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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by DCU Online Research Access Service Smart cinema as trans-generic mode: a study of industrial transgression and assimilation 1990-2005 Laura Canning B.A., M.A. (Hons) This thesis is submitted to Dublin City University for the award of Ph.D in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. November 2013 School of Communications Supervisor: Dr. Pat Brereton 1 I hereby certify that that this material, which I now submit for assessment on the programme of study leading to the award of Ph.D is entirely my own work, and that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge breach any law of copyright, and has not been taken from the work of others save and to the extent that such work has been cited and acknowledged within the text of my work. Signed:_________________________________ (Candidate) ID No.: 58118276 Date: ________________ 2 Table of Contents Chapter One: Introduction p.6 Chapter Two: Literature Review p.27 Chapter Three: The industrial history of Smart cinema p.53 Chapter Four: Smart cinema, the auteur as commodity, and cult film p.82 Chapter Five: The Smart film, prestige, and ‘indie’ culture p.105 Chapter Six: Smart cinema and industrial categorisations p.137 Chapter Seven: ‘Double Coding’ and the Smart canon p.159 Chapter Eight: Smart inside and outside the system – two case studies p.210 Chapter Nine: Conclusions p.236 References and Bibliography p.259 3 Abstract Following from Sconce’s “Irony, nihilism, and the new American ‘smart’ film”, describing an American school of filmmaking that “survives (and at times thrives) at the symbolic and material intersection of ‘Hollywood’, the ‘indie’ scene and the vestiges of what cinephiles used to call ‘art films’” (Sconce, 2002, 351), I seek to link industrial and textual studies in order to explore Smart cinema as a transgeneric mode. I categorise it as a grouping of films which may have different formal characteristics, but are linked by industrial origins and production contexts, and through their use of genre, as Smart cinema embeds more challenging arthouse or cult tendencies in a framework of variable generic familiarity or accessibility. Individual texts contain thematic, stylistic and structural elements which can be positioned at, and interpreted along, loci on a continuum from mainstream to independent. This is achieved through a process of “double coding” (King, 2009), which King relates to Bourdieu’s ideas of habitus and distinction, but which I expand to include utilising textual attributes to create simultaneous calls to action to multiple audiences, along a continuum from ‘indie’ to ‘mainstream’, often in a manner that obscures their industrial positioning. Double coding works to simultaneously cultivate mainstream-resistant audiences, actively positioning texts as distanced from the industrial circumstances which produced them, and to accrue cultural capital for producers. Crucially, Smart attempts to combine the potentially transgressive, ‘cool’ underground appeal of cult cinema with echoes of high culture and artistic status which comes more directly from the arthouse tradition, and is therefore embedded within what James English calls ‘the economy of prestige’. (English, 2009) Rather than a generational outcropping, or intrusion of independent cinema into the mainstream, Smart cinema demonstrates product differentiation within the context of horizontal integration: studios making strategic interventions into what would previously have been seen as ‘indie cinema territory’. While encouraging framing within an auterist model, and by utilising – or fetishizing – what we might casually consider ‘indie style,’ Hollywood studios extended their reach beyond the mass market by co-opting notions such as ‘independence’, ‘cult’, ‘authenticity’, and ‘prestige’. 4 Acknowledgements In 2013 the School of Communications in DCU tragically lost a fine scholar, our very dear friend Dr. Robert Furze (1971-2013) and we will mourn his passing for a long time to come. This dissertation is dedicated to his memory. Heartfelt thanks to my supervisor Dr. Pat Brereton for his continual support, encouragement and good advice; his confidence in my abilities was a tremendous comfort, particularly when I had lost my own, and his work ethic inspirational. Particular thanks for their generosity go to Dr. Roddy Flynn, who as well as acting as internal examiner was instrumental in my finding my way into academia in the first place, and to Dr. Debbie Ging, not just as my second supervisor, but as an example. I have at all times been tremendously grateful to the School of Communications’ support and encouragement, and thanks to Professor Paschal Preston, Professor Helena Sheehan, Dr. Des McGuinness, Ms. Mary Nulty, Ms. Carol Diamond, and Mr. Damien Hickey. Thanks also to my students, who have taught me more than I have ever taught them. Specific thanks to the staff of the DCU Health Centre, in particular Dr. Mona Sayegh, without whom it is strongly possible this dissertation would never have been completed, and whose commitment and professionalism have given me an entirely new lease of life. It is a privilege to be given the opportunity to produce a PhD dissertation, and one for which I am profoundly grateful, and from which I have learned immeasurably. It can, however, be a lonely and dispiriting process, and sometimes the only possible comfort can come from those who are travelling the same path, and those who have successfully reached their destination. My fellow DCU PhD scholars Henry Silke, Denis Murphy, Fergal Quinn and Brenda McNally have been sounding boards, partners in crime, and shoulders to cry on; I have been so thankful for their presence, and wish them all the best in their own research. My friends in other academic institutions have also been tremendously encouraging and supportive, and particular thanks must go to Dr. Harvey O’Brien at UCD, as well as Dr. Kylie Jarrett, Dr. Mary Gilmartin, Dr. Jeneen Naji, and Eoin O’Mahony at NUI Maynooth, Professor Will Brooker of Kingston University, and Dr. Anna Cooper Sloan of Warwick University. My deepest gratitude is reserved for my wonderful friend and housemate Dr. Sheamus Sweeney, who was my rock, and whose friendship means more than I can say. My friends and family have been wonderfully supportive and helpful; my much-loved mother Ita and father Ger, brother Michael and sister-in-law Yvonne, have all made the past few years manageable with their emotional (and sometimes financial) support, and I will be very proud to finally become “Doctor Aunty Laura” to my beloved nephew David. My darling friends Karen Rooney, Bree Cullen, and Caoimhe Grant have listened to my woes and never complained about my sudden disappearances; my friend Dan O’Sullivan has picked up a lot of slack on my behalf without ever a grumble, during what has been a very hard year for him. A word, too, to my beloved Turtles in time zones around the world: I was never short of friendship, support and companionship as long as one of you was around. Particularly in the light of the tragic loss this year of our dear friend Naomi, I want to say that I appreciate so much all that you have done for me, and for each other. Finally, to my darling Eric. Thank you for your love, for the strength of your unfailing belief in me, your great generosity of heart, and your kindness. In fact, thank you for everything. 5 Chapter One: Introduction the very regularity with which declarations of new epochs have been made, the sheer number of ‘New Hollywoods’ that one finds posited over the course of film history, recommends this more sober view: if things are always ‘new’, nothing is ever really new. There is a constant process of adjustment and adaptation to new circumstances, but this is an adaptation made on the basis of certain underlying and constant goals: the maximizing of profits through the production of classical narrative films. Rather than looking for a fundamental break between classicism and a putative post-classicism, we would do better to look for smaller-scale changes and shifts, at both the institutional and aesthetic levels, within a more broadly continuous system of American commercial filmmaking. (Neale and Smith, 1998, 14) This dissertation explores one of the “smaller-scale changes and shifts” of which Neale and Smith write, that is, the emergence and popularisation of Smart cinema during the period 1990-2005. The expression comes from Jeffrey Sconce’s 2002 “Irony, nihilism, and the new American ‘smart’ film”, and as a term, it allows us to contain and examine a particular intersection of mainstream and independent American cinema. An unwieldy label for an unwieldy category, something Sconce acknowledges, the closest to a definition that he comes is to describe it as an art cinema ‘mutation’, or indeed “an American school of filmmaking that survives (and at times thrives) at the symbolic and material intersection of ‘Hollywood’, the ‘indie’ scene and the vestiges of what cinephiles used to call ‘art films’.” (Sconce, 2002, 351) It is this somewhat nebulous territory I explore, and my goal is to do so in a manner which elucidates both industrial and textual elements and contexts. As any exploration of the field indicates, there is no specific common definition of what a Smart film constitutes. The type of textually-based description implied by the word ‘Smart’ (the common strand Sconce sees as linking the texts being that highly mutable concept tone, rather than anything more textually concrete), has been all but replaced by more industrially-grounded classifications, circulating around terms such as ‘indie’ and ‘indiewood’; in light of the common use of these descriptive categories, my use of the term ‘Smart’ may perhaps seem somewhat archaic.

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