Bonnie & Clyde and Current Cinema: Does the Audience Know What an Independent Film Is?
the following essay, is a small section of my book “Moving Images: Film History”.
Between 1967 and 1969, while the truly independent American director Martin Scorsese worked on editing the Woodstock documentary (a project he would eventually be removed from due to possessiveness in the editing room), Arthur Penn released—and relished in the impact of—his 1967 masterpiece, Bonnie and Clyde.
However, the story begins a few years earlier. While studying filmmaking at NYU, Martin Scorsese honestly did not have much going for him financially. Like many of his contemporaries, he began emulating the pictures coming out of Europe, particularly François Truffaut’s Jules and Jim and Federico Fellini’s 8½. Both would greatly inspire his NYU short It’s Not Just You, Murray. The young Catholic seminarian was so immersed in the overwhelming wave of anarchism found in rock music and the idiosyncratic European pictures of the period that he even found himself participating in the popular debates of the day over which film was superior: La Dolce Vita or L’Avventura. At the time, Scorsese sided with La Dolce Vita. Later in life, however, he admitted that L’Avventura was the greater picture.
While Scorsese remained immersed in this cultural revolution alongside others of his generation, the upcoming wave of American film students became fascinated with the European edge that had overtaken New York, largely unaware that Europe itself had begun developing an affinity for American mythologies found in the works of Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock. Haskell Wexler once remarked that American cinema had become artistically stagnant compared to Europe, yet had one actually gone to France in 1965, they would have found that many French critics already viewed the French New Wave as a movement that had reached its natural conclusion.
Truffaut, in particular, through his work at Cahiers du Cinéma, made his admiration for American genre filmmaking unmistakable, often pushing past his own insecurities over speaking English to communicate with his American counterparts. He was also a close friend of Arthur Penn, who had returned to the theatre after his tumultuous replacement on The Train (1964). John Frankenheimer—whom Truffaut reportedly regarded as highly susceptible to studio influence—had taken Penn’s place after Burt Lancaster insisted upon a replacement in hopes of delivering a commercial success following disappointing European releases.
All of this is to say that Bonnie and Clyde was a byproduct of circumstance.
Its writers, David Newman and Robert Benton, found themselves reminding audiences of the mythos surrounding Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow because, by the mid-1960s, few people held any particular cultural attachment to them. Though their names remained part of American vernacular, Newman and Benton believed the rebellious couple from the 1930s could be reinvented for the hippie generation. After countless writing sessions—which, importantly, never produced what either writer would have considered a formal screenplay, as neither actually knew what a screenplay was supposed to look like—they sought out Truffaut, eventually ending up with Arthur Penn, as though fate had intended it all along.
You see, Bonnie and Clyde was genuinely provocative for its time. Its direct treatment of violence struck many audiences as almost un-American. Because the Production Code had long dictated the limits of violence and sexuality on screen, Bonnie and Clyde became one of the first American films in which violence itself became the point, forcing audiences to confront its brutality through lingering close-ups rather than sanitized suggestion.
Its brushstrokes of realism, combined with its loose, free-flowing structure, communicated the daring confidence of inexperience. Bonnie and Clyde are in love, and through that love they construct their own family. Alongside the beauty and extraordinary performance of Faye Dunaway—arguably the finest performance in the film—the distinct Gene Hackman, whose effortless talent feels almost impossible to replicate today, and Warren Beatty, then desperately seeking legitimacy as a producer, committed themselves entirely to an idiosyncratic vision.
This was a modestly budgeted period piece that seemed destined to fail: written by people who did not know what a screenplay looked like, directed by self-proclaimed failures and outsiders, and created by artists whose greatest hope was simply that the picture might earn back its cost amidst a culture undergoing rapid transformation as part of a broader international movement.
Which brings us to today.
Movies adapted from or based upon YouTube material have begun reaching cinemas, prompting many comparisons to the period that gave birth to Bonnie and Clyde. Many people unfamiliar with what truly constitutes an independent film assume these productions somehow embody the same spirit simply because they operate with comparatively smaller budgets.
This is perhaps the greatest misunderstanding surrounding independent—or anti-studio—cinema.
A film does not become independent merely because it costs less to produce. A motion picture can have a modest budget while still existing almost entirely to satisfy established commercial conventions, serving the economic interests of financiers, agencies, and internet personalities attempting to reproduce the success they have already achieved online.
Films such as The Backrooms and Obsessions have deliberately been marketed as carrying an “indie spirit” by many of the same corporate structures whose creative dominance Bonnie and Clyde fundamentally disrupted. Penn’s film created an environment in which the studios genuinely no longer understood what audiences wanted. It emerged from a worldwide artistic dialogue between American filmmakers and European cinema that sought to move audiences away from predictability.
Today’s attempts to market internet-derived projects as authentic alternatives often amount to little more than calculated efforts to capitalize on younger audiences without abandoning the comforting machinery of the studio system.
While Bonnie and Clyde became one of the final nails in the coffin of the old Hollywood studio era, it was hardly embraced by those studios. They did not want it. They did not expect it to succeed. Yet following the intellectual revolution ignited years earlier by Cahiers du Cinéma and critics inspired by André Bazin, the film exploded like a Big Bang for what remains the greatest era of independent American filmmaking.
It became a period in which critics looked backward to redefine the future, in which studios admitted they no longer understood their audiences, and in which audiences themselves no longer knew what they wanted until filmmakers showed them. People from every background, from every corner of the world, made films that studios often considered irresponsible, offensive, or commercially impossible, even while distributing them. Cinema fragmented into countless voices, niches, identities, and artistic ambitions. The sheer variety, freedom, and creative disorder of that era cannot honestly be compared to another internet cash-in produced by already wealthy influencers and marketed through the hollow promise that “you could be next.”
These productions are products of complacency—another stage in capitalism’s endless ability to repackage rebellion as commerce. In five years they will feel as manufactured and as phony as every trend that preceded them.
Yet I still long for a time when inexperienced people were simply allowed to make pictures because they did not yet know they were expected to pander in order to succeed.
