ABSTRACT
In the twenty-first century, the term ‘independent film’ requires a serious overhaul and a cogent updating. Digital interfaces, platforms, technologies, and programs both continue older entertainment industry economic models, with its focus on distribution–exhibition, and also open up new formations such as online festivals, Flash, and streaming that reconfigure the relationship between shorts and the feature-film industry. In a multiplatformed media landscape that spans film, video, broadcasting, video on demand, satellite, CD ROM games, and the internet, the divisions between technologies are blurred as works migrate between different platforms, with different interfaces. This migration of media productions across technologies, where the transnational media corporations function as distributors—exhibitors rather than producers, has also blurred the borders and debates that defined the term ‘independent film’ in the previous thirty years: it is not so easy to draw a line between dominant and oppositional, profit and nonprofit, film and video, analog and digital, as it might have been in 1974. A quarter of a century ago, independent media could be identified through its structural, aesthetic, and ideological differences from corporate media: oppositional, political, non-profit, different voices, different aesthetic strategies, new narrative structures.
