American Smart Cinema

Traditions in World Cinema

General Editors: Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer

Founding Editor: Steven Jay Schneider

This series introduces diverse and fascinating movements in world cinema. Each volume concentrates on a set of films from a different national, regional or, in some cases, cross-cultural cinema which constitute a particular tradition.

American Smart Cinema

Claire Perkins

ENDORSEMENTS APPROVED:

A thought-provoking analysis of the thematic and formal qualities of a significant series of tendencies in American cinema beyond the mainstream, mixing detailed readings of individual films with consideration of broader cultural contexts in which they can be understood.

Professor Geoff King, Brunel University

Over the past two decades, ‘Indie’ cinema has become an almost unworkable category, applied indiscriminately to a body of films that demonstrate little to no economic or stylistic cohesion. In American Smart Cinema, Claire Perkins makes an important contribution toward mapping recent American filmmaking with greater critical precision, providing a detailed and insightful examination of the ‘smart film’ in relation to its recurring interest in the politics of youth culture. It is a welcome addition for those interested in better understanding the unique tone and thematic obsessions of this particular wing of ‘Indie’ production.

Professor Jeffrey Sconce, Northwestern University

Connecting the ‘smart’ sensibility to issues of expressive irony, generational divide and therapeutic culture, this bold new book describes a recent critical tradition in commercial-independent American filmmaking by exploring the unstable tone and dysfunctional themes of such films as The Royal Tenenbaums, Adaptation, The Squid and the Whale, Palindromes, Magnolia, Flirt, Ghost World, Your Friends and NeighborsDonnie Darko and Simple Men.

Acknowledging the loaded forms of expression employed by these films, American Smart Cinema provides new directions for their study by discussing the self-conscious approach taken to film historical discourses of authorship, narrative and genre. Examining the smart film’s taste for ‘blank’ style and issues of middle-class identity, the book provides a comprehensive account of smart cinema as an aesthetic category while also considering the cultural and political factors that have guaranteed it critical and popular success.

Claire Perkins is Assistant Lecturer in Film and Television Studies in the School of English, Communication and Performance Studies at Monash University, Australia.