Part 1 of my two part talk:
Fargo is an independent film made in 1996 by Joel and Ethan
Coen or the Coen Brothers as they’re commonly known. You’ve all heard the term independent film
but do you know what it means?
Independent from what?
Independent in its most basic form simply means independent from the
financing of the five major Hollywood studios, which today are Warner Brothers,
Universal, Paramount, Columbia, and Disney.
But independent also usually suggests a more alternative spirit and
lower budgets. Some of the most famous
American independent films are Pulp Fiction, Lost in Translation,
The Blair Witch Project, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Really, since the beginning of American film (1895), there have been
those that work in Hollywood and those that work outside the system. Or in other words the independents.
There are some filmmakers who spend their entire careers as
independents. Then there are other
filmmakers who make one film within the system and then their next film outside
of Hollywood. And then spend their
career going back and forth between the two.
While filmmakers working outside the
system have always been around, there was a period in American cinema in the
1980s and 1990s that was the high point for American independent film. This is the period when the Coen Brothers
first emerged and I just want to quickly paint a picture of what the landscape
looked like that helped create this moment.
By the eighties, due to the
unprecedented success of films such as Jaws and Star Wars, a new
blockbuster mentality emerged in Hollywood.
Plus, politically there was a return to a more conservative America, and
consequently more conservative films.
Due to these factors, and a number of
others, Hollywood budgets grew in the eighties making it more difficult to
produce commercially risky, artistic cinema in Hollywood. Studios were simply unwilling to give
emerging filmmakers who were more artistically-minded their big break.
Therefore, the young, more
artistically-minded filmmakers were frustrated with the opportunities that were
available to them in Hollywood and began to make films outside the system. Meanwhile, film festivals, such as Sundance
in Utah, began sprouting up across America to help get the word out about these
emerging voices. And soon by the end of
the eighties, a whole new sector of American cinema had emerged, that of
independent film.
Hollywood of course is a business so any
trend you see at any given time can be traced back to the economics of the
situation. Home video was booming in the
early eighties and was of great assistance to this high point of independent
film. Video stores were opening all over
the world and desperately needed product to fill their shelves. And so if you made a film, you were assured of
a decent amount of revenue just in video sales.
This was the landscape of American
cinema when the Coen Brothers emerged on the scene in 1984 with their first
film, Blood Simple. The Coen
Brothers financed Blood Simple by making a trailer of the film they
hoped to direct and then set up meetings with potential investors where they
would show them the trailer with a 16mm projector. Fortunately for The Coen Brothers, Blood
Simple was enough of a success to launch their career which continues
nearly 40 years later. The formula for
continuing to have a career as an independent is your films must make
money. I would argue that the most
commercially successful Coen brother films have always been the ones that best
merged commercial and artistic aspects into something that could cross over to
multiple audiences. To date, the Coen
Brothers have made 18 films and the focus of today’s discussion Fargo was
their sixth.
So back to how I started.
Is Fargo an independent film?
Polygram and Working Title Films produced it and Gramercy distributed it,
all three of which had ties to Universal.
So on one hand, Fargo was not an independent. However, in terms of the other definition,
that independent film usually runs counter to Hollywood, has an alternative
spirit and approach, I would argue that Fargo is an independent through
and through.
Sydney Pollack, who directed movies such as Three Days of
the Condor, Jeremiah Johnson and Tootsie, once said the
following in trying to define independents:
“Independent usually meant anything that was an alternative
to recipe films or mainstream films made by studios. They were anything Hollywood was not. If Hollywood made ‘movies’, indies made
‘films’. If Hollywood sold fantasy and
escapism, indies thrived on realism and engagement. If Hollywood avoided controversial subjects,
indies embraced them. If Hollywood
movies were expensive, indie films were cheap.
If Hollywood used stars, indies preferred unknowns, even nonactors. If Hollywood retained final cut, indies
demanded it for themselves. If Hollywood
strip-mined genres and dropped movies out of cookie cutters, indie films
expressed personal visions and were therefore unique and sequel-proof. If Hollywood made movies by committee, indies
were made by individual sensibilities who wrote as well as directed, and
sometimes shot and edited as well. While
Hollywood employed directors, hired to do a job, indies were filmmakers who
worshipped at the altar of art. While
directors accumulated BMWs and homes in Malibu, filmmakers made unimaginable
sacrifices and lived in New York, preferably on the Lower East Side. They scammed and hustled, lied and cheated,
even sold drugs or their own blood, to finance their films…Hollywood favored
spectacle, action, and special effects, while indies worked on a more intimate
scale, privileging script and emphasizing character and mise-en-scene.”
I think after the above definition it’s pretty obvious how Fargo
feels like an independent film. But
just to mention a few things that set it apart from most Hollywood films of the
nineties, I would list:
- The
fact that it’s shot outside of Hollywood and mostly in actual locations, rather
than inside a studio with constructed sets
- The
fact that we don’t meet the lead female actor until after more than thirty
minutes into the movie
- The
sheer excess of profanity, violence, and nudity
- The
random scene with Mike Yanagita that services the plot little to not at all
- And
the lack of known actors or glamorous faces
After the next round of trivia, I will come back and talk
about the role of repetition in design and show how it is an essential artistic
strategy in Fargo that helps the film achieve its cinematic rhythm and
coherence.
