Abstract\ud
\ud
Following from Sconce’s “Irony, nihilism, and the new American ‘smart’ film”, describing an American school of filmmaking that “survives (and at times thrives) at the symbolic and material intersection of ‘Hollywood’, the ‘indie’ scene and the vestiges of what cinephiles used to call ‘art films’” (Sconce, 2002, 351), I seek to link industrial and textual studies in order to explore Smart cinema as a transgeneric mode. I categorise it as a grouping of films which may have different formal characteristics, but are linked by industrial origins and production contexts, and through their use of genre, as Smart cinema embeds more challenging arthouse or cult tendencies in a framework of variable generic familiarity or accessibility. Individual texts contain thematic, stylistic and structural elements which can be positioned at, and interpreted along, loci on a continuum from mainstream to independent.\ud
\ud
This is achieved through a process of “double coding” (King, 2009), which King relates to Bourdieu’s ideas of habitus and distinction, but which I expand to include utilising textual attributes to create simultaneous calls to action to multiple audiences, along a continuum from ‘indie’ to ‘mainstream’, often in a manner that obscures their industrial positioning. Double coding works to simultaneously cultivate mainstream-resistant audiences, actively positioning texts as distanced from the industrial circumstances which produced them, and to accrue cultural capital for producers. Crucially, Smart attempts to combine the potentially transgressive, ‘cool’ underground appeal of cult cinema with echoes of high culture and artistic status which comes more directly from the arthouse tradition, and is therefore embedded within what James English calls ‘the economy of prestige’. (English, 2009)\ud
\ud
Rather than a generational outcropping, or intrusion of independent cinema into the mainstream, Smart cinema demonstrates product differentiation within the context of horizontal integration: studios making strategic interventions into what would previously have been seen as ‘indie cinema territory’. While encouraging framing within an auterist model, and by utilising – or fetishizing – what we might casually consider ‘indie style,’ Hollywood studios extended their reach beyond the mass market by co-opting notions such as ‘independence’, ‘cult’, ‘authenticity’, and ‘prestige’