The 1990s was one of the best decades in the history of American cinema because of the coming-of-age of an independent movement. How did it come about? A brief flashback. The Hollywood studio system lost power and influence somewhere in the early 60s. A crop of new filmmakers appeared. These were influenced by Italian Neo-Realism and the French New Wave,and buoyed by the counterculture and the rise of cinephilia. Their films were for the most part financed by the studios, now willing to give decision-making power and artistic freedom to the directors. The last half of the 60s and first half of the 70s make up a decade when several emerging American directors (Altman, Scorsese, etc.) produced a crop of outstanding films. Then came Jaws and Star Wars, which gave birth to the era of the blockbuster by breaking box office records. Hollywood decided to invest in the production and marketing of banal spectacles highly dependent on costly special effects which appealed primarily to youth looking for escapism (even critic Pauline Kael, by then a populist who rarely reviewed so-called art films, decried this lamentable development). As a result, the 1980s is probably and arguably the worst decade in the history of American movies.
Of course there were excellent American films made every year of that decade, but less of them. I've come to this personal conclusion fairly recently, after four decades of compulsive movie watching. There have always been American independent movies or "amerindies". Among my favorites: Salt of the Earth (1954), Shadows (1958), Wanda (1970), and Eraserhead(1977). But by the late 80s, these no longer seemed isolated products by renegade mavericks but part of a growing movement inspired by the Do It Yourself (DIY) ethos of the punk rock scene, fed by college film programs, and supported by institutions such as the Sundance Institute and its film festival. The mainstream press took notice in 1989, when Jarmusch's Mystery Train, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies and Videotape, and Gus van Sant's Drugstore Cowboy were released in close proximity. Yet this was only the beginning. The indie movement truly came of age in the 90s. Hollywood responded by investing a modest but significant amount of its vast resources into projects by young filmmakers with a vision (not unlike what happened 20 years earlier). As a result, American cinema in general experienced a renaissance.
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