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Introduction
Since nearly all of us are acculturated to expect certain types of experiences in movie theaters and on television, one of the valuable functions of the multifaceted independent cinema that has developed alongside the popular cinema during most of its history is to challenge our expectations. When we see a film that surprises or shocks us, we are forced to question the implicit assumptions about cinema our expectations encode. Of course, this process is inevitable within any area of film history. Even in the standard genres of commercial film, viewers are inevitably comparing each new instance of horror film, Western, and suspense thriller with previous instances and with the sense of the genre's history they have developed. What gives some forms, and some particular instances, of independent film their "critical" edge is the
extent
to which they force us to question our psychological/social/political investment in the conventional. A new instance of a horror film usually confronts, at most, a limited number of the expectations we bring to the genrethe way in which characters are developed or plots resolved, or the type of special effects used, or the overall look of the events dramatizedbut an independent film with a powerful critical edge might challenge our assumption that a film must include characters and plot or must present events within images that confirm Western perspectival conventions or must include recognizable imagery at all. Indeed, one of the signals that one is experiencing a powerfully critical film is the conviction that what we're seeing isn't a
real
movie, even though it is obviously being projected by a movie projector in a movie theater.
A particular critical film can relate to the conventional cinema in