“What is indie cinema?” asks Richard Vine at The Guardian. He runs though a brief history of Indiewood, notes that the London Film Festival put Azazel Jacobs, Barry Jenkins and Joe Swanberg on a panel promoting a new wave of truly independent filmmaking, and then rhetorically wonders if his initial question is irrelevant:

But is indie a meaningful term anymore, or is it just shorthand for “cool”, “edgy” or “offbeat”? Does it matter if the so-called faux-indie production methods result in decent films such as Juno and Little Miss Sunshine that play at easy-to-access multiplexes alongside the CGI sequels and threequels?

To answer the three questions posed in the above paragraph: Yes, no, yes. What follows is essentially the same argument I’ve made one thousand times over the past three years, but apparently there are still some people who need to hear it.

Vine seems to be making the argument that it doesn’t matter if a film marketed as “indie” is produced independently of a studio or not, as long as the end product is “decent,” like Juno or Little Miss Sunshine. But the success of indie-in-branding-only titles *is* a problem, because it clogs multiplex space and hogs the attention of the small but not insignificant percentage of consumers who would genuinely like to see something legitimately independently produced (insofar as they believe that a lack of studio participation ensures that the end product will at least attempt to do something new/different/honest/independently minded, which is not a terribly misguided assumption), if such productions were easier to find out about and access.

“Indie” may have become “just shorthand for ‘cool’, ‘edgy’ or ‘offbeat’” insofar as its use as a marketing term by enablers of studio co-dependency, but this is bad. As long as there are still filmmakers who are actually making movies that are worth a damn outside the constraints of the institutionalized, studio-funded “indie” system (and there are, of course, including those on the London panel Vine references, and countless others), the positioning of a film like Juno as “indie” is something that should make us actively angry.

Vine goes on to quote a number of actors and filmmakers who are featured in an upcoming Sky TV documentary called This is Indie. It’s no surprise that Tilda Swinton has smart things to say about this, but her words are worth repeating:

…when I started making films with Derek Jarman in the 1980s, that was really independent film-making, going around with a Super 8 camera to make The Last of England. That was before the studios started making what I would describe co-dependent films, films that were on a leash but given the impression that they were studio-light.

Independent means you are free to say what you want. It does not necessarily say you will be able to do it very easily and anyone is going to give you any money to do it. It might mean it is very uncomfortable, it might mean you work with chaos on a daily basis, though it does mean that you don’t have someone breathing down your neck …

[via @filmlimc]