Pump Up the Volume : Defining the American Independent Cinema Through Music, 1970s-2000s

This paper explores the key, deep relation between music and moving images that defines the so-called “American Independent Cinema” (King 2005, 2013) as a film culture. This body of works is grounded in the scene-based approach of the underground punk/rock music, which has been familiar to the independent filmmakers by the 1970s (e.g., No Wave). A pattern of DIY practices and media shared by musicians, filmmakers, screenwriters, and actors in common spaces is at the core of these film productions' strategies since the 1970s, becoming more than an alliance in the 1990s and the 2000s. According to Shank (1994) and Kruse (2003) the act of sharing the same live experience and listening culture defines the idea of a “scene”, in which performers and audience are both active parts of a “whole”. Thus, according to Newman (2009, 2011) and Staiger (2013), the indie film culture is characterized by a special relationship that the film is able to establish with the viewer, starting from the idea of a double position of the filmmaker as a film spectator. The exploration of this strategic, meaningful relation that develops “through the ears” suggests a specific interpretation of this corpus of works in terms of film history, in a wide arch of time (1970-2000s), going beyond the historiographic and biographic approaches. It emerges a theoretical framework that highlights the idea of a sort of “bodification”, defining different stages of development: the indie film culture as the “Body” (“Independent Cinema”, 1976-1992), as the “Corpse” (“Indie Cinema, Indie Rock”, 1992-2001), and as the “Brain” (“Indiewood and Indie 2.0”, 2001-2011). The paper investigates some key-examples as Eric Mitchell’s "Kidnapped" (1978), Susan Seidelman's "Smithereens" (1982), Allan Moyle’s "Pump Up the Volume" (1990), Richard Linklater’s "Slacker" (1991) David Markey’s "1991. The Year Punk Broke" (1992), Linklater’s "subUrbia" (1996), Richard Kelly’s "Donnie Darko" (2001), and Wes Anderson’s "The Royal Tenenbaums" (2001).