Imagined Life: American Independent Cinema and Transcendentalism

Imagined Life: American Independent Cinema and Transcendentalism examines the prevailing characteristics of American independent cinema and explores its longstanding debt to the Transcendentalists. This nineteenth-century New England group, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller, subscribed to an idealistic philosophy based upon an intuitive and imaginative understanding that knowledge transcends logic and empiricism.

By analysing a range of American independent ...