Phill Hall on THE HISTORY OF INDEPENDENT CINEMA III

Werner Krauss, Conrad Veidt, Lil Dagover in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari

Phil Hall Interview: Part I
Phil Hall Interview: Part II
What have been the top foreign influences on American independent filmmaking?
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and the European avant-garde films of the 1920s were a huge influence on U.S. underground filmmakers. The Italian neo-realism in the post-World War II era had a strong impact, primarily because it enabled filmmakers to adopt an obvious low-budget approach — with the caveat that the film was appropriately gritty enough to warrant the glamour-free style.
The 1962 Italian feature Mondo Cane helped to inaugurate the shockumentary filmmaking school that is still with us. More recently, the Dogme school of filmmaking had a flurry of [...]

Phil Hall Interview II

Mary Pickford, one of the first major independent producers, and screenwriter Frances Marion

Phil Hall Interview: Part I
The History of Independent Cinema. I’m assuming that refers to US-made films. Even so, that’s a lot of ground to cover. What sort of parameters did you have to use in order to condense that very long and very diverse history into one volume?
Clearly, I could not accommodate every independent film into the book. I decided to focus primarily on films and creative artists that made a significant contribution to the commercial and/or artistic development of film production and distribution. That helped to eliminate many obscure films and filmmakers from coverage.
There are two genres that were not pursued in depth. I opted not [...]

THE HISTORY OF INDEPENDENT CINEMA: Q&A with Phil Hall

"Independent film is a vast and varied territory, and Phil Hall’s remarkable book explores every inch of it with wit, intelligence, a sympathetic spirit, and a wide-open mind. Fresh discoveries and surprising revelations abound on every topic from Edison to Aronofsky, Anger to Warhol, the silent era to the Internet age. It’s hard to imagine a study more keenly in tune with one of cinema’s liveliest, most multifaceted fields.” — David Sterritt, Ph.D, chairman, National Society of Film Critics
The "remarkable book" in question is called The History of Independent Cinema, which, as the title implies, covers the century-long development of American filmmaking outside the big-studio lots. Published by BearManor Media, The History [...]