What's left of the indie: genre approaches

Abstract

Indie cinema lived a golden age from 1989 to 1999. After this boom time, independent films remain difficult to categorize. This article proposes to redefine the independent cinema according to the economic fluctuations of the industry, key in its evolution, and to observe the contradictions of a cinema that is determined by its open character, not to be ascribed to the genre codes and that, however, allows to be assimilated as one more tendency of commercial cinema. Consequently, the diffuse evolution of independent cinema during the last twenty years has ended up creating a genre, reproducible even by cinematographies foreign to the North American.