feminist and queer movements. This article holds open the possibility that by longing for a moment when jazz was hip these shows may be articulating with an audience’s desire for a more critical, more aware, more just future.

Can the Pain of Vystopia Help to Create a More Compassionate World?

Can the Pain of Vystopia Help to Create a More Compassionate World?

Pelatihan Post-Produksi (Audio-Visual Editing) Film Indie di Armidale English College Soreang, Bandung

INDIE FILM EDITING TRAINING AT ARMIDALE ENGLISH COLLEGE OF SOREANG, BANDUNG REGENCY. A film can be seen as a medium of mass communication because in a film there are elements of entertainment, education, and information. In fact, a film can be an advocacy media that encourages a social change. In the film production management, there are major label and indie label concepts, where the indie label focuses on film content and filmmakers' freedom of expression. The stages that must be passed by a filmmaker in producing a film starts from the stages of development, pre-production, production, post-production, and distribution. The post-production stage is the most important stage that determines whether a film is classified as a quality film or not because it involves the final touch of a film. Therefore, the author decided to make a community service program in the form of post-production indie film training (audio-visual editing) at Armidale English College, Soreang District, Bandung Regency. The purpose of this training is to provide practical understanding and skills in the field of audio-visual editing to the trainees. The various implementation methods used in this training included media communication methods (audio-visual), lecture methods, interactive methods, pre-test and post-test methods, and simulation methods. The results achieved after the training was carried out were that the trainees experienced increased understanding and skills in the context of indie film post-production, especially in the process of audio-visual films editing.
 Keywords: Audio-Visual, Editing, Indie Film, Post-Production, Training.

Representing Talent: Hollywood Agents and the Making of Movies by Violaine Roussel (review)

Reviewed by: Representing Talent: Hollywood Agents and the Making of Movies by Violaine Roussel Laurel Carlson Violaine Roussel, Representing Talent: Hollywood Agents and the Making of Movies. University of Chicago Press, 2017. 256 pages. Violaine Roussel’s Representing Talent: Hollywood Agents and the Making of Movies displays the unique role of talent agents in the media industry through a revealing and thorough ethnographic study. The Hollywood agent is a figure frequently shrouded in mystery, often only understood via shoddy film and television portrayals (e.g. Tootsie’s George Fields or Friends’ Estelle). These portrayals have led to the stereotyping of agents as greedy, ruthless, and parasitic. Even in academic circles, little attention has been paid to the role of the agent in the media industry as a whole. Roussel seeks to investigate this singular profession, a feat that she manages with sophistication by using 122 interviews, performed between 2010 and 2015, with agents of a wide variety of backgrounds and experience. Though the interviewees remain anonymous – and for good reason – Roussel’s fieldwork reveals the complicated and hierarchized relationships that exist between agents and their clients, between agents and other Hollywood production workers, and between agents themselves. In so doing, Roussel draws a complex yet accessible map of where agents stand in the context of Hollywood media production. By intervening into a gap in Production Studies scholarship, Roussel demonstrates the importance of understanding “agenting,” as it is referred to in the industry, in order to make sense of how films and television shows come to be produced in Hollywood. Roussel opens her book with a prologue that traces the development of [End Page 55] Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991) from the sale of the rights to Thomas Harris’ source novel in the late 1980s up to the official start of the film’s production. Roussel argues that despite all the work that goes into a film’s development, it is only on the first day of production that a film becomes “real.” This case study demonstrates the tricky orchestration involved in a Hollywood agent’s work and maps out the winding road of negotiation that often takes place before a film goes into production. Following the prologue, each of Roussel’s seven chapters investigates a different aspect of the world of the Hollywood talent agent, including how agents work their way up in the industry, the importance of relationships in the profession, the complicated power structures between agents and their clients, the logic behind “pricing talent” and actors’ fees, and the changing structure of the profession due to the emerging importance of the indie film market and digital media. Among these chapters, the notion of “relationship work” emerges as a critical site for the development of the agent’s career. Roussel stresses that strong relationships with firm boundaries constitute the lifeblood of Hollywood agents and that the creation of a network of trust as well as a personal “agenting style” are key to “making it” as an agent in the industry. Roussel delineates the difference between “Big Hollywood” and “Little Hollywood” in the agency system as “two distinct systems of cultural production” (29). While Big Hollywood includes the major agencies that dominate the system, Little Hollywood includes a vast number of smaller and less lucrative agencies. Roussel’s book is effective because she pays attention to both sides of the agency system by including interviews with members of both arenas. Because movement between Big and Little Hollywood does occur, these systems are distinct yet interconnected. Roussel’s overall arguments about the agency system hold significantly more weight because she isn’t merely addressing the major agencies that represent Hollywood’s biggest stars; she demonstrates an understanding of the small and boutique agencies that are often ignored in Production Studies and Media Studies. Representing Talent includes an interesting investigation into the demographics of the agency system by noting that in accordance with stereotypes, Hollywood agents are predominantly white and male. Although women are finding more representation at the lower levels of the agent industry, men still make up the vast majority of high-level positions. While one could object that Roussel’s interview subjects are predominantly white and...

“I’d like an abortion please”: rethinking unplanned pregnancy narratives in contemporary American cinema

Released in 2014 and 2015, respectively, the American indie films Obvious Child and Grandma each feature a central protagonist who is dealing with an unplanned pregnancy and is pursuing an abortion. These pro-choice narratives not only challenge Hollywood cinema’s repetitive depiction of unplanned pregnancies that result in motherhood, but they critique the dominant political and societal discourses surrounding abortion and women who choose to terminate pregnancies. Tracing the history of cinematic portrayals of unplanned pregnancy, and reflecting upon how post-feminist culture has positioned the notion of choice, this paper notes the significance of Obvious Child and Grandma as films that not only feature abortion as a central theme, but utilize comedy in their navigation of a controversial subject. Furthermore, this paper argues that in their frank and positive engagement with termination as a potential resolution to an unplanned pregnancy, these films offer important attempts to destigmatize the subject of abortion.

A Companion to American Indie Film

A Companion to American Indie Film