The Books of My Life: Not Hollywood

 

In her book Not Hollywood: Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream (Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 2013), cultural anthropologist Sherry Ortner trades an ethnography of the Sherpas of Nepal, a culture she studied in the 1960s, tor an ethnography and analysis of one America filmmaking culture, which she studied in the 2000s. Like cultural anthropologists Hortense Powdermaker, a student of Bronisław Malinowski who took her doctorate at the London School of Economics, and Leo Rosten, who took his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, before her, Ortner became not only an observer of an American film culture culture but also a historian and sociologist of one American filmmaking scene, the American independent fiction and non-fiction cinema of the 1980s and after, a cinema culture that, as Ortner notes, defined itself as not Hollywood, as not a purveyor of inoffensive and unrealistic fairy tale entertainments with happy endings.

Ortner ties the rise of post-1980s American independent cinema and its culture to neoliberalism and its impacts on Generation X, which she defines as the generations impacted by neoliberalism rather than as a cohort. Ortner explores the rise of the professional middle class with progressivist political leanings, a class that arose, Ortner argues, in the wake of 1970s and 1980s corporate neoliberalism and which would play major economic (as producers and investors) and artistic (as directors, actors, and crew) roles in the independent American cinema. She explores the economic, political, and cultural concerns at the heart of this Generation X professional middle class and Gen X independent filmmakers, including a fear of falling or downward economic mobility, a concern with the perilous economic position of migrants who came to the United States in the 1980s and after, and a concern with the perilous economic situations of impoverished single mothers and the children they tried to protect in the perilous neoliberal America in which they lived (a kind of filmic political activism argues Ortner). She explores debates over what independent cinema is, how independent American movies are made, and how independent movies are distributed, including the role Miramax and Hollywood studio specialty divisions, one of which would eventually be Miramax after it was acquired by Disney, played in the American independent cinema.

There is a lot to like in Ortner's historical, sociological, and ethnographic exploration of the American independent cinema. Unlike many deconstructionist and semiological text centred analyses of American cinema, Ortner's approach, and particularly its ethnographic approach, adds essential empirical flesh and bone to how American independent cinema is actually made and, as such, is an important adjunct and empirical corrective to so much English and Cultural Studies grounded film analysis these days. On the other hand, I don't think Ortner explores, as much as she could, earlier forms of American independent cinema including United Artists, which had a somewhat artistic bent, American International Pictures, which had a more pop emphasis and played an important role in the rise of targeted cinema, or Orion Pictures, a "mini-major studio that produced many small, heartfelt, and more realistic films in the 1970s and 1980s. Nor do I think Ortner does as much as she could with the role foreign art cinema, particularly French cinema in its nouvelle vague period, and the films of Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini, played in impacting notions of flimmaking in America, played in the rise of the new Hollywood cinema and its directors in the late 1960s and 1970s, and played in the distribution of non-studio films in the United States, particularly afther the breakup of the Hollywood control of production, distribution, and exhibition in 1948. Additionally, I don't think Ortner explores, as much as she could, how films of the new Hollywood, such as Where the Lilies Bloom, a 1974 adaptation by producer Robert Rabnitz, writer Earl Hamner Jr. of The Waltons fame, and director William A. Graham, of a novel by Bill and Vera Cleaver, about rural North Carolina children who fear falling further into poverty after their father dies and fear what will happen to them as a result of their father's death, a film distributed by United Artists, and a film which foreshadows at least some of dark themes--fear of downward economic mobility and the resultant dangers to children--Ortner finds in the American independent cinema of the 1980s and after. Finally, one invariably wonders if there would have been differences in the analysis of feminism and indie women in the book if the ethnography and analysis had been done in the wake of the #MeToo movement.