Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
This book illustrates the many ways that actors contribute to American independent cinema. Analyzing industrial developments, it examines the impact of actors as writers, directors, and producers, and as stars able to attract investment and bring visibility to small-scale productions. Exploring cultural-aesthetic factors, the book identifies the various traditions that shape choices about independent films' character and narrative designs, casting choices, and performance styles.
Acting Indie reframes American independent cinema by offering a genealogy of industrial and aesthetic practices that connect independent filmmaking in the studio era and the chaotic 1960s and 1970s to contemporary American independent cinema in its evolving indie, indiewood, and post-indiewood forms. Chapters focusing on actors' involvement in the emergence and evolution of American independent cinema as a sector alternate with chapters that show how aesthetic traditions such as naturalism, modernism, postmodernism, and Third Cinema influence films and performances.