A Requiem for Mumblecore: Looking Back at the Last Time Movies Were Allowed to Be Small
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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 Festival, once a modest venue for showcasing and breaking small-budget films, had transitioned into another Hollywood shindig, complete with a strong celebrity presence and pricey dealmaking.
In retrospect, a film movement — one that confronted life as it was lived by a certain demographic — was bound to emerge from outside this system. The original batch of mumblecore directors include the aforementioned Bujalski, Swanberg, and Duplass(es) alongside Aaron Katz (“Dance Party USA”), Frank V. Ross (“Quietly On By”), and Kentucker Audley (“Team Picture”). A loose collective formed (they all acted in or participated in each other’s films), and journalists, especially those weaned on blogs, were eager to praise this post-“Indiewood” scene as a new cinematic vanguard.
It should go without saying that the circumstances of mumblecore’s development had less to do with a concerted effort in counter-programming and more with the rise of new technology. The first consumer-grade camcorder, as well as intuitive home editing software, not only removed financial barriers for first-time filmmakers but also helped demystify the production process for a new generation, much in the way that the 16mm camera influenced the New Wave. “This is the first time, mostly because of technology, that someone like me can go out and make a film with no money and no connections,” Katz told The New York Times.
The first generation of mumblecore films subsequently featured, and occasionally interrogated, the ways that tech impacted young adult life. Flip phones and desktop screens were prevalent in the work not just as symbols but as integrated elements of any given room, e.g., the website as a destination unto itself was an acknowledged idea rather than a novel concept. Swanberg’s early films especially examined how virtual communication, either via email or online chat rooms, had permanently altered in-person interactions by magnifying the degree of self-consciousness that’s absent from text.
However, as the name suggests, conversation as a battleground fraught with polite passive aggression, misdirected emotion, or verbal incoherence was often mumblecore’s modus operandi. Bujalski’s debut feature “Funny Ha Ha,” the first and arguably best film of the bunch, expertly captures the precise awkwardness in speech that stems from a sincere desire to avoid social tension. Naturally, that tension is created anyway, and Bujalski depicts the way people navigate charged post-collegiate environments as they generate their own principles about living in the world. “Funny Ha Ha” helped pave the way for others to portray eyes-darted exchanges between people who are uncomfortable in their own skin.
Social discomfort had obviously been represented on screen before, but the Millennial version of it, with conversation informed by pre-packaged self-awareness around etiquette and the utility of sensitive personas, had yet to be fully explored in contemporary terms. Naturalistic, sometimes improvised dialogue is an obvious mumblecore hallmark, but it also illustrated, in all of its awkward ignominy, the uncomfortable silence shared between friends and romantic partners, as true colors come to light or hidden motives are revealed. It’s silly to reduce a scene to simplistic thematic patterns, especially considering that the films themselves are hardly identical, but if mumblecore had a project, it’s that it offered a warts-and-all view of this specific anxiety in a way that was assisted by the burgeoning technology at filmmakers’ disposal.
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Critics at the time constantly cited John Cassavetes as mumblecore’s lodestar, but that’s really just lazy shorthand for a certain kind of performance-driven realism. The core filmmakers are all avid cinephiles and have cited any number of art films as influences; in a Filmmakerprofile from 2007, some cited Gus Van Sant’s Death Trilogy (“Gerry,” “Elephant,” and “Last Days”), Antonioni, Tarkovsky, and the original BBC version of “The Office.” The restrained yearning that courses through Eric Rohmer’s films and the unaffected manner of Richard Linklater’s characters feel like appropriate touchstones. Swanberg made the point that reality TV and YouTube primed audiences to handle the informal style baked into much of mumblecore; there’s truth to the way that cable and the early internet made people accept a type of imperfect, compact aesthetic that would otherwise be dismissed as amateurish.
The other easily identifiable similarities across the initial wave of mumblecore films are less era specific and more part and parcel with low-budget filmmaking: non-professional actors, commonplace settings (apartments, bars, offices, etc.), and an emphasis on interpersonal dynamics. There’s an obvious practical element at play here — young filmmakers rely on friends and familiar locations for their films — and this approach falls in line with a storied history of dialogue-driven, character-based American independent cinema.
Since the ascendent scene coincided with the growth of internet film writing, a plethora of contemporary critical work about mumblecore exists. It’s easy to argue that the filmmakers were benefits of a hype machine, and some of the coverage has a forced urgency to it, but mumblecore prompted just as much criticism for its perceived narcissism as it did feverish praise. Plenty of people saw these films, and their teeth were set on edge by the cultural homogeneity, the navel-gazing conversations, the unremarkable visual palate, or the nonchalant performances contained therein. That may have been inevitable — after all, not everyone is interested in loosely-plotted, conversation-heavy films about young people “figuring it out” even with the edges sanded off.
These criticisms can hardly be dismissed out of hand, as the quality varies so widely amongst the work. A degree of visual clumsiness and narrative drain-circling is unavoidable within a group that’s learning how to write and direct in the public eye. Swanberg was particularly divisive: in 2007, Amy Taubin called him a “lout” whose “greatest talent is for getting attractive, seemingly intelligent women to drop their clothes and evince sexual interest in an array of slobby guys who suffer from severely arrested emotional development,” while Richard Brody, upon the release of Swanberg’s 2015 film “Digging for Fire,” compared his career arc to that of Roberto Rossellini’s.
The films were mostly white and middle-class, but the prevalence of that milieu and — by extension, its apoliticality — feels like more of an industry-wide concern. It’s completely believable that filmmakers of color were making similar films during this time that went un(der)recognized, in which case a broader ecosystem of press and industry voices utterly failed them. In that same Film Comment article, Taubin appropriately calls out the lack of critical and industry attention towards So Yong Kim’s “In Between Days” despite it being aesthetically comparable to other mumblecore films.
Neither the work nor the careers of the initial batch of filmmakers are interchangeable. The methodical tone and structure of Bujalski’s 16mm-photographed ’00s trilogy isn’t to be found in Swanberg’s sexually confrontational digital films from the same period. The Duplass Brothers’ narratively conventional movies that effortlessly translated to mainstream success can’t be easily compared to Aaron Katz’s character portraits just because they’re both broadly about relationships. Frank Ross’ films demonstrate a unique sensitivity towards labor and work-life balance not reflected in the work of his peers. The spiky sole directorial efforts by Ronald and Mary Bronstein (“Frownland” and “Yeast,” respectively) have aesthetic roots in the movement but functionally live on their own planet.
At the same time, it would be absurd to deny that the films naturally inspire comparisons because, well, many of them are about young people in relationships. You can ding them for a lack of imagination, but it makes sense for personal films made by twentysomethings and their friends whose collective life experience was limited to hanging out and hooking up to reflect the muck of that lifestyle. The ambition, for better or worse, was to create a contemporary cinema that reflected small, yet significant problems between people living regular, mundane lives. At its best, the uncomfortably intimate aesthetic of the films combined with the general diffidence at their heart attempted to epitomize a generational temperament and linguistic sensibility. Some responded with enthusiasm and others with strong antipathy, which could be said about any cohort of young people trying to make a name for themselves.
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By almost any metric, mumblecore was ultimately a small phenomenon, even though it had a curiously long tail. Most of the initial films lived on the festival circuit, received bare-bones theatrical runs, and were distributed on the internet befitting the general lack of industry financing. Yet, many of the primary batch of directors continue to have a career in film in some capacity. Some achieved relative success by incorporated mainstream production values and professional actors into their work. Others eventually moved primarily into acting or editing. Kentucker Audley, one of the scene’s most overlooked filmmakers, founded NoBudge.com, a platform dedicated to showcasing young new talent, which fulfills a genuine need during a time when true independent cinema exists only in fits and starts.
It’s somewhat notable that many of the breakouts from ’00s mumblecore were the female practitioners and collaborators, who were largely ignored or overlooked at the time. Greta Gerwig began her acting career in earnest in Swanberg films, but she quickly moved into bigger-budgeted productions and eventually became the Oscar-nominated household name she is today. Mary Bronstein has reportedly wrapped a new film set to be distributed by A24. Lynn Shelton, whose “Humpday” came at the tail end of the wave, worked consistently in film and TV until her sudden tragic death in 2020.
Lena Dunham’s early short films, as well as her 2010 feature film “Tiny Furniture,” were firmly within the mumblecore mode, but her popular TV show “Girls” opened a door for television to start deploying the sub-genre’s aesthetics into a more palatable package. The Duplass Brothers created “Togetherness” on HBO and Swanberg created “Easy” on Netflix, both shows that carried their corresponding signature. However, the DNA exists in many of the era’s dramedies, like “Looking” and “High Maintenance,” because low-stakes relationship stories, even ones with a prickly sensibility, tend to attract a bigger audience when they features attractive people in better-lit environments.
The second generation of mumblecore filmmakers never remained in the mode for very long. Barry Jenkins and Damien Chazelle’s first features qualify to some extent, but their ambitions obviously lay elsewhere. Alex Ross Perry, Dustin Guy Defa, and Amy Seimetz all used the framework at one point and eventually discarded or evolved past it. None of them were trying to make pale imitations, but the general feeling evoked from the first wave feels tied to a particular time, place, and aesthetic that’s difficult to replicate. (As a counterpoint, Justin Zuckerman’s 2023 film “Yelling Fire in an Empty Theater,” shot for little money and on mini-DV, about a recent college grad’s brief, nightmarish time in a New York apartment, comes close to conjuring up memories of the mid-’00s originals.)
If Mumblecore was easy to mock, that’s because the films seemed superficially low effort and the full-court press around the scene magnified any perceived flaws. But now that small-scale, intimate views into young contemporary life have abandoned the cinema and almost exclusively moved onto social media, it’s enough to make you miss even the weakest entries. Part of the genuine charm of those films were that they were created by and featured people who didn’t necessarily aspire to celebrity or wealth. Anything remotely comparable being made currently will inevitably feature camera-ready people weaned on platforms incentivized to amplify the most conventionally beautiful among us. Mumblecore embraced the internet but was firmly influenced by cinema; now, the internet has fully integrated itself into real life, it has become its own influence.
The film industry has mostly been reduced to a mixture of brain-dead blockbusters designed to service ready-made, IP-hungry fans and an increasingly narrow sliver of independent-in-name-only films that all seem to trend towards gentrified genre fare. Not too long ago, however, there were films — some good, some bad — that believed that conversational torpor as a byproduct of incomplete identity formation and the awkwardness of incipient or dying romance deserved the big-screen treatment.
In 2010, Bujalski gave a lecture at the University of Florida during a weekend conference on Film and Philosophy. The talk digresses between a variety of topics, but at one point, while talking about teaching students how to direct actors, he makes a statement that seems to capture the ideal of what the original mumblecore directors were trying to accomplish, and also charts a way forward for other aspiring independent filmmakers.
“I’ve wagered ten years of my own work on a hunch that it does not violate the tenets of good drama to tell stories that take place on lower frequencies, because to me the most beguiling aspects of human behavior—the things that really beg the question, ‘Why am I me and not you?’ and perhaps more to the point, ‘How the hell did you end up being you anyway?’—emerge not when the stakes are at their highest, when an atomic bomb is in the room needing to be defused, but when the stakes are unclear. Most of our lives are lived in this zone, where it’s not entirely clear what will be gained or lost when we decide to help each other, or love each other, or betray each other. But we do it anyway, and there is a wealth of untold stories in those little choices.”
