We'll never know what marketing genius first coined the term "independent film" -- although '80s indie impresario John Pierson can surely take credit for popularizing it -- but it dates back more than 20 years, to the period when Hollywood became dominated by blockbuster mania in the wake of "Jaws" and the movie now known as "Star Wars: Episode IV."

At first it was a label used to sell such divergent anti-Hollywood fare as Jim Jarmusch's "Stranger Than Paradise," Wayne Wang's "Chan Is Missing" and Alex Cox's "Repo Man." From the outset, indie had something of the flavor of punk rock, albeit a more inclusive, multi-culti punk that welcomed racial and ethnic minorities, sexual revolutionaries, and self-appointed weirdos of all stripes.

The succeeding decades have brought us two or three major waves of indie cinema and any number of smaller micro-phenomena. There was the African-American explosion that began in the late '80s, sparked by Spike Lee's "She's Gotta Have It." There was the new queer cinema of the early '90s, which has arguably percolated upward all the way to the multiplexes -- first with Kimberly Peirce's gripping "Boys Don't Cry" in 1999 and then with Todd Haynes' wonderful "Far From Heaven" this year. Female directors like Allison Anders, Nancy Savoca, Julie Dash and Nicole Holofcener began to change the boys'-club atmosphere of filmmaking. (Although there's still a long way to go.)

Inevitably, some of these directors working way outside the Hollywood system started to make hits -- and Hollywood wanted them back. Kevin Smith made "Clerks"; Richard Linklater made "Slacker" and "Dazed and Confused." And, of course, Quentin Tarantino made "Reservoir Dogs" and then "Pulp Fiction." Immediately after Tarantino's multi-Oscar pileup in 1994, people inside and outside the biz started to say that indie film was doomed. Now that the studios could see that the hip cachet of indieness was worth something, the thinking went, snarky pseudo-Tarantino hipness would be cloned and die-stamped like widgets in a Shanghai widget plant.

Well, that was pretty much true. (See, for example, the entire career of Guy Ritchie. Or rather don't.) But once all the imitation indies featuring jokey gangsters had been cleared off the stage -- along with the pretense that "Shakespeare in Love" was something more than customary Hollywood fluff -- we were left with a changed international film market, one where offbeat, pop-fueled delights like "Trainspotting" (a precursor to the next-gen indies) could become big hits. If Jarmusch and David Lynch are the Old Testament prophets of the new indie-film universe, Tarantino is its messiah and "Pulp Fiction" is its gospel, to be emulated but never imitated. Fans, critics and filmmakers alike, we're all Quentin's kids now.

We hope you enjoy Salon's new Indie Film page. Please let us know what you think.

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