ABSTRACT
In late 1994, Miramax Films released the movie Clerks and in the process launched the career of a first-time director, Kevin Smith. The film was initially made on a shoestring budget, with Smith famously maxing out a string of credit cards and selling his comic book collection to finance the film. Clerks is structured as a series of eighteen vignettes that dramatise the experience of working in a convenience store, with each section signposted by titles such as ‘malaise,’ ‘lamentation,’ and ‘underground’. Clerks are so utterly authentic that its heroes have never heard of their generation. Clerks emerges from a cross-genre movement with shared beliefs about art and its validity at a moment where those views are moving from the margins to the mainstream – as, indeed, is US independent cinema. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.
