Imagined Life
American Independent Cinema and Transcendentalism
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Edinburgh University Press
Publishing:30th Nov '26
£95.00
This title is due to be published on 30th November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Imagined Life: American Independent Cinema and Transcendentalism examines the prevailing characteristics of American independent cinema and explores its longstanding debt to the Transcendentalists. This nineteenth-century New England group, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller, subscribed to an idealistic philosophy based upon an intuitive and imaginative understanding that knowledge transcends logic and empiricism. By analysing a range of American independent films, this book reveals a vital nexus operating in contemporary America between this uniquely North American philosophy and quintessentially American film. Just as the Transcendentalists strategised immersion, observation and reflection and sought empathy as the key to meaning, which came when adherents acquired trust in themselves to comprehend what was morally right, so this volume argues that this same strategy informs and characterises the creative praxes prevalent in recent and contemporary American independent cinema. To the extent that American independent cinema continues to provide a forum for marginalised identities, whether these be racial, sexual, political or even philosophical, this study demonstrates that the conscience of America is sustained and strengthened in independent films that embody Transcendentalist ideas and praxes.
Imagined Life offers readers a beautifully intricate, historically and philosophically grounded, study of American independent cinema. By locating the praxis of this much-debated film culture in the ethos of Transcendentalism, Rob Stone has re-animated its discourse with welcome wonder, and indeed, imaginative understanding. * Kim Wilkins, University of Oslo *
Stone’s standout book brilliantly sheds new light on the rich panorama of US indie movies, uniquely reconsidering their coherence through the interpretative lens of Transcendentalism. Imagined Life artfully weaves together the “busy minimalism” of US indie style, with the understated but ever-present oppositional, anti-establishment ethos of indie movies. This ingenious approach illuminates how independent cinema projects the profundity of everyday life, their characteristic focus from Faces through Slacker to The Florida Project. Keeping the theory admirably accessible, the focus firmly on the films, Stone thus helps us to fully realise the true role of US indies as the conscience of a nation. From Cassavetes through Burnett, Gerima and Dash and on to Jarmusch, Bahrani, Gerwig, Reichardt, Zhao and Jenkins, there is truly something here for all indie movie lovers. Emphasising the interconnectedness of humanity and its environment, this remarkably readable book speaks to a time of climate crisis, but without ever giving up hope in another imagined life. * David Martin-Jones, University of Glasgow *
ISBN: 9781399539128
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
256 pages