Article:

Ephemeral bodies and threshold creatures: The crisis of the adolescent rite of passage in Sofia Coppola’s THE VIRGIN SUICIDES and Gus Van Sant’s ELEPHANT

The abiding and predominant tendency of scholarly and critical approaches to American Independent Cinema is to characterise it as a cinema in crisis due to the highly contentious nature of the term ‘independent’. A plethora of recent studies such as those by Gregg Merritt, John Berra, and Michael Newman focus on the very definition, and by extension the possibility, of ‘independence’ in an increasingly commercially-driven business where economic factors often take precedence over the romantic notion of artistic vision and integrity (of which American cinema of the 1970s is often viewed as exemplary). Other scholars such as Geoff King and Jason Wood employ the nebulous term ‘indiewood’ in order to recognise the hybrid nature of independence within the American film industry today. This scholarship is valid and clearly has its place but I would argue that this focus on the notion of independence has resulted in a paucity of material on the aesthetics and poetics of American Independent Cinema. My intention, therefore, is to analyse two American independent films, both of which could readily fit within the ‘indiewood’ paradigm as a cinema of crisis rather than as one merely in crisis.1 I will argue specifically that a dominant trend in American independent film is the exploration of various rites of passage of which one of the most prominent is adolescence (or the ‘teen pic’ genre).