Today we’re happy to provide you with an excerpt from Sherry B Ortner’s new book Not Hollywood. Subtitled “Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream”, its an ethnographic look at Independent Film since the late 80s. In this excerpt Sherry looks at the darkness that is endemic of so many independent features. What do you think?
Dark Indies
From the beginning of this project, I immersed myself in independent films. At first I was somewhat mystified. While many of them were compelling, many of them were also quite dark and, in one way or another, disturbing. They were clearly ‘‘not Hollywood.’’ This generated the first question of my research beyond the purely ethnographic: what was this all about? In Part I of this chapter, I tackle this general question of ‘‘darkness’’ and propose to understand it in terms of the generational positioning of a new breed of filmmakers, the first post-boomer generation usually known as Generation X. I argue further that ‘‘Generation X’’ represents not a particular cohort that ended at a certain point in time, but an ongoing and open-ended social entity that is bearing the brunt of the massive economic transformations called ‘‘neoliberalism.’’
