Perhaps the niftiest things in the book, though, are lists by various film figures at the end of each chapter highlighting what they believe to be the ten most important American independent movies of all time. The lists are diverse, to say the least: Film historian Charles Pappas drops The Thing from Another World, while film editor Matthew Sorrento includes Scorpio Rising, Kenneth Anger's surrealist pop short about a homoerotic biker gang. The lists serve as terrific primers; I'd be surprised if you didn't want to slot even one of their titles into your Netflix queue.
That goes for the entire book, too. Hall mentions so many interesting films, be they bizarre, obscure, underappreciated, or sometimes all three, that you feel like rushing to your nearest video store. It's because of this book that I've finally decided to watch Robert Flaherty's pioneering 1922 docudrama Nanook of the North after hearing about it for years. If The History of Independent Cinema is sometimes imperfect, and not always a page-turning read, I think that Hall should still feel some pride at the amount of frenzied DVD-renting his book is going to cause among its readers.
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