In 2009, while Lynn Shelton's third feature Humpday was touring the US festival circuit, an interview appeared in The New York Times with the headline ‘She's a Director Who's Just Another Dude’ (Orange 2009). Like Shelton's previous feature My Effortless Brilliance (2008), Humpday features two male friends tensely reuniting a decade or so after college. The later film is distinguished by its specifically high concept premise, though, where the men attempt to counter their respective anomie by proposing to have sex with each other on camera – in an ‘art project’ destined for Seattle's famous amateur porn festival HUMP! The New York Times piece went to some lengths to detail the complex themes that ground this arresting plot. But the enduring effect of the article is the way its headline captures just one sentiment: the comment from Humpday performer and mumblecore regular Mark Duplass that the success of its improvised style was enabled by Shelton's ‘greater affinity for men’. ‘You know those girls that are closer with dudes, in general?’ he posed, ‘She's got a bit of that going on, so obviously that plays into it’. Duplass's remark – and its take-up in the article's headline – is striking for its causal summary of a position that is central to indie discourse: namely, that the visibility and success of female directors in the sphere of independent filmmaking depends upon their capacity to align with a sensibility and brand that has been gendered as masculine. In this chapter I will examine how the niche indie mode of mumblecore has been constructed in this way, and can subsequently be understood as a form of what Stella Bruzzi has called ‘men's cinema’. I will then consider how the work of some of the women whose work is linked to the mode – namely, Shelton, So Yong Kim and Desiree Akhavan – ‘reframe’ the broad parameters of mumblecore syntactics to open up to feminist, queer and racial perspectives in their content and style.

MUMBLECORE AS MEN's CINEMA

Mumblecore was the first bona fide ‘subgenre’ of the post–1989 Indiewood era. As the high period of the production and discourse on these ultra lowbudget, largely improvised, self-consciously ‘amateur’ films occurred between roughly 2005 and 2010, the films and practitioners associated with this mode form a point of transition between the first ‘Sundance-Miramax’ generation and the practical and discursive changes that digital technologies have enabled in the subsequent period.