The Sundance Film Festival, America's largest and arguably most influential showcase for independent movies, has just wrapped up its twenty-fifth, or thirtieth or eighteenth, installment, depending on who's counting. The earliest version of Sundance, the Utah/US Film Festival, was first held in Salt Lake City in September of 1978. From the start, it reflected the taste and interests of its celebrity mascot Robert Redford, the festival's inaugural chairman; the first awards jury included Redford's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid co-star Katharine Ross, who was already at a point in her career where she must have been grateful for the work. In 1981, the festival moved to Park City, where the annual date would eventually be shifted to January to take advantage of the attractions of the ski resort there. As far as Sundance is concerned, "Sundance" began in 1985, when management of the then-struggling festival was taken over by Redford's Sundance Institute, which he ran with festival co-founder Sterling Van Wagenen. By the time the Festival had its biggest, buzziest hit to date with Steven Soderbergh's 1989 sex, lies, and videotape, insiders were routinely referring to it as the Sundance Film Festival, though the name wouldn't officially change until 1991.

sex, lies, and videotape, followed by the likes of Reservoir Dogs, Clerks, Hoop Dreams, and other films, would establish Sundance as a major way station for the films and filmmakers that would define the American indie movie scene in the 1990s. Today the festival is one port of call among many for new moviemakers looking to get some attention, but it remains the recognized big daddy of indie festivals, inspiring all the respect and resentment that label implies. Anyone looking to get a sense of the shape of movie fashions since the mid-1980s could do worse than to examine a list of all the movies that have been rewarded with prizes and press attention after playing Sundance. And, it goes without saying, that history includes some wrong turns.

STACKING (1987): Never one of the best-known of all Sundance entries and now one of the most thoroughly forgotten, Stacking is of interest only for the degree to which it sums up everything that was typical, and typically unappealing, about "indie film" before Soderbergh and company stormed the castle. Back then, it wasn't called independent filmmaking but "regional cinema", and wiseguys had another name for it: granola movies. The regions depicted in regional cinema tended to be those that were said to represent the American heartland, and which could be faked on location in Canada. They tend to feature stock characters--the stolid farmer trying to hang onto his land in the face of changing times, the bored wife wondering where her frisky youth frisked off to, the confused teenager with potential literary gifts, the sexy stranger who's just passin' through--who are often played by good actors earning cinematic karma points. (The cast of Stacking, for instance, includes Christine Lahti, Frederic Forrest, Peter Coyote, James Gammon, and Jason Gedrick.) The reigning master of granola cinema is Victor Nunez, a Sundance perennial fixture who helped launch Ashley Judd's career with the 1993 Ruby in Paradise and Peter Fonda's comeback with the 1997 Ulee's Gold, though his own career, and granola cinema in general, may be best summed up by the title of his early feature, Gal Young 'Un.

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See the trailer for the movie the studios loved so much they held on to it for three years, because they didn't want to share the awesomeness!

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We knew this day would come.  We knew that eventually, we were going to have to address the man who is arguably almost as famous for his game-changing approach to soundtracks as for the actual movies he directs.  Quentin Tarantino, like a lot of smart-ass culture vultures of his generation, is a pop-cult omnivore, as well-versed in music as he is in literature, film, television, and fashion, and it should come as no surprise that in his greatest accomplishement as a director, 1994's Pulp Fiction, he brought his encyclopedic knowledge of pop music to bear on the soundtrack with a geek's precision and an auteur's passion.  Tarantino's instincts as a music director proved as profitable to Sony Music as his instincts as a filmmaker did to Miramax:  the movie was a huge success, and the soundtrack went platinum almost immediately after its release.  Selling over a million and a half units in its first year, it was one of the most popular soundtracks of the decade, and not only launched one career (that of Urge Overkill, the Chicago band who covered "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon" on the album) but revived two more (those of Kool & the Gang and Dick Dale, who enjoyed a popular resurgence after two of their best-known songs were featured in the film).

The curious alchemy that took place when Tarantino put the soundtrack together -- and it is no exaggeration to call him the creator of the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, as he personally selected every single track, often building entire scenes around a piece of music he felt would be appropriate -- has become characteristic of his films, and has led to his reputation as a director who has an uncanny ability to match up visual and musical elements in his films.  And yet, many of his detractors -- and, for that matter, a number of his supporters -- are quick to point out that the story of music in Tarantino's films is one of missed opportunities, and a triumph of metareference over originality.  After all, in his soundtracks no less than in his movies themselves, Quentin Tarantino is a pastiche artist.  A filmmaker of his caliber is perfectly capable of doing what Jim Jarmusch, another director with a reputation for crafting stellar soundtracks, does:  use a few existing pieces of music as ringers, and then commission an original score that conjures its own mood and moment, rather than relying on the emotions generated by preexisting songs to create impact.  Just as his films constantly serve as a sort of postmodernist irritant, a nagging little voice saying, hey, do you remember this?  Do you get what I'm referencing here?, his film music can be viewed as little more than a catalog of referents, a mixtape to the last half-century of junk culture that's designed not so much the create a thrilling film experience so much as remind you of a thrilling film experience you've already had.

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Joachim Trier's debut film Reprise centers on a pair of twentysomething best friends who drop their debut novels into the same mailbox to varied results. It's taken the writer/director on a very interesting journey. The film won Trier a Discovery Award at the 2006 Toronto Film Festival; it debuted in the States at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, and was later the featured film in the 2007 New Directors/New Films series, where Manohla Dargis of the New York Times declared it "one of the most passionately and intellectually uninhibited works from a young director I've seen in ages." It also went on to win Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Film at the Amanda Awards in Norway (the equivalent of an Oscar) in 2007. But only after support from superproducer Scott Rudin and Miramax will the film get a general release in American theaters today. Reprise is vibrant, inventive and original in both its ideas and its form, and is sure to be at the top of my own year-end list. — Bryan Whitefield

Foreign-language films typically have a hard time in America, and I remember someone at the MoMA screening asking if you had considered writing an English language version of Reprise. . .
[laughs] I've had offers, actually. But to me Reprise is perfect as it is now in its cultural setting. I'm interested in detail, and not because I'm trying to hone in on one particular part of the audience. You try to see things as they are — these are people who are living like that and have shoes like that and listen to music like this and this is the world where they live. You work to create it and you don't ask questions. To recreate that somewhere else would be absurd. But at the same time, some people were telling me, "This film reminds me so much of people I know on the Lower East Side." I get this even in Turkey. There were people there that were coming up to me to say, "We have boys like that in Istanbul that listen to Joy Division and everything."

You use some interesting formal devices in the film. . .

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New Line Cinema only recently settled a lawsuit filed by Peter Jackson, director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, that was supposed to clear things up between the studio and the filmmaker and open the way to production on Jackson's version of The Hobbit. Now the studio has been hit by a suit by heirs of J. R. R. Tolkien and a group of publishers who are looking to tap the studio for millions. Also waiting for their day in court: the Saul Zaentz Company, which once upon a time owned the film rights to Tolkien's work--they sold them to Miramax, which in turn sold them to New Line, and which has already had its own complicated round of legal action with New Line — and "sixteen New Zealand actors who appear in supporting parts in the films, who last year charged New Line with bilking them of a share in an estimated $100 million profit from the sale of video games, caps and other film-related merchandise." As The New York Times reports, "the trilogy may be turning into the first true cinematic 'franchise' for local legal representatives. The lawsuits, to some extent, have fed one another, and are providing a feast for those who bill by the hour."

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