Jason J Hedrick
The American cinema of the early ’90s will always be synonymous with a new breed of independent filmmakers, pushing against the excess and expense of the ’80s with comparatively small budgets and often off-kilter approaches to genres past. Richard Linklater ushers in a whole new generational label with his non-narrative experiment Slacker, shot in 1989 for $23,000 and released in 1990. The next year Robert Rodriguez astonishes everyone with his resourcefulness by making El Mariachi for a gob smacking $7,225. The Sundance Film Festival becomes the foremost factory for some quite notable careers, producing multiple films in the million-dollar range typically associated with the era: Stephen Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, and Charles Burnett’s To Sleep With Anger. And, for budgets half that size, similarly implacable classics like Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning, Todd Haynes’ Poison, and Steve James’ Hoop Dreams.
There’s been a lot of mythologizing of the era by filmmakers and critics, a zealous nostalgia by those who witnessed the cinematic shift in real time, and a continuing reassessment of the era by new generations of cinephiles and critics. It’s a period of movie history that echoes the tactics of “new wave” movements throughout Europe that blossomed in the late ’50s, bled into the resurgence of the new American cinema ethos in the late ’60s, and by the mid-’70s fully transformed into one of the most compelling and uncompromising decades for auteur cinema.
And then the ’80s happened. And, of course, there were a lot of great films made in that decade. Robocop, for instance. Wings of Desire. And a few others. But, to paraphrase the great screenwriter Robert Towne, the ’80s was an era that tended to follow the marketing lessons of unprecedented blockbusters like Jaws to a fault.
The “Indy Era” of the early ’90s marked yet another period whose economics and aesthetics pushed hard against the previous era. While the early ’90s ran on a very nouvelle-vague attitude that wrested power from taking camera in hand and ignoring an industry who acted as if they had any access to production locked up in their studios, its filmmakers differed in how they experimented with form, diversified cultural perspectives, and embraced the transgressive. Of course, the impulse to chalk any era up to a definitional, consistent set of qualities is always a fool’s errand. For many it’s remembered as being dominated by a fairly bro-y cohort initially characterized by the aforementioned Linklater, Soderbergh, Tarantino, Rodriquez, and later adding the likes of Kevin Smith and Paul Thomas Anderson. But across those filmmakers, there’s a lot of distance between, say, something like Stephen Soderbergh’s bonkers Schizopolis and Paul Thomas Anderson’s character-based debut Hard Eight. And there’s and even greater distance between those directors and some that are too frequently left out of the discussion about how drastically the new independents altered movie culture: Hal Hartley, Julie Dash, Nina Menkes, Caveh Zahedi, Allison Anders, Cheryl Dunye, Tom Kalin, Philip Ridley, Beth B., Nick Gomez, Everett Lewis, Alexandre Rockwell, and Nancy Savoca, to name a mere handful.
For those who want to dig into the bygone and heavily mythologized period of the early ’90s a bit deeper, here are a few films that get a little less play but will definitely broaden your perspective on the kind of creative freedom and impulse that characterized the era. Some of these are risky in retrospect, some a bit bizarre, and some downright groundbreaking. Some were darlings at the time and have simply fallen out of the conversation since then, and some have always been a bit too far out of the limelight. Of course, in some cases, there’s good reason for a film being edged out of the cultural and critical frame, and I certainly re-assessed a few in my research for this piece that fell into that category (or trash heap, if you prefer—see The Linguini Incident…or don’t). I kept this short list of overlooked favorites mostly domestic, so the likes of Juenet and Caro, Wong Kar-Wai, Bela Tarr, Leos Carax, Milcho Manchevski, Tom Tykwer, Emir Kusturica, and all the films that usher in the aggressively independent “Dogme ‘95” era will have to wait for another list. In the meantime, here are five unique gems from the early ’90s that are worth another look:
Trust
Director Hal Hartley is one of the strongest catalysts for this list, and even though Trust is a favorite and a good starting point for the uninitiated, this is more of a blanket recommendation for his whole body of work. I would especially recommend all the films through 1997’s Henry Fool, one of his absolute best, featuring the remarkable ensemble of Thomas Jay Ryan, Parker Posey, and James Urbaniak. Henry Fool truly seemed like a significant plateau in Hartley’s career, spawning the sequels Fay Grimm (2006) and Ned Rifle (2014). But Trust marked a similar plateau for Hartley in the early 90’s, establishing his style in a way that had mostly been honed through short films and a couple of quickly produced, low budget features.
Trust is a film that reinterprets the romance and teen films of the 1980s—think the Pretty in Pink or Some Kind of Wonderful period of John Hughes. Hartley even had a counterpart red-headed muse to Mollie Ringwald in Adrienne Shelly, an actor who was the impetus for Hartley diving quickly into production on Trust. Shelly is worth noting for her unforgettable work over a few Hartley films, as well as her own directorial body of work that grew out of this period, tragically ended when she was murdered after directing her small classic Waitress (2007), which spawned the highly successful musical of the same name.
In Trust, Shelly stars opposite another great, unsung actor of the ’90s and Hartley regular Martin Donovan. Together they craft an odd romantic duo pushed together after Shelly’s character Maria is kicked out of her house for being pregnant and then taken into the equally rocky and unaccepting home life of Donovan’s character Matthew. The film feels like Hartley catching lightning in a bottle via the performances of the two leads and a shooting schedule that was reportedly only 11 days. It features the highly specific Hartley look and sound, which is an odd mash-up of screwball era quickness and directness in the dialogue, and the comical blocking of some early Godard movies. The film was edited by Nick Gomez, who will show up as a director later in this list.
The Reflecting Skin
Young Jeremy Cooper as Seth Dove is the perfect model of the “sinister child” that reoccurs throughout horror film history. His black bowl haircut and cold gaze are as indelible as any creepy child actor, from The Omen to the Orphan. But while creepy kids are a dime a dozen, few films have the aesthetic design and detail of Philip Ridley’s 1990 debut The Reflecting Skin. And here’s the twist: it may not even be a horror movie.
The early ’90s was a fertile time for films that stretched the definitions of horror, and often the limitations of independent productions lent themselves well to experimenting with the genre. The Reflecting Skin features the most unforgettably horrific opening sequence involving children doing unspeakable things to a frog, and then continues to be entirely unsettling throughout. Yet, this utterly strange and menacing film never seems to be following any template for the cinematic horror that came before. Yes, there’s a sinful child. And, yes, there are possible vampires. But the story that unfolds in The Reflecting Skin from there feels more under the influence of David Lynch than your typical horror tropes, especially in the traumatized and hallucinatory relationship Seth develops with a haggard fetus/angel, which feels like an homage to the baby in Eraserhead. Films behaving in a “Lynchian” manner is largely unavoidable when assessing this period (or any period since, really), often as much an insult or reduction as a compliment, but Ridley is no mere copycat, and his visual style feels fully formed out of the gate.
The most recognizable actor in The Reflecting Skin is no doubt Viggo Mortensen, and the film feels like his first major role, and a stepping stone to his next role in Sean Penn’s excellent directorial debut, The Indian Runner (1991). Mortensen plays the older Dove brother returned from the war, ultimately seduced by the Dove’s widow neighbor/possible vampire, Dolphin Blue (Lindsay Duncan in a role Tilda Swinton couldn’t have made more perfectly traumatized and alien). The way Mortensen’s character perfectly mirrors young Seth visually compounds the dire message Dolphin ultimately departs to Seth’s character: “The nightmare of childhood. It only gets worse.” The finale is one that embraces horror through an uncompromisingly huge swing at melodrama, especially for such a modestly budgeted film. Ridley’s insistence on design feels almost like a graphic novel, in the best sense, with the rustic farmhouses rising like stranded vessels from the unnaturally yellow fields of Idaho wheat. The Reflecting Skin is as visually sumptuous as it is thematically dark. The world we see is entirely through the eyes of a child, and there may be nothing scarier than that.
Daughters of the Dust
Julie Dash’s historical tale of Gullah culture in the early 1900s focuses on the Peazant clan of Ibo Landing, located on a Georgia coastal island where they maintained African folkways in a liminal cultural space. It’s a film that feels simultaneously like a truthful piece of history and a highly aestheticized—at times almost dance-like—piece of impressionistic art. The central tension in the film involves the modern and Americanized Viola Peazant (Cheryl Lynn Bruce) returning to Ibo Landing as the sprawling family debates moving north and away from their coastal roots, with Nana Peazant (Cora Lee Day) as the most rooted of the family, declaring in a way that establishes the film’s poetic tone:
I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. I am the barren one and many are my daughters. I am the silence that you cannot understand. I am the utterance of my name.
But to describe Daughters of the Dust in narrative or historical terms doesn’t quite do justice to the experience of the film. Dash and cinematographer Arthur Jaffe (who she was also married to at the time, and who would go on to shoot Spike Lee’s Crooklyn a few years later) create a swirling, theatrical experience that uses the natural landscapes of the islands as their stage. The score composed by John Barnes is integral to the gorgeous movement and editing of the film, and while some of the instrumentation may have a distinctly late’ 80s/early ’90s feel, it’s so fully realized that it escapes feeling dated. Through her meticulous and lush sense of music and movement, what Dash manages takes on the tone of myth constructed of slow-motion washes and dropped frame rates. It has a kinetic energy that feels fused to the poetic and theatrical language of the project, aided by the significant art and production design by Kerry James Marshall and Michael Kelly Williams.
Upon release in the early ’90s Daughters of the Dust looked nothing like what most people associated with independent films of that time. But then again, the film is still so singular that it looks like little else today. It is a crucial work for anyone interested in the history of matriarchal black culture. I still remember the feeling upon first seeing it of witnessing something that had seemed entirely invisible up until that point. Not just a film with style, but a film with the power to reveal the unseen. It received some play around the release of Beyonce’s visual album, Lemonade, which borrowed some of the film’s look, but Daughters of the Dust still feels underseen when it comes to films of the ’90s independent era.
Laws of Gravity
One of the most unfairly underappreciated independent dramas of this period has to be Nick Gomez’s tale of small-time Brooklyn crooks, Laws of Gravity. As the title suggests, the film depicts an inevitable crash brought on by the duo of Jimmy (Peter Greene) and Jonny (Adam Trese), two hustling hoods whose dwindling loyalty to one another tends to bring everyone down with them. Greene and Trese are both remarkable in their debut performances here. In fact, the overall strength of the ensemble cast in Laws of Gravity is superb, especially in light of a lot of first-time filmmakers in this period who maybe didn’t have as strong a grasp on directing actors. Gomez has not a weak link in this cast, including the great Paul Schulze and Edie Falco, both of whom had previously worked on Hal Hartley films (Falco is great as Adrienne Shelley’s sister in Trust, actually), and would go on to act together in the TV show Nurse Jackie.
When it comes to Gomez, the crossover links to be made with directors and actors, particularly when it comes to the significant influence he had through the TV he went on to direct (Homicide: Life on the Streets, The Sopranos, The Shield, etc.) is endless. Laws of Gravity is also his film debut as a director, and comes off as unadorned in technique compared to other directors of the time. Gomez established a bare-bones, unflashy style that was unrelenting in its focus on the action and performances. He seemingly takes a bit of that focus from those who came before, like Cassavetes, and sets the stage for the spiraling, claustrophobic style filmmakers like the Safdie Brothers.
In reviewing films for this piece, there’s a recurring theme of reconfiguring genre tropes (as with Hartley and Ridley) or fusing theatrical elements with the cinematic (as with Julie Dash and the next film on the list), but Gomez’s Laws of Gravity stands out as a pioneer of the new psychological realism that would increasingly move toward smaller cameras and a hand-held, intimate approach. Again, because of the strength of his cast, the extent to which we invest in the characters brings an earned weight to the drama, even with a title that cues us to the inevitable crash.
Two Small Bodies
Finally, here’s an underseen pick that will no doubt divide audiences a bit. I’m fascinated by films from the early ’90s that engage in a sort of transgression that has gone somewhat out of style, at best, and been declared dead, at worst. Two Small Bodies, directed by Beth B. who came out of the New York “No-Wave” and performance art scene of the 80’s probably received the most notoriety adapting this darkly absurdist two-hander from the play of the same name by Neal Bell. Like any good theatre adaptation, the film doesn’t play like filmed theater but makes a strong cinematic case for itself. It’s an increasingly absurd tale built around a series of interrogations and encounters between a woman (Suzi Amis) who may have murdered her missing children and the investigating misogynist dick assigned to the case (Fred Ward).
To be sure, this one’s not for everyone. It’s one of those mysteries where experimenting with the tropes of noir eclipses the waning reality of the mystery itself. The interplay of Amis and Ward becomes increasingly depraved and revealing, and the sensibilities of Beth B. and Neal embrace the dark sexuality of the characters in a way that will feel out of time to some, but for others will play like a welcome antidote to an era that would rather bristle at the lack of a moral center. Two Small Bodies is perfect for those wanting to recapture something like the energy around the Chicago theater scene of the ’80s and ’90s, from the more experimental plays of Sam Shepard to Tracy Lett’s Bug or Killer Joe. It’s a film that mesmerizes through repetition and ultimately leaves you feeling like you just woke up from dreaming the darkest of film noirs.
