“IT is time to blow the whole thing up.” In September 1960, when those words were lobbed at the world by a New York-centric, off-Hollywood circle of malcontents called the New American Cinema Group, there was no mistaking their radical urgency. Given the cold war times — one of the first large ban-the-bomb rallies had been held in Madison Square Garden some months earlier — this call to annihilation might have seemed tasteless. But for this group, whose numbers included the film critic, later filmmaker Jonas Mekas and the not-yet-director Peter Bogdanovich, the time for a free American cinema, one rooted in personal vision and liberated from censorship and the distribution and exhibition strangleholds, was now.

The time may have come once more. In the last few years American independent cinema has been rocked by seismic changes — including downsized companies and emerging technologies — that have altered this world more profoundly since 1993, the year that the Walt Disney Company bought Miramax Films. In the ensuing years the other major studios followed suit (Sony already had a boutique with Sony Pictures Classics), building specialty divisions, snapping up talent and writing bigger and bigger checks. It was an industry shift that soon resulted in a studio-indie infrastructure that had its own auteurs as well as its own producers, agents, lawyers, managers, publicists, festival programmers and journalists. Together this world gave indie movies “buzz” and minted new stars, some of whom hit it big, going from Sundance to Scorsese.

That infrastructure is crumbling. Three of the major studios have closed, absorbed or scaled back their various specialty divisions, including a now severely diminished Miramax Films. Yet even as the studio-indie model disintegrates, a new nonstudio model appears to be emerging from the rubble. In recent years, for instance, novice filmmakers and longtime independent insiders have begun experimenting, and finding some success, with new approaches to releasing movies, including self-distribution. The D.I.Y. world isn’t new, but what is novel is how filmmakers and other industry insiders are sharing their nuts-and-bolts experiences and blue-sky ideas both in person and online, creating a virtual infrastructure. But filmmakers who use Facebook to sell their movies aren’t simply partaking in a social-networking fad; they are trying to create a more complex, interactive and personalized relationship between them and their audiences. That explains why more than one D.I.Y. adherent likes to invoke the music world, where fans can become a loyal following, one that doesn’t just download a single song (or, as the most passionate of fans sometimes do, swap bootlegs), but also buys T-shirts, posters, memorabilia, concert tickets and yet more songs.

The frisson of the live concert experience partly explains why some independent filmmakers now show up at some of their screenings in person. Last August, for instance, the young filmmaker Andrew Bujalski appeared at the decidedly low-key Los Angeles premiere of his latest, “Beeswax,” at the Nuart Theater, one of that city’s single-screen art-house theaters. Before the movie began, he chatted amiably with filmgoers in the theater lobby, not far from the concession stand. Along with his producers, he also introduced the movie and, when it was over, stayed to take questions from an audience that now had a sense of the man to go along with his director’s credit.

Online and off, the human factor of course remains paramount to the independent world, and while its emergent foundation has a virtual component it retains a crucial bricks-and-mortar side too. Proof of this can be found in the three-day, pre-Sundance Film Festival confab, the Art House Convergence. Inspired by John Cooper, who recently took over as the director of the festival, this third annual meeting brought together more than 100 independent exhibitors, including art-house theater operators like the director Michael Moore, who has the State Theater in Traverse City, Mich., to discuss survival strategies. One of the most critical problems facing art-house cinemas is what’s been deemed a “hair problem” — meaning, an aging clientele that’s either gray or bald and whose declining numbers are worrisome to independent exhibition.

In a recent blog post on his Web site, trulyfreefilm.com, the producer Ted Hope, whose recent titles include “Adventure land,” wrote that it “is really surprising how few true indie films speak to a youth audience.” He continued, “In this country we’ve had Kevin Smith and ‘Napoleon Dynamite,’ but nothing that was youth and also truly on the art spectrum like ‘Run Lola Run’ or the French New Wave (‘Paranormal Activity’ not withstanding...),” adding: “Are we incapable of making the spirited yet formal work that defines a lot of alternative rock and roll? And if so, why is that?”

Any future alternative film culture will depend on the cultivation of younger patrons who are used to receiving much if not all of their entertainment at home and on hand-held devices. Some film festivals, notably South by Southwest, have attracted young audiences, partly by showcasing young directors like Aaron Katz (“Quiet City”). A similar generational enthusiasm and energy has to carry over into a new independent model if current and future filmmaking generations — including Kelly Reichardt (“Wendy and Lucy”), Ronald Bronstein (“Frownland”), Barry Jenkins (“Medicine for Melancholy”) and those whose movies are still on their laptops or in their dreams — are to find the kind of audiences and momentum that, in the 1980s, turned Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee into cultural touchstones.

Game changers like Lance Weiler, a D.I.Y. visionary whose 1998 mock documentary “The Last Broadcast,” directed with Stefan Avalos, was the first movie released in theaters digitally, understand that younger audiences can’t be reached the way that their Fellini-loving grandparents once were. Younger audiences might not be more active moviegoers than their grandparents (watching a film is never a passive experience), but they live in an interactive, media-saturated world. These days “everyone is his or her own media company,” Mr. Weiler wrote in Filmmaker Magazine. “With the push of a button they can publish, shoot or record and moments later it can be online for the world to see.” This audience, in other words, has its own D.I.Y. ethos, and sometimes can be part of a movie’s creative process.

The major studios certainly are paying attention to what Mr. Weiler and other do-it-yourselfers have to say. For the release of its recent hit “Paranormal Activity,” a digital-age spin on the old haunted-house formula, Paramount Studios lifted a number of release strategies from this new world, including exploiting social networks — (TweetYourScream) on Twitter — to stoke and sustain audience interest. At the same time Paramount was also borrowing a page from the exploitation cinema handbook. In the 1950s and ’60s the director and producer William Castle (“The Tingler”) competed with Big Hollywood by actively engaging his audience with various gimmicks, like placing buzzers under seats to zap moviegoers mid-screening or advertising that nurses would be standing by in case anyone fainted.

Castle’s genius was to make audience members feel as if, with their giggles and screams, they were active participants in the movie and its meaning. That ability to make moviegoers see themselves as a part of the action was a crucial element to how Harvey and Bob Weinstein turned Miramax Films into a dominant force not only in independent cinema but also in Big Hollywood. It helped that two of their most popular and early stars, the directors Kevin Smith (“Clerks”) and Quentin Tarantino (“Pulp Fiction”), were natural showmen who attracted intensely dedicated followings. Yet as time went on and Miramax increasingly devoted its resources to slick commercial productions (“Cold Mountain”) that were at times indistinguishable from mainstream fare, it was no longer reaching out to specific audiences but the mass.

Miramax’s early success in forging deep and seemingly meaningful connections to its audience was greatly aided by its ability to sustain the fiction that it was separate from Big Hollywood, even as its power grew and its Oscar statuettes accumulated. By playing the studio outsiders, the Weinsteins could keep prices down and maintain the indie cred that was initially their most valuable and, in a way, lethal brand. In Peter Biskind’s 2004 book “Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film,” a Disney executive, Chris McGurk, recalls how the studio bought Miramax: “We laid out on a piece of paper how we would help Miramax take over the independent world and kill everybody. The big issue was whether these two guys could work with us, work within the system.”
The Weinsteins did and then didn’t work within the system, breaking with Disney in 2005 and opening their self-titled company shortly thereafter. They aren’t wholly to blame for everything that went right and wrong in the studio-indie system: They are just the flashiest example of the Hollywood-ization of the independent world. Throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s, other distributors tried to match Miramax dollar for dollar, hit for hit, by throwing money at movies that, as the stakes and studio-indie investments grew, shifted attention and resources away from work that was not simply independent in their initial financing but also aesthetically and politically adventurous, shocking, even confrontational. It’s no surprise that along the way much of the conversation shifted from the art of cinema to its business.

Business remains part of that conversation by necessity, though the discussion has shifted again as artists, exhibitors and distributors consider the reconfigured landscape, one with less money and uncertain audiences, true, yet also no longer as tightly in the grip of Big Hollywood. This year’s Sundance was abuzz about entries that were available for rental on YouTube or through video on demand during the festival, as filmmakers try out new ways to make an impact. These small-screen efforts have met with skepticism even while reaping the expected publicity, because it’s unclear how they might affect a movie’s distribution chances post-festival. Now, as the independent cinema nurses its Hollywood hangover, the future remains unclear even as one message is getting louder: It is time to blow the whole thing up.