Since the late 1990s, a subtle, subversive element has been at work within the staid confines of the Hollywood dream factory. Young filmmakers like Spike Jonze, Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, David O. Russell, Richard Linklater, and Sofia Coppola rode in on the coattails of the independent film movement that blossomed in the early 1990s and have managed to wage an aesthetic campaign against cowardice of the imagination, much like their artistic forebears, the so-called Movie Brats—Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, Altman, and Ashby among others—did in the 1970s. But their true pedigree can be traced back to the cinematic provocateurs of the Nouvelle Vague—such as Truffaut, Goddard, Chabrol, Rohmer, and Rivette—who, in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, liberated screens around the world with a series of films that challenged our assumptions of what the medium could offer and how stories could be told—all of them snapping with style as much as they delivered on ideas. Highly idiosyncratic yet intricately realized, accessible yet willing to overthrow the constraints of formal storytelling, surreal yet always grounded in human emotions, this new film movement captures the angst of its characters and the times in which we live, but with a wryness, imagination, earnestness, irony, and stylish wit that makes the slide into existential despair a little more amusing than it should be.
DEREK HILL is the author of Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers (Kamera Books), a study of the films of Charlie Kaufman, Richard Linklater, David O. Russell, Wes Anderson, Sofia Coppla, and others. His book on the films of Terry Gilliam from Schaffner Press as well as Peter Jackson: Interviews (in which he served as editor) as part of the University of Mississippi's Conversations with Filmmakers series are both forthcoming. He has contributed to the Directory of World Cinema: Japan and Directory of World Cinema: American Independent (Intellect), Little White Lies magazine, and to a number of print and online publications. He is also a contributing editor and film critic for the online arts journal Sinescope.
You can visit him online at: http://derekhill.wordpress.com/
