As the financial threshold for filmmaking lowers, the variety of films being made increases. Indie filmmakers are having a blast, experimenting with style and content in ways that enable them to make signature moves and even invent new genres. One such genre is "mumblecore," which amounts to a millennial version of the slacker film. "Specimens of the genre share a low-key naturalism, low-fi production values and a stream of low-volume chatter often perceived as ineloquence," the New York Times notes;
More a loose collective or even a state of mind than an actual aesthetic movement, mumblecore concerns itself with the mundane vacillations of postcollegiate existence. It can seem like these movies, which star nonprofessional actors and feature quasi-improvised dialogue, seldom deal with matters more pressing than whether to return a phone call. ...But what these films understand all too well is that the tentative drift of the in-between years masks quietly seismic shifts that are apparent only in hindsight. Mumblecore narratives hinge less on plot points than on the tipping points in interpersonal relationships. A favorite setting is the party that goes subtly but disastrously astray. Events are often set in motion by an impulsive, ill-judged act of intimacy.
Artists who mine life’s minutiae are by no means new, but mumblecore bespeaks a true 21st-century sensibility, reflective of MySpace-like social networks and the voyeurism and intimacy of YouTube. It also signals a paradigm shift in how movies are made and how they find an audience. “This is the first time, mostly because of technology, that someone like me can go out and make a film with no money and no connections,” said Aaron Katz, whose movies “Dance Party USA” and “Quiet City” will be shown as part of a 10-film mumblecore series at the IFC Center that begins Wednesday and continues through Sept. 4.
Mumblecore's immediate roots may lie in the narcissistic immediacy of MySpace and the analysis of post-collegiate aimlessness first plumbed in such films as Ben Stiller's Reality Bites, but it also has a more distant ancestry in the drawing room dramas perfected by nineteenth-century novelists such as Jane Austen and Edith Wharton. The novel of manners was the first major narrative genre to concentrate on the enormous emotional weight of human relational minutiae, and the mumblecore film about parties going wrong may well be said to owe a substantial, if unacknowledged, debt to the masterful limning of social gamesmanship offered in such works as Pride and Prejudice and House of Mirth. Austen and Wharton were mean critics of their world, aware of how brutal, petty, and solipsistic largely inactive, privileged lives can be, and yet able to portray sympathetically the struggles of those who lived such lives.
And as such, they are an unlikely but rich source for mumblecore's practitioners.