This article is part of IndieWire’s 2000s Week celebration. Click here for a whole lot more. Let’s get it out of the way: it’s a stupid name.
A tossed-off joke made at a bar during the 2005 edition of SXSW. Sound editor and former indie rocker Eric Masunaga technically coined the term, while filmmaker Andrew Bujalski was the first to use it publicly — and also the quickest to try to disabuse people that it applied to anything real. Nevertheless, both the term “ Mumblecore ” and the loose sub-genre it’s been used to describe have endured longer than any of its practitioners could have likely predicted.
In 2007, two years after the Texan premieres of Joe Swanberg and the Duplass Brothers’ debut films, New York’s IFC Center ran a ten-film series entitled “The New Talkies: Generation D.I.Y.
” that attempted to capture a moment in American independent film. A decade later, mumblecore had gone mainstream — or rather, the films had become more polished, and their influence had trickled down into television. It had also became something of a punchline.
By the 2000s, independent cinema had become big business. Conglomerates had spent the past decade either acquiring buzz-worthy production/distribution companies or starting their own “independent” studios. Scrappy filmmakers who made a name for themselves in the ’80s and early ’90s —Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, the Coen Brothers, Steven Soderbergh, etc.
— were now established auteurs. The Sundance Film Fe.