American Independent Cinema

An inspiration to European film-makers and to mainstream Hollywood, US independent cinema has blossomed in the late 80s and 90s with an enormous variety of idiosyncratic and challenging cinema coming to the fore.

Sight and Sound magazine has captured much of the excitement of this vital, intelligent and often quirky cinema as it happened. This book, part of a new series of Sight and Sound Readers, combines interviews with directors, features on major genres and reviews of some of the key films released derived from the pages of the magazine. The editor Jim Hillier adopts a broad definition of US indie film including material on the Coen brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Gus van Sant, Jim Jarmusch, Rose Troche, Todd Haynes, Hal Hartley and many more besides.