An Indie Impresario, Who Made His Mark Fast and Memorably Adam Yauch, who died Friday of cancer at 47, was one of the best things to happen to American independent cinema in years. In February 2008, when Mr. Yauch announced the arrival of his distribution company, Oscilloscope Pictures, which he founded with David Fenkel, it sent a jolt through the indie world. An offshoot of Mr. Yauch's Oscilloscope Laboratories, his and Mr. Fenkel's new film division entered the fray right on the heels of a very strong Sundance Film Festival, when to many of us everything still looked so right in the indie business. At the time, studio divisions like Paramount Vantage were releasing titles like "There Were Blood," which along with independent films like Todd Haynes's fractured ode to Bob Dylan "I'm Not There," had been nominated for numerous Academy Awards. The lunatics had taken over the asylum or so it seemed. Not long after Oscilloscope Pictures came on the scene, though, Warner Brothers shut down the first of several of its specialty divisions and the indie world began to shrink as one after another studio dependents (Warner Independent Pictures, Paramount Vantage) disappeared or withered away. Oscilloscope, though, was operating on a different frequency, far from the Hollywood hum, which showed as it started to pick off-Hollywood titles like the documentaries "Flow" (about the water crisis) and "Frontrunners" (about a race for president of the student union at Stuyvesant High School). The titles kept getting better and in 2008 Oscilloscope bought one of its finest films, Kelly Reichardt's "Wendy and Lucy," about a young woman (Michelle Williams) struggling to hang on to hope and her dog, Lucy, in hard economic times. In May 2009, Mr. Yauch traveled to the Cannes Film Festival for the first time with the movie. "I was glad to see everyone in tuxes and ball gowns going up the red carpet," he wrote in an email at the time. I was afraid that the photos I've seen of Grace Kelly and Cary Grant would have faded into history like everything else, and that people would be walking into premieres in shorts, T-shirts and Crocs. So I was impressed when I saw a man in a suit turned away because he was wearing sneakers. Perhaps Cannes is the last bastion of dignified decadence. Certainly Oscilloscope seemed a model of the serious if not self-serious film company. Its titles were far flung, originating from across the globe - fiction films like "The Maid" and "The Messenger," documentaries like "Scott Walker: 30 Century Man" and "Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love" - and consistently if not fetishistically nonmainstream. Whenever Mr. Yauch attended Sundance, it was common to see him emerge from screenings of some of the decidedly less commercial offerings, foreign language films and unconventional work that Oscilloscope would sometimes later pick up. Its slate felt less bought and more curated and very quickly, the company became synonymous with smart, interesting cinema. When you saw its name, you knew that you wanted to see the film, too. Mr. Yauch's enthusiasm about film along with all those titles were part of why so many in independent cinema, even nominal rivals, embraced his entrance into this difficult, sometimes fractious world. Later in 2009, when my colleague A.O. Scott and I asked him about the momentous change that were rocking this world, and whether independent cinema had any kind of future to speak of, Mr. Yauch wrote another e-mail: "I believe that there is some middle ground. That you can make interesting, creative, informative films that will appeal to a wide audience. Maybe I'm an idealist, but I don't think you need to feed people these lowest common denominator films to get them out of the house. There are people who are interested in going out to the movie theater to see "Moon" or "Wendy and Lucy." "That being said, we are hoping to get the rights to make "Coyote Ugly 4, this time they're in the Marines."