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Content A NEW AMERICAN CINEMA
Copyright 2003
by
Belinda Marie Baldwin
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)
August 2003
Belinda Marie Baldwin
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UMI Number: 3116663
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089-1695
This dissertation, written by
under the direction o f h ft£ _ dissertation committee, and
approved by all its members, has been presented to and
accepted by the Director o f Graduate and Professional
Programs, in partial fulfillment of the requirements fo r the
degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Director
Date A u g u st 1 2 , 2 0 0 3
Dissertation Committee
7 Chair
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION:
THE EMERGENCE OF THE NEW AMERICAN CINEMA
CHAPTER ONE:
WHYTHE NEW CINEMA BROKE FROM THE AVANT-GARDE
CHAPTER TWO:
THE CHANGING LANGUAGE OF THE NEW CINEMA
CHAPTER THREE:
HOW THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE STOLE THE NEW CINEMA
CHAPTER FOUR:
THE AMERICAN NEW WAVE
CHAPTER FIVE:
THE SUNBELT AND THE NEW REALISM OF THE RIGHT
CONCLUSION:
NEW BEGINNNGS FOR NEW CINEMAS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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ABSTRACT
This project documents the history, politics and tradition of feature length
independent cinema in America since the post-war period. Using the theories of
Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Williams and Walter Benjamin, this project performs a
sociological analysis of independent cinema within the context of American politics
and culture since the post-war period. The project shows how the independent
cinema identified with Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation, and charts the
independent cinema’s relationship to avant-garde, foreign and Hollywood cinema.
Starting with The New American Cinema Group in the 1960s, the American new
wave in the 1970s, and ending with contemporary independent films from 1980 to
the present, this project most generally charts the independent cinema’s relationship
to socialist realism and other American arts.
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INTRODUCTION
THE EMERGENCE OF THE NEW AMERICAN CINEMA
In September of 1960, twenty-three independent filmmakers, producers, and
actors gathered at Tlie Producers Theatre on New York’s Lower East Side to chart a
manifesto for a new American cinema. Published in Film Culture: America’s
Independent Motion Picture Magazine in the summer of 1961, “The First Statement of
the New American Cinema Group,” outlines The Group’s ideology. “In the course of
the past three years,” the statement begins, “we have been witnessing the spontaneous
growth of a new generation of filmmakers., .the Free Cinema in England, the French
New Wave, the young movements in Poland, Italy, and Russia, and in this country the
work of Lionel Rogosin, John Cassavetes, Alfred Leslie and Robert Frank.” The Group
wanted to start a free cinema movement in America. For Jonas Mekas, Peter
Bogdanovich, Emile d’Antonio, Shirley Clarke, Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, Lionel
Rogosin, and the others, the official cinema or “Hollywood” was as good as dead. “It is
morally corrupt, aesthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, and temperamentally
boring.” If independent filmmaking had up until then been random, unorganized, or an
“unconscious and sporadic manifestation,” then The Group had joined to formalize
these random acts of resistance into a full-fledged cinema movement. The Group
wanted a new American cinema: “We know what needs to be destroyed and what we
stand for.”
The Group wanted for the cinema what the Beats had done for literature and
poetry, what Robert Frank and William Klein had done for photojournalism, what The
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Living Theatre had achieved off-Broadway. “As in the other arts in America today,
where fresh winds have been blowing for the last few years, our rebellion against the
old, official, corrupt, and pretentious is primarily an ethical one,” the manifesto
argued. The Group was “for art, but not at the expense of life.” Following Italian neo-
Realism, England’s Free Cinema Movement, or even the French New Wave, The New
American Cinema Group wanted to revamp the American commercial cinema to
address “real life” contemporary socio-political issues. The Group rejected the elitism
of “The Big Art Game” and the avant-garde cinema’s obsession with formal
experimentation.1 The Group rejected artifice in life and cinema to embrace a cinema
verite approach to fictional filmmaking. “The form must grow from the subject matter
of our times,” as Lionel Rogosin argued. Or, as The Group manifesto argued: “We are
not an aesthetic school that constricts the filmmaker within a set of dead principles.
We feel that we cannot trust any classical principles either in art or life.”
“The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group” outlined the
Group’s objectives for a new American cinema. The success of Shadows (1959) and
Pull My Daisy (1959) had proven to Group members that youth audiences in America
wanted a new kind of cinema, and that “paradoxically, low-budget films give a higher
return margin than big-budget films.” These films illuminated the possibilities for a
low budget American independent cinema, one that could succeed in the marketplace
and still be “free.” Since The Group thought that filmmaking was the filmmaker’s job,
it rejected any and all “interference” of producers, distributors, and investors. The
Group also rejected censorship, studio financing and sought to establish an alternative
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production, distribution, and exhibition system for its films. “We want to make it clear
that there is one basic difference between our group and other organizations such as
United Artists,” the manifesto concluded. “We are not joining together to make
money. We are joining together to make films.”
Part of the Beat generation, The Group was disillusioned with post-war
American culture. However, where the Beats were nihilistic, The Group was hopeful.
The cinema was the answer. “We are joining together to build a New American
Cinema. And we are going to do it together with the rest of our generation. Common
beliefs, common knowledge, common anger and impatience bind us together.” The
Group rejected the film industry’s blatant commercialism. The Group wanted a
politically engaged popular cinema. Mekas explained, “Hollywood films reach us
beautiful and dead. They are made with money, cameras, and splicers instead of with
enthusiasm, passion, and imagination.”2 The Group hoped to reform the social uses of
the American film industry. To accomplish this goal, The Group, composed mostly of
artists, not businesspeople, needed to learn how to compete in the commercial
marketplace.3
Even so, The Group’s concerns were primarily ethical in nature. The Group
believed that Hollywood’s studio system, assembly line mode of film production was
too efficient to be “art” or “politics,” which The Group believed had to be “free” of all
formal codes, systems, and regulations. “We don’t want false, polished, slick films.
We prefer them rough, unpolished, but alive; we don’t want rosy films—we want them
the color of blood.”4 The studios, The Group believed, “professionalized” filmmaking
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into a dull set of minute tasks. Studio films were “formally and thematically stiff,”
“pretentiously expensive” and ultimately divorced from reality. These films stifled
“man’s” creative potential. The Group thus resolved to “abolish the Big Budget
myth.. .and if it will help us to free our cinema by throwing out the splicers and the
budget-makers, and by shooting our films on 16mm.. .let us do so.”5
The Group celebrated John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959) and Robert Frank and
Alfred Leslie’s Pull My Daisy (1959) as new American films. Based on Jack Kerouac’s
play “The Beat Generation,” Pull My Daisy allegorizes the Beat generation’s impact on
daily American life. The thirty-minute film features prominent Beats like Allen
Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, the painters Alice Neal and Larry Rivers, and
filmmaker Alfred Leslie as “fictional” beat profits who liberate the film’s bourgeois
white male from his traditional role as husband, father and provider within the nuclear
family.
Pull My Daisy merges the Beats’ play with language as jazz with the formal
codes of the cinema to form an alternative “Beat” film language.6 In Allegories o f the
Cinema: American Film in the 1960s, film scholar David James argues that the film
goes so far as to effect a Brechtian wake up call for the viewer. For James:
The plurality of this narrative is reproduced visually in the
composition and camera movement, which maintain the apartment
interior in constant flux, continually rearranging it by pans that pull
it into new patterns of depth and new planes, new patterns of
unbalanced interpenetration of domestic space and artists’ studio,
and continually fluctuating, highly chiaroscurist patterns of black
masses and everyday objects.. .Kerouac’s voice over maintains the
spectacle at a distance, preempting the suture of lip-sync and
ensuring that the scenes will be contemplated rather than entered;
the narration’s lack of authority in explaining the multiple goings-
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on cannot meld the visuals into a single, unified audio-visual story,
but only multiply their inconclusiveness which, aided by the
fragmentary jazz track, spins off only fresh possibilities of
irresolution.7
For these reasons, James celebrates the film’s radical nature. “Like the melody of a
modem jazz solo,” he argues, Pull My Daisy undermines “the premise that art is more
ordered than life.”
In “The Making and (Unmaking) of Pull My D aisy” film scholar Blaine Allen
discusses the film’s complicated relationship to consumer culture. Although Pull my
Daisy “always remained outside the conventional system of motion picture
production,” Allen argues, “by seeking outside financing and forming a limited
partnership, the producers made the film into a business as much as a form of personal
expression.”8 Although the film was directed, written and stared “real life” Beats
instead of Hollywood actors, and although the film was shot “on location” in Alfred
Leslie’s Fourth Avenue loft and distributed by the New American Cinema Group
member Emile d’Antonio, Pull My Daisy was still a commercial film. The film was
financed independently, but by Wall Street investors who were eager cash in on the
Beat’s popularity with youth audiences. The film is, as David James argues, a
politically radical film, and, as Blain Allen argues, an independently produced
commercial film.9 Like the films The New American Cinema Group wanted to make
for a new American cinema, Pull My Daisy is an independently produced commercial
film that expands the formal codes of the American cinema even as it brings
underground politics to mainstream audiences.
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The New American Cinema Group also celebrated John Cassavetes’ Shadows
(1959). The film merges documentary realism and melodrama to reveals the surfaces
and depths of Beat subculture. Shadows explores this theme through a series of
relationships, between siblings, lovers, and friends, between white and black people,
blacks who “pass” as white, and whites who might like to pass a black. Hugh, Ben and
Lelia are siblings who live together in a small apartment on New York’s Lower East
Side. Tony is the film’s “Beat” white male. The film’s dramatic tensions occur through
a series of mistaken identifications. Hugh is the dark skinned older brother who,
because of his skin color, struggles to be taken seriously as a singer. Ben is the light
skinned younger brother and trumpet player caught between his ability to pass as white
and his shame at being able to do so. Leila is the light skinned younger sister who is
totally naive to racial politics. Liela doesn’t even know that she’s passing as white.
After meeting Hugh, Tony realizes that Lelia, his girlfriend, is in fact a black woman.
The film explores the tensions between these characters. However, rather than
resolving all conflicts, Shadows dwells in them to reveal the “shadows” that haunt the
Beat generation’s surface racial harmony.1 0
Like Pull My Daisy, Shadows experiments with cinema language. “One of the
principles of Cassavettes’ work is the multiple stranded narrative, “ as Cassavetes’
scholar Ray Carney argues. “While Hollywood is premised on an idenfication
strategy in which the viewer processes information in terms of a single, dominant
understanding of what things mean (generally figured by the star’s viewpoint),” in
Shadows, “life contains many different stories and alternative points of view. The
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film’s narrative circulates the viewer through alternative perspectives and relations to
experience.”1 1 As Carney implies, Shadows is a non-linear multi-stranded narrative
that denies the viewer the experience s/he might have expected from the typical
Hollywood film. Instead, Shadows invites the viewer to explore life from another
perspective.
In many ways, Shadows is an American version of Italian neo-Realism. In Sure
Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema, film scholar Barbara Wilinsky details
the formal qualities of Italian neo-Realism. Focusing on Open City (Rossellini, 1946),
Wilinsky argues that Italian neo-Realism defined itself against the Hollywood’s cinema
tendency for escapism with a realism that merged melodrama with documentary. Open
City used non-professional actors, vernacular and improvised dialogue, and looked
“realistic,” as if had totally been “shot on location with few artificial sets, little artificial
lighting, and no sound equipment.”1 2 These stylistic markers distinguished Open City
from the majority of Hollywood films even as they allowed the film to document the
social realities of disenfranchised Italian people during the post-war period.
Like Open City, Shadows merges melodrama with a documentary “realism”
to “realistically” dramatize topical social issues and compete with Hollywood. Like
Open City, Shadows looks like it was “shot on location with few artificial sets, little
artificial lighting, and no sound equipment.” Cassavetes encouraged the actors to
model their characters and dialogue after their personal lives. The characters come off
as real and spontaneous like jazz. Ben Carruthers who plays “Ben” in the film was a
struggling jazz musician. Leilia Goldini or “Leila” really was Ben Carruthers’
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girlfriend. Like Open City, Shadows is melodrama that seems “real” because of the
hand held camera work, low budget aesthetics, and because the actors created their
characters from their off screen lives.1 3
Shadows and Pull My Diasy made headlines after Amos Vogel screened them
together at his Cinema 16 “Cinema of Improvisation” night in November of 1959.1 4
After the screening, Village Voice film critic J. Hobberman proclaimed, “the
underground has announced itself!”1 5 The films put a new American cinema on the
map. After winning Film Culture’s Independent Film Awards, the films screened to a
full house in 1960 at the National Film Theatre’s “Beat, Square and Cool Festival.”
The Venice Film Festival gave Shadows the Film Critics Award and grouped it with
Pull My Daisy and Shirley Clarke’s The Connection into a “New York School” of new
American filmmaking.” The same three films also screened at Cannes, where Clark’s
film won the Palm d’Or. Shadows also toured the Cinematheque Francaise, London
Film Festival, and London’s Academy Cinema, where the film earned more money for
the theater than any other film in the theatre’s twenty-five year history.1 6
In his Esquire essay entitled, “La Nouvelle Vague de New York,” journalist
Walter Ross understood that Pull My Daisy and Shadows marked a new American
film. The films were critical turning points for Ross because “they (were) successful”
and “they seem(ed) easy.”1 7 For The Group, the films “proved that good,
internationally marketable films” could be made independent of studio money, “on a
budget of $25,000 to $200,000.”1 8 For Mekas in particular, “ Shadows proves that a
feature film can be made with only $15,000. And a film that doesn’t betray life or
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cinema.. .it proves that we can make our films now and by ourselves. Hollywood and
the miniature Hollywoods will never make our films.”1 9
Variety appreciated Shadows for similar reasons. As for Mekas, for Variety,
Shadows “may well be the standard bearer for an entirely new approach, a radical
swerve, in American manufactured entertainment.” Time called the film the new
“$40,000 Method.”2 0 Pull My Daisy was remarkable for the same reason. For Variety,
“Kerouack Beatnik ‘Daisy’ Rates % in Art Houses.”2 1 Everyone from the margin to
the mainstream appreciated Shadows and Pull My Daisy for being refreshingly
different than the big budget Hollywood spectacle.2 2
In his 1962 Film Culture essay “Notes on the New American Cinema, “ Mekas
celebrated the films for their authentic representations of “real life,” which he linked to
their low-budgets and small scale productions. “For the new cinema,” Mekas argued:
Shadows represents a turn inwards-a focusing upon psychological
realities., .the film’s rhythm, its temperament is not that of the
ideas in it, but, primarily, that of the people in it, their faces, their
movements, their tone of voice, the stammerings, their pauses-their
psychological realities revealed through the most insignificant
daily incidents and situations.
Mekas continued that Pull My Daisy “blended most perfectly the elements of
improvisation and conscious planning, both in camera work and directing. The
“plotless episode has never been more eloquent than it is in this film. The feeling of
‘being there’.. .its authenticity is so effective, its style so perfect that the film has
fooled even some very intelligent critics; they speak about it as if it were a slice of
life, a documentary. Instead of criticizing the film, they criticize the Beat generation.”
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The most vocal member of The New American Cinema Group, Mekas argued
that while big budgets, expensive equipment and lavish studio sets divorced
filmmaking from reality, low budgets, 16mm cameras, and location shooting situated
filmmaking within the “real world.” Shadows and Pull My Daisy were relevant for
their “authenticity” and “camera reality,” for their closeness to the everyday and
distance from the commercial cinema’s over-produced version of “slick” reality. For
Mekas, these films were a “slice of life.” The rhythms of these films had been derived
from “the most insignificant daily incidents.”2 3 In “Shadows Achieves Impact by
Realism” The Los Angeles Examiner argued, “if the idea of improvisation is not new,
‘Shadows' is still a unique enterprise. By permitting its actors to say what they feel,
which here proved successful, it has for the most part marinated itself in naturalness. It
is as close to life as flesh is to bone.”2 4 Newsweek reported that the film is “all rough
edges, but it has more raw vitality per rugged inch than most movies catch in a total of
8,000 feet.”2 5 For the Los Angeles Times, Shadows was “squalid but brilliant.”2 6
Despite the buzz, Shadows and Pull My Daisy did not turn a profit. Like Pull
My Daisy, Shadows was produced and distributed independently of the Hollywood
studio system. Cassavetes made his film over the course of three years with the money
he had collected private investors and from donations he received after promoting the
film in The New York Times and a New York radio show.2 7 Unlike Robert Frank’s
thirty-minute film, which did well to secure exhibition in art house theatres, film
societies, and film festivals, Shadows was a $40,000 feature that needed a national
distributor to secure returns. Since the film was neither a short experimental nor a
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studio picture, Shadows had a difficult time finding its niche in the American film
marketplace. As far as American distributors were concerned, American audiences
preferred foreign art films. A London distributor, The British Lion eventually
distributed the Shadows, but it was only able to see it to three American theatres (the
Embassy in New York and the Sunset and Crest theatres in Los Angeles). By the
summer of 1961, all of the prints of Shadows were returned to Cassavetes and
promptly put in storage. Years later, in an interview with Ray Carney, Cassavetes
expressed his disillusionment after Shadows. “In America,” Cassavetes recalled, “we
had what we started out with: a 16mm, black and white, grainy, rule breaking, non-
important film that got shown only when someone was willing to do us a favor.”2 8
Cassavetes’ comment gets us to the heart of the matter. By the early 1960s,
new American had access to the means of film production, to 16mm cameras,
celluloid, actors, writers, and communities of people willing to make films just for the
sake of doing it. Avant-garde film communities in New York and San Francisco had
been making experimental films since at least the 1930s, and there have been
maverick independent feature filmmakers in America since the beginning of the
cinema. The New American Cinema Group is unique because it wanted to break into
the infrastructure of the American film industry to secure an alternate distribution and
exhibition route for independently produced American films. The Group wanted its
“rule breaking” cinema about contemporary American social issues to reach
mainstream American audiences. Not just sporadically, when “someone was willing
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to do them a favor,” but systematically, The Group wanted to create a new American
cinema.
In many ways, The Group was like England’s Free Cinema. Like the Free
Cinema came of age during the post-war period, through London’s arts community
and around discussions that were happening in Sight and Sound and Sequence
magazines, The Group emerged through New York City’s filmic arts community
through Film Culture and Film Quarterly. Similar parallels could be drawn between
these movements and the French New Wave, which resulted largely through the
Cahier du Cinema. However, the French New Wave admired the Hollywood auteurs
and even certain aspects of popular American cinema. The Free Cinema and The
Group were on the contrary motivated by ethical concerns about the social uses of
cinema. These cinema movements organized against generalized ideas about
“Hollywood” as an oppressive cultural institution.
The bad news is that neither lasted for very long. Within a decade, the Free
Cinema and The Group had dissolved from groups to individual filmmakers working
sporadically in the commercial film industry or off the occasional government grant, in
other words, “when someone was willing to do them a favor.” The Group is
nevertheless a defining moment in the history of American cinema. From the new
wave to sex, lies and videotape (1989) and Do The Right Thing (1989), all of the
waves of American independent cinema are indebted to The Group. In fact, The Group
began what we today call American independent cinema. This project is a history of
this cinema.
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When I began this project, I was interested in “contemporary” American
independent cinema, films like sex, lies and videotape (1989) and others made
between 1980 and the present. However, nowhere in my preliminary research could I
find a history or tradition for feature length, independently produced American
commercial cinema. There has been plenty of scholarly work on the avant-garde as an
independent cinema and Hollywood as the rival or antithesis to independent cinema.
Yet the space in between these two extremes is relatively empty. This is the location of
the independent American cinema of this project. It is also the place where realism is a
political aesthetic for social change.
Although independent filmmakers in this country feel like they are part of a
community of producers, actors, writers, associations, film festivals, journals and
magazines, American film scholars have tended to gloss over this area of culture,
community, and film production. The reason is because we are locked into a
dialectical approach to “free” cinema. Film studies is attached to a very particular
narrative. In their seminal book, Film History: An Introduction (1994), for example,
David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson devote just a paragraph The New American
Cinema Group.2 9 Although their book is meant as an introduction to film history,
Bordwell and Thompson, in all of their books on American film history, tell film
history as if it were the story of the Hollywood cinema’s resilience. Hollywood grows
stronger with each external challenge to its authority, according to this history.
Independent cinemas are bound to fail. The story demands it. Within this narrative, the
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only true independent cinema is the avant-garde cinema since it doesn’t compete with
Hollywood for large audiences.
When scholars do focus on feature length American independent filmmaking,
they often define this cinema as Greg Merritt does in Celluloid Mavericks: A History
of American Independent Film (2000), as “any motion picture financed and produced
completely autonomous of all studios, regardless of size.”3 0 Yet even this definition
ultimately falters. In a country where the mainstream cinema is owned by a small
group of conglomerates, feature films are never one hundred percent financially
independent of the commercial film industry. Even independently produced films
ultimately rely on the studios for distribution, at least if they want to reach an audience
larger than friends and family. There simply is no way to be outside of the commercial
film industry in America. Merritt’s book, along with Emanuel Levy’s Cinema of
Outsiders (1999), also romanticizes the individual artist at the expense of the artistic
tradition. There are many great individuals in the American independent cinema.
However, this cinema is better understood as the relationships between people. These
relationships are the history, culture and tradition of the American independent
cinema.
What I’ve learned in my research is that American independent cinema has
never really even wanted to be completely outside of the commercial film industry.
From The New American Cinema Group to the American new wave, feature length,
socially conscious, politically motivated, independent filmmakers in this country have
tried to reach in between the dialectic, between the avant-garde and the Hollywood
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cinema, to create a new American cinema. The history of the American independent
cinema is for precisely this reason like the history of a tightrope. Independent cinema
walks a fine line, merging avant-garde ideals with popular styles to compete with
Hollywood for a large audience. What’s interesting about this history is not that
Hollywood always wins, not the product, but the process.
I’ve also learned that the American independent cinema is as strongly connected
to other new wave national cinemas like Italian neo-Realism, England’s Free Cinema or
The French New Wave as it is to other American art forms. This project does not go
into detail over the new cinema’s place in to the international art cinema, but instead
focuses specifically on the new American cinema’s relationship to American cultural,
politics, and arts. The Group wanted to do in American what Italian neo-Realism had
done in Italy. It was a national film movement with international heroes. This project
explains the new American cinema’s style and politics are part of a long tradition in the
American arts that use realism for social change. As the following chapters detail, this
tradition includes music, literature, poetry, photography, painting and cinema. I focus in
particular on the independent cinema’s ties to the New Deal public arts, but one could
easily look further back for more evidence of this tradition.
Since The New American Cinema Group, American independent cinema has
taken its name from its point of critique: the mainstream media’s interpretation of
American society. Independent cinema in this country is as critical of patriotism or
nationalism as it is of the American government and Hollywood’s version of American
life. The Group was “American” to the extent that it wanted to start a new cinema in
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America just as the Free Filmmakers had done in England and the new wavers in
France. In other words, The Group was a national film project that identified as an
international film movement. It even imagined that its annual film festival would serve
the “free filmmakers from all over the world.” Like The Group, the American new
wave evoked the name of the nation even as it actively broke down national barriers.
The new wave was also an “American” cinema with international influences. Like most
national cinemas, the American independent cinema competes with Hollywood, which
is globally powerful to the extent that it successfully denies its geographic location,
going instead for something more ephemeral, the stuff of fantasy.
The first chapter of this project discusses The New American Cinema Group as
it emerged from New York City’s post-war avant-garde film community. The Group is
what Raymond Williams might describe as a “cultural formation.” In The Sociology
of Culture, Williams defines a “cultural formation” as an informal organization
composed of artists united by “a collective public manifestation in pursuit of a specific
artistic aim.3 1 Williams also argues that cultural formations tend to organize in relation
to larger institutions and identifies three types of these “external relations”:
specializing, as in the cases of sustaining or promoting work in a
particular medium or branch of an art, and in some circumstances a
particular style.
alternative, as in the cases of the provision of alternative facilities
for the production, exhibition, or publication of certain kinds of
work, where it is believed that existing institutions exclude or tend
to exclude.
oppositional, in which the cases represented by alternative
relations are raised to active opposition to the establishment.3 2
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The Group fits with Williams’ definition of an alternative cultural
formation. Although The Group organized against the aesthetic and narrative
tendencies of the Hollywood cinema, against the studio system as a mode of film
production, The Group was not fundamentally opposed to the conditions of the
commercial cinema. The Group adapted the logic of commercial filmmaking in
order to forward its social and political aims. The first chapter discusses The
Group’s “alternative” relationship to the avant-garde and Hollywood within the
context of post-war American culture and politics.
The Group filmmakers were substantially different from the many other
independent filmmakers that came of age in post-war New York City. The Group was
organized for a specific goal and with a specific film style and content in mind. As
Mekas clarifies:
In the 60s, there were avant-garde shorts and avant-garde features.
Ron Rice made The Flower Thief (1960) and The Queen o f Sheba
Meets Atom Man (1963). These are features, but they were also
part of the avant-garde in their sensibility and their techniques.
Beginning with Shirley Clarke and Lionel Rogosin a breed of
independents developed that wanted a more public kind of feature.
And their sensibility was different. Their content was different, and
they sort of moved away from the avant-garde sensibility and
techniques.3 3
Chapters one and two go into this in depth, but it is important to make the larger
point now. This project does to not try to understand all American independent
cinemas. Nor does it claim to describe every filmmaker in American not working
for a studio. This would be impossible. Instead, this project explains what Mekas in
the quote from above describes as a “sensibility” within the American independent
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cinema. The New American Cinema Group and the American new wave are
examples of this sensibility, which has a very particular style and a content that
speaks to a tradition in the American public arts.
Chapter two discusses the new cinema relationship to the New Left and
Civil Rights. Focusing on Shirley Clarke’s films, The Connection (1959), The Cool
World (1963) and Portrait o f Jason (1967), this chapter charts The Group’s
historical trajectory, from an off-Broadway collective film movement to a populist,
neo-realist art cinema, and then back again to a less popular, more underground
experimental art cinema.
Chapter three tackles the American Film Institute (AFI). Envisioned first by a
UCLA film professor, the AFI was imagined as a distribution arm for the new
American cinema. By the 1960s, independent filmmakers in this country had access to
the means of film production, but distribution, the key to reaching a large audience,
was still under the controls of a select few. The AFT was planned as the new cinema’s
saving grace. This chapter outlines the discussions that surrounded the start of the AFI
to explain how and why the AFI ultimately became an off-Hollywood production
facility. Nothing is all good or bad, and the AFI has given a lot of grant money to
filmmakers over the years. Even so, this project faults the AFI nonetheless because it
could have significantly challenged the dominant structure of the movie industry.
Instead, the AFI did just the opposite and reproduced it.
Chapter four discusses the return of the new American cinema. The American
new wave emerged through federal and state arts grants as well as public broadcasting.
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All of the American arts flourished during the 1970s through the NEA and NEH’s
Bicentennial Arts Projects, which were designed by the government to work like the
New Deal arts. New wave films like Harlan Country, USA, Hester Street, Girl
Friends, Northern Lights, El Norte, The Scenic Route and Bush Mama were made
through government grants and private investors, who were rewarded for their
generosity under Nixon’s tax shelters for domestic film production. The 1970s was
also the decade of the docu-drama, when nearly 10 million people tuned into PBS’s
twelve-hour documentary series An American Family (1973) while another 40 million
turned on CBS for seven nights of Roots (1977). In turn, the American new wave is
the first popular and financially successful wave of American independent cinema.
Chapter five discusses the rise of The Sunbelt and explains how this region of
the country dramatically changed American politics and culture. From New Country
music to Dirty Harry (1971), the popular culture of The Sunbelt, which is also to say
the new Republican majority, challenged the Left, which is also to say the independent
cinema’s ownership over realism. This chapter links the rise of The Sunbelt to the
larger shifts taking place in American politics and culture, namely the end of the
Welfare State and the shift from modernism to postmodernism. This chapter is
important to this study of independent cinema because it discusses the breakdown of
the “sensibility” that I argue defines the American independent cinema.
The final chapter brings us full circle. The “sensibility” that defines the
independent cinema of this project is challenged but not destroyed by the end of the
Welfare State. The final chapter makes this point by focusing on the 1981 Los Angeles
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“New American Cinema Conference.” Although this conference focused only on the
movie business, the title alone ties it to The New American Cinema Group’s dream for
a new, more socially engaged American cinema. The two pivotal films of this
historical moment, Do The Right Thing (1989) and sex, lies and videotape (1989) are
the Pull My Daisy (1959) and Shadows (1959) of their day. Yet the moment
considered itself brand “new,” divorced from history. What I try to insist is that this
moment is not so much “new” but dates as far back as the New Deal, when public
artists created not solely for self-fulfillment but for a “new” and better world.
2 0
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1 Open City spent one hundred weeks in Times Square Theatre in 1946 and is
generally regarded as the film that began the foreign art film boom in America.
2 Jonas Mekas. “A Call for a New Generation of Film-Makers.” P.Adams Sitney. The
Film Culture Reader.New York: First Cooper Square Press, 2000.
3 Parker Tyler. Underground Films: A Critical History. New York: Grove Press Inc.,
1969. Tyler argued, “The commercial cinema is one of the bad habits of modem
society” because it places “too much emphasis on technical accomplishment, technical
flash and professional splash.. .exactly what the ‘entertainment’ film has substituted
for serious themes and truly artistic treatment.” For these reasons, Tyler continued,
the commercial cinema, “rational, mathematical, and constantly subject to test and
verification” was closer to science than art. The commercial cinema established unfair
standards that regulated filmmaking to an elite few with the money and institutional
support to make “quality” films.
4 The New American Cinema Group. “The First Statement of the New American
Cinema Group.” The Film Culture Reader, pp. 79-84.
5 Jonas Mekas. “A Call For A New Generation of Film-Makers.”
6 David James. Allegories of the Cinema: American Film in the 1960s. New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1989.
7 James. Allegories of the Cinema, pg. 93.
8 Blaine Allan. “The Making and (Unmaking) of Pull My Daisy.” Film History: An
International Journal. Vol. 2, Number 3, 1988, pp. 185-205.
9 “This is the Beat Generation.” The New York Times November 1952. The New York
Times published a 12 part series on The Beat Generation in 1959. Jack Kerouac made
his famous appearance on “The Steve Allen Show” the same year.
1 0 David Bordwell. “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice.” Film Criticism
fall 1979.
1 1 Bordwell. “The Art Cinema as Mode of Film Practice,” pg. 58.
1 2 Barbara Wilinksy. The Emergence of Art House Cinema. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001, pg. 19.
1 3 Wilinsky. The Emergence of Art House Cinema, pg. 59.
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1 4 The first cut of Shadows opened at the new Paris Theatre in New York while Pull
My Daisy at the New York Theatre in 1959.
1 5 Tyler. Underground Films: A Critical History, vi.
1 6 “John Cassavetes Shadows an Art House Wow.” Variety 26 October 1960.
1 7 Walter Ross. “La Nouvelle Vague de New York.” Esquire May 1962.
1 8 In “A Call for a New Generation of Film-Makers, ” Mekas argued, “Shadows
proves that a
feature film can be made with only $15,000. And a film that doesn’t betray life or
cinema. It proves that we can make our films now and by ourselves.”
1 9 Mekas. The Film Culture Reader, pg. 75.
2 0 Variety 2 August 1961.
2 1 Variety 13 July 1960.
2 2 Time 14 November 1959. The Hollywood Reporter 25 July 1960. Variety 13 July
1969.
2 3 Ray Carney. Shadows. London: BFI, 2000.
2 4 Carney. Shadows, pg. 23.
2 5 “Raw Edges-Raw Vitality.” Newsweek 3 April 1961.
2 6 “Shadows, Squalid but Brilliant.” The Los Angeles Times 3 July 1961.
2 7 The show was entitled “Jean Shepard’s Night People.” According to Carney,
Shepard, following Cassavetes’ lead, asked listeners to “buy an advanced ticket for
two dollars to your movie.” Cassavetes reportedly raised $2500.
2 8 Carney. Shadows, pg. 71
2 9 David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson. Film History: An Introduction. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1994, pg. 382.
3 0 Gregg Meritt. Celluloid Mavericks: A History of American Independent Film. New
York: Thunder Mouth Press, 2000, xiii.
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3 1 Raymond Williams. The Sociology of Culture. New York: Schocken Books, 1980,
pp. 62-63.
3 2 Williams. The Sociology o f Culture, pg. 70.
3 3 Brian Frye. “An Interview with Jonas Mekas.” Senses o f Cinema 2000.
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CHAPTER ONE
WHY THE NEW CINEMA BROKE FROM THE AVANT-GARDE
The main aesthetic problem in the movies, which were invented for reproduction (of
movement) is, paradoxically, the overcoming of reproduction. In other words, the
question is: to what degree is the camera (film, color, sound, act.) developed and
used to reproduce or to produce (sensations not possible in any other art medium)?
Hans Richter, “Film as an Original Art Form,” Film Culture 1955
Art may be indefinable. But for me it is important to do something significant. The
form must grow from the subject matter and from our times. The artist must be
engaged in his times in the strongest manner possible.
Lionel Rogosin, “Notes on a New America Cinema,” Film Culture 1962
Jonas Mekas recently reminisced about his New York City “movie life”:
In 1950-51, my movie life begins. First, on 42n d Street between 6th and
8th Avenue, there were maybe fifteen movie houses, and you could see
everything and spend all night watching movies. Now if you didn’t
want to see old movies and classics, you went to MoMA, which we
did. And we did not miss a single day, because we wanted to catch up
with everything. Or if you wanted to see newsreels, there was a
theatre just for newsreels. If you wanted to see the avant-garde, the
new experimental films, you went to Cinema 16 programs. If you
wanted to see very rare early silent film of various formats, you went
to Theodore Huff Society, again once a week.1
As Mekas details, New York City’s film culture in the 1950s was rich with variety.
The city’s movie theatres, film societies, universities and museums screened
everything from silent movies, westerns and classics to Leftists documentaries,
international art cinemas and short experimental films. More than in any other city
in America at that time, in New York City, as Mekas testifies, one could lead a
“movie life.”
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By the 1950s, New York City was home to modem America’s filmic arts
community. The newfound availability of the 16mm camera and the relocation of
many of Europe’s most renowned artists, filmmakers, and scholars during and
immediately after the Second World War to New York City sparked film societies,
film clubs and even university film classes. The first Film Forum opened there in
the early 1930s to showcase foreign art films and experimental shorts. The Museum
of Modem Art (MoMA) started its film library and lecture series on artful
filmmaking around the same time, beginning with Femard Leger’s now famous
1935 lecture on “Painting and Avanced-Garde Filmmaking.” Hans Richter
emigrated to New York City from Germany in the 1940s and taught film courses at
the College Institute of Film Technique at City College. Around the same time,
another German emigrant, the renowned film scholar Rudolph Amheim came to
New York City and began the New York Film Society. Amos and Marcia Vogel
opened Cinema 16 in 1946. By the mid-1950s, when Mekas began his New York
City “movie life,” Cinema 16 listed some 2600 members.
Mekas inaugurated Film Culture: America’s Independent Motion Picture
Magazine, the new generation’s film magazine, in 1955. A poet from Lithuania,
Mekas immigrated to New York City in 1949 to begin his “movie life.” Besides
traveling the city’s theatres, Mekas took Richter’s film class and began filming his
everyday experiences with his new Bolex camera. Lost, Lost, Lost (1949-63)
chronicles Mekas’ strange new world. “I was there. I was the camera eye,” his voice
guides the viewer over hand held, abstract images of Central Park, Brooklyn’s
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Lithuanian community, the Film-Maker’s Co-Op, The Living Theatre and friends’
homes. His voice over testifies: “It’s my nature now to record, to try to keep
everything I am passing through.. .to keep at least bits of it.”2 Like diary entries,
deeply personal and disjoined, the “bits” to which Mekas refers are now his
celluloid memories, not Lost Lost Lost, but preserved for posterity as scenes in a
“movie life.”
Mekas made his only narrative films in the early 1960s. Shot by Eduard de
Laurot, a frequent Film Culture contributor, Mekas’ Guns of the Trees (1961)
reveals the dark side of Cold War America. Like Pull My Daisy, the characters in
Guns of the Trees are symbolic and allegorical. Guns o f the Trees also follows Pull
My Daisy’s Beat motif. Allen Ginsberg’s voice over poetry accompanies the film’s
documentary and newsreel footage. Adolfas Mekas and Frances Stillman play the
depressive white couple. Ben Carruthers from Shadows and Argus Speare Julliard
portray the optimistic black couple. As film scholar Tessa Hughes-Freeland
summarizes, “Frances’ constant battle with suicide is at odds with Argus’ pregnancy
in an ultimate human dilemma.”3 The film’s core dilemma is contextualized as
“real” with documentary footage (the city dump, Fulton Street fish market, police
violence, the protests against U.S involvement in Cuba) contextualizes the “human”
dilemma within the social reality that was Cold War America. Ginsberg’s poetic
narration along with folk songs, news reportage and jazz compose the film’s
fragmented soundtrack, which begins and ends with Mekas reading from
Prometheus Unbound. Taken with the film’s low-budget or “naturalistic” lighting
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and frequent jump cuts, Guns of the Trees has a raw, aggressive edge which depicts
Cold War America is violent place, and a threat to the human spirit.
Although the film was scripted, Mekas’ The Brig (1963) seemed so “real”
that it won the documentary competition at the 1964 Venice Film Festival. The film
uses the oppressive conditions of military prison or “brig,” where soldiers are
incarcerated for being “weak” to stand for American culture in general during the
Cold War.4 In his essay for 1982 retrospective, “The American New Wave 1958-
1967,” film scholar James Roy MacBean explains how the film’s “realistic” style
supported its theme. For MacBean:
The camera work lurches violently when the action in the cage gets
rough, swings jerkily around in double time step with the prisoners,
who are forced to run around in their cage like rats on a treadmill,
and jolts to a halt abruptly when the prisoners pull up short at the
white lines on the floor which they are forbidden to cross without
asking the sergeant’s permission. The camera, getting right up under
the nose or the jutting jaw of the sadistic officer, gives the audience
the very visceral feeling of just how intimidating that claustrophobic
proximity to one’s torturer can be.5
As MacBean explains, The Brig, like Guns of the Trees, uses jarring camera
movements, aggressive close ups and a relentless soundtrack to perform a social
critique. The viewer identifies with the prisoners in a hostile military state.
MacBean explains, The Brig “becomes physically and psychologically
discomforting in the extreme, thus duplicating in the audience the very sensations of
fatigue and stress that would allegedly be the experience of the prisoners of the
military brig...The Brig seems to encourage us to rise up and rebel against such an
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outrageously authoritarian and sadistic system.”6 Like Guns of the Trees, The Bring
encourages audiences to challenge social reality.
With Guns o f the Trees and The Brig, Mekas temporarily abandoned his
preferred mode of filmmaking. From Lost, Lost, Lost to Walden (1969),
Reminiscences o f a Voyage to Lithuania (1972), Paradise Not Yet Lost (1979), and
Zefiro Tornia (1992), Mekas’ films have primarily been abstract, non-narrative film
poems. In each, Mekas’ voice over brings the viewer through abstract and even
unrelated images. In Walden especially, Mekas’ kinship with the Romantic poets is
obvious. Over blurred images of a young girl playing on stilts in Central Park,
Mekas asks the viewer to experience the transcendental qualities of life:
Now viewer, as you sit and watch, and as life outside in the streets is
still rushing, maybe a little bit slower, but still rushing. Just watch
these images. Nothing much happens. The images go. No tragedy, no
drama, no suspense. Just images, for myself, and for a few others.
This is Walden.
Like his other film poems, Walden records Mekas’ daily experiences from the
inside-out, foregrounding his inner, emotional self over the external world of
people, places and things. His films record the experience of shooting just as the
abstract expressionist painters painted the experience of painting. With both, the art
is in the happening, the moment and the experience. A film about the emotional
experience of filming, Walden creates a “middle landscape” through the camera eye
where the viewer can “just sit and watch.” Here, remote from the speed and chaos
of the city, “Nothing much happens, no drama, tragedy or suspense. Just life.”7
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Walden speaks to an American literary tradition. In The Machine in the
Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, literary scholar Leo Marx,
focusing on Thoreau’s Walden, shows how 19th century American literature
expressed the fears that American culture in general had about industrialization. As
for Mekas, for Thoreau, Walden is tranquil in contrast to the chaos of the industrial
city. Walden is a peaceful mental domain where man can safely reunite with his true
self outside of the hustle and bustle and noise of modem industrialization. Marx
uses Freud’s notion of fantasy from A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis
(1920) to explain. For Freud:
The creation of a mental domain of fantasy has a complete
counterpart in the establishment of “reservations” and “nature parks”
in places where the inroads of agriculture, traffic, or industry threaten
to change. The “reservation” is to maintain the old condition of things
which has been regretfully sacrificed to necessity everywhere else;
there everything may grow and spread as it pleases, including what is
useless and even what is harmful.8
Marx uses Freud’s comparison of mental fantasy to parks and reservations to
explain how 19th century American literature like Walden imagined “nature” as a
utopian metal and physical space outside of the industrial city. This literary
construct, Marx argues, represents how American culture coped with the “new”
with romantic depictions of the “natural” world.
Mekas’ Walden clearly pulls from this history. Mekas slows the rush of the
modem city to the point of abstraction. The city becomes a depiction of Mekas’
fantasy life. Mekas used the camera to create a mental space of serenity outside of
the chaos of modem industrialization. Like Walden, all of Mekas’ abstract film
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poems create a sublime mental space of fantasy that speaks to the tradition that
Marx identified within 19th century American literature.
The Brig and Guns o f the Trees are unusual films for Mekas. Not about the
abstract life of the mind, these films are about harsh, physical reality.9 Why would
Mekas make these films? “Just as a single diamond may have various facets which
we perceive in succession,” Maya Deren once argued, “so a man may, and should,
have many aspects in truth; and integrity, then, consists in his responding to the
requirement of each phase of his life with the aspect which most accurately relates
to it.” Although Guns of the Trees and The Brig occupy just a moment in Mekas’
filmmaking career, this moment represents an important facet in his movie life.
There is Mekas the flaueur, enjoying his movie life in New York City’s many and
varied exhibition spaces. There is also Mekas with the movie camera, recording his
everyday experiences as celluloid memories. Then there is “life” as represented in
the movies. Mekas made Guns o f the Trees and The Brig to compete with the
Hollywood’s version of life in American life. While the American avant-garde
continued with abstract, non-narrative films, The New American Cinema Group,
and Mekas specifically, embraced a more socially engaged “realism” during the
1960s.
The New American Cinema Group defined itself against the post-war
American avant-garde cinema. While The Group recognized itself as a film
collective for social change, the post-war avant-garde understood itself as a group of
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individual artists committed to expanding the language of cinema. One of the
leading scholars of the American avant-garde, P. Adams Sitney has argued:
Avant-garde filmmaking in the United States has never been a
movement; the individualism of the artists prevented that. Yet there
have been collective drifts, general tendencies around which the film
historian can structure his observations.1 0
Sitney’s comment brings us to a larger point. The avant-garde that emerged in
American during and immediately after the Second World War was an art
movement about individuality. The avant-garde believed that art should express the
individuality of the artist along with the uniqueness of the individual work of art.
The goal was to elevate the cinema into an “original” art form. As the post-war
avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter explained in 1955, “the question is: to what
degree is the camera developed and used to to produce (sensations not possible in
any other art medium)?” Using Richter’s statement as a case in point, the
filmmakers of the post-war avant-garde cinema in America believed that their role
as artists was to produce unique one of a kind cinematic experiences. In the process,
these artists believed they could save the cinema from mass production.
The ideas of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu help us to understand the larger
picture. In The Field of Cultural Production, Bourdieu argues that cultural
production within industrial capitalism happens within two competitive fields: the
large-scale or commercial field of production and non-commercial or restricted field
of production. These fields are inexorably intertwined within the larger field of
power. Where the field of large-scale production makes popular culture, as
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Bourdieu explains, the field of restricted production produces “art.” These fields
contrast and complement each other. For Bourdieu, the fields represent:
The opposition between small-scale and large-scale production,
between the production based on denial of “economy” and of profit.
The characteristics of the commercial enterprise and the cultural
enterprise, understood more or less as disavowed relation to the
commercial enterprise, are inseparable.1 1
Where producers in the field of large-scale production embrace capitalism to attract
the largest possible audience and high profits, producers in the field of restricted
production make “art” by actively disavowing the logic of mass production.
Restricted or non-commercial producers circulate through small and elite social
apparatuses like libraries, universities, museums, galleries, and societies where “art”
is an affront to commercial culture. In the “economic world reversed,” as Bourdieu
explains, producers work “for arts sake” for small audiences, not for profit or mass
appeal.
The post-war American avant-garde supports Bourdieu’s ideas. As is almost
needless to say, Maya Deren was a central figure in the post-war American avant-
garde. Besides her films, which some scholars argue mark the first wave of avant-
garde filmmaking in America, Deren was a tireless community organizer and one of
the most outspoken advocates for avant-garde cinema up until her untimely death in
1961. Deren began The Film Arts Society in New York in 1953 to “bring together
for mutual action and protection, the hitherto isolation of film artists, and to act as a
liaison center between the film artist and his public.” Eventually renamed The
Independent Filmmaker’s Association (IFA), Deren’s film society did not fund film
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projects, but it did offer information on film stock, equipment rental and film crews.
The IFA also distributed a catalogue of society member films to universities and
other film societies to bridge the gap between the “film artist and his public.” By the
mid-1950s, as one scholar explains, the “IFA had become a monthly forum for a
full-fledged social and intellectual community. Members not only saw each others
work but also films and lectures by Len Lye, James Broughton, and Kenneth
Anger.”1 2
On the one hand, the IFA wanted to unite the film artist with his/her public.
On the other hand, the IFA needed the divide between artist and public for its social
identity as an elite organization. The IFA was in this way symbolic of the post-war
New York City arts culture at large. As Lauren Rabinovitz has noticed, “Deren’s
consistent calls to other artists through opposing ‘community’ and ‘isolation’ were
part of a unified discourse of elite separation and privileged identity among New
York City artists in general in the 1950s.” In his well-known essay from the era,
“Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), published in New York City’s Partisan Review,
art critic Clement Greenberg explained the modem artist’s elite separation from the
public as a symptom of a larger crisis facing the modem arts. For Greenberg, the
avant-garde’s detachment from the “real world” meant that it could save art from
mass culture so long as it sacrificed its revolutionary potential. Greenberg
explained, “It is true that once the avant-garde had succeeded in ‘detaching’ itself
from society, it proceeded to turn around and repudiate revolutionary as well as
bourgeoisie politics.”1 3
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Although Greenberg’s ideas are today highly contested, many American art
critics and artists at the time of his essay’s first publication agreed with Greenberg
on the unfortunately albeit necessary separation between art and politics. Especially
after the Nazis took Paris, the center for modem art at the time, American artists and
critics thought that it was their duty to “save” art from Fascism. The same artists
and critics were disillusioned with Stalin’s Communism, and, since both Fascism
and Communism had used representational art for propaganda, these same
American artists and critics perceived the abstract aesthetic as “free” from
totalitarian politics.1 4
In The Politics of Freedom (1950), for example, the American cultural critic
Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. linked realism with totalitarianism a la Communism and
Fascism and abstraction with democracy a la American capitalism. For Schlesinger:
The totalitarian man fears creative independence and spontaneity. He
mistrusts complexity as a device for slipping something over on the
regime; he mistrusts incomprehensibility as a shield, which might
protect activities the bureaucracy cannot control.1 5
For Schlesinger, abstract art represented the freedom or art from state oppression.
He argued:
The paintings of Picasso reflect and incite anxieties, which are
incompatible with the monolithic character of “the Soviet person.”
Their intricacy and ambiguity make them hard for officialdom to
control.1 6
Schlesenger’s argument exemplifies the change of tides that happened in American
art and art criticism during the post-war period. Abstract art came to represent “the
politics of freedom” in America. Because the abstract aesthetic was thought to be
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“independent” from social reality, Abstract Expressionism, for American artists,
critics, and eventually the government became the symbol individual “freedom”
through American capitalism during the Cold War.
The American avant-garde of cinema would implicitly get caught up in the
government’s appropriation of abstraction during the Cold War. Although the
avant-garde was not always an abstract cinema, it did prize itself as being divorced
from social reality. Distance from social reality or realism, the language of
commercial cinema, was what, for many of its artists, qualified the filmic avant-
garde as a legitimate art. As Greenberg argued for the avant-garde in general, the
filmic avant-garde understood itself as “detached from society.” Returning to Maya
Deren’s IDA as an example, the filmic avant-garde, which “was part of a unified
discourse of elite separation and privileged identity among New York City artists in
general,” forged its social identity on opposing concepts of community and
isolation.
During the American Federation of Arts 1976 retrospective, “The History of
the American Avant-Garde Cinema,” curator John Handhardt explained that the
post-war American avant-garde prided itself as being “radically other.” For
Handhart:
The avant-garde film of Europe in the 1920s, and in America with
increasing activity since the 1940s, aspires to radical otherness from
the conventions of filmmaking and the assumptions and conditions
which inform the dominant view and experience of film.. .these
independent films are made primarily in 16mm not in 35mm of
commercial filmmaking, and they involve the filmmaker directly
through a tactile “hands on” approach or an assertive point of view of
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an artist engaged in such vanguard aesthetic movements as cubism,
surrealism, abstract expressionism or minimalism. This cinema
subverts cinematic conventions by exploring the medium and its
properties and materials, and in the process creates its own history
separate from classical narrative cinema.1 7
As Handhart argued, the post-war American avant-garde aspired to achieve
a state of radical otherness—from the commercial cinema, the other modem arts,
and even within itself, where filmmakers aspired to differentiate themselves and
their films from the personalities and works of other experimental filmmakers. The
films of this period overtly defied the rules and logic of the commercial cinema.
Avant-garde films were often shorter or much longer than mainstream narrative
films. As Handhart argues, avant-garde films tended to be shot on 16mm or 8mm as
opposed to the commercial cinema’s preferred 35mm formatting. The “father” of
the American avant-garde, Stan Brakhage burned, scratched and glued organic
material to his celluloid. These markings aligned his cinema with the organic or
“nature,” and insured that they would be read as one of a kind art objects.1 8
In her essay on Maya Deren for the 1976 retrospective, film scholar Lucy
Fischer connected the avant-garde’s desire for radical otherness with its obsession
with the self. For Fischer:
The American avant-garde was motivated by self-definition.. .both
on a personal level in respect to the psychological identities of the
individual artists and to the filmmakers’ to the other arts.1 9
As Fisher explains, the avant-garde’s obsession with self-definition doubled for a
desire for radical otherness. This desire visualized in the filmmakers’ abstract “one
of kind” films. Avant-garde filmmakers used the camera to abstract social reality
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into art. “The technological liberation of the camera,” Richter argued, “is intimately
bound with psychological, social, economic and aesthetic problems.” The camera
was the lynchpin in the system. Representative of mass production’s challenge to
“art,” the camera was thought to embody both the best and worse case scenarios for
modem man. On the one hand, the logic of industrialization was “built into” the
camera, which was therefore ultimately doomed to distance man from his “real life
conditions” and destroy the “aura” of art as a social ritual. On the other hand, the
camera, if freed from its role in industrial culture, could provide modem man with a
new mode of self-expression.
Central here is the post-war avant-garde’s adherence to the myth of artistic
creation. As film scholar James Peterson has explained, the myth of the “great
artist” was central to all of the modem arts and the avant-garde cinema especially.
For Peterson, “the artist as an inspired genius who forcefully rejects an oppressive
tradition and transcends petty rules and conventions is one of the most fundamental
myths of the avant-garde.”
Brakhage especially embraced this myth of artistic genius. In a widely sited
passage from Metaphors on Vision, Brakhage wrote:
Imagine an eye unruled by man made laws of perspective, an eye
unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which must know each
object encountered in life through an adventure in perception. How
many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware
of “green”?2 0
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In this quote, Brakhage links his fantasy for film as pure experience, as
vision without eyes otherwise trained by “man made laws,” to the idea of childhood
as yet another metaphor for untainted cognitive space. Brakhage’s idea here
communicates with the American avant-garde’s relationship to 19th century
American literature and to the ideology that art, seen here as the space for pure
contemplation, happens outside of “man made” modem industrial culture.
Brakhage’s desire to unite man with “green,” before it became an adjective that
hindered his connection to nature, to “green” as pure experience, also speaks to
Mekas’ fantasy in Walden, where “there’s no drama, no tragedy, and no
suspense.. .just life.” In both cases, the artist accentuates his presence in bringing
man closer to nature apart from mass culture.
By the end of the 1950s, the American government was also celebrating the
myth of artistic creation. The rest of this chapter discusses this along with several
other key happenings in post-war American culture and politics that informed The
New American Cinema Group’s take on art and politics. Specifically, the
breakdown of the Hollywood studio system, the popularity of foreign art films with
young American audiences, and the government’s appropriation of symbolic and
subjective expressionism through the Museum of Modem Art during the Cold War
created a cultural opening for a feature length socially engaged independent film
movement to emerge and perhaps even flourish in this country. This “new”
American cinema brought realism back into the American arts for the first time
since the 1930s.
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The New American Cinema Group wanted no part of the big art game. Like
Italian neo-Realism or England’s Free Cinema Movement, The Group merged
fiction with documentary. The Group shot on location, used non-professional actors,
vernacular speech and dialogue, naturalistic lighting and sound design to capture
life “as it really is.” The Group wanted to ground its cinema in social reality. The
Group celebrated the realism of the 16mm, black and white, grainy camera, of
“poor” sound design, jump cuts, and out of focus images. Maya Deren disregarded
this style the “catch as catch can” mode of filmmaking and critiqued its lack of
discipline and sentimentality. “A scream of pain is not a song,” Deren argued the
early 1960s.2 1 By then, however, Deren was out of style with the new generation
which embraced this “catch as catch can” style as a radical affront to the formalism
of the avant-garde and the professionalism of the Hollywood cinema.
The New American Cinema Group wanted to compete with Hollywood
within as opposed to outside of the mainstream, where the avant-garde was busy
saving art from mass culture. The Group did not believe that mechanical
reproduction threatened the cinema’s art potential. In fact, The Group hoped to
mechanically reproduce art to enlighten a mass audience. Here, The Group’s beliefs
recall Walter Benjamin’s well regarded take on art and mechanical reproduction. In
“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin argued:
To an ever-greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the
work of art designed for reproducibility.. .But the instant the criterion
of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total
function of art is reversed, it begins to be based on another practice:
politics.2 2
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The Group wanted to enlighten “the people” with a popular art cinema. The avant-
garde believed in the one of a kind work of art, the original. Authenticity was not, as
it had been for the American avant-garde, a central issue for The Group. Instead,
The Group wanted to use mass production and realism to send a political message
of social reform to a mass audience. For The Group, this was the “reality” that
Hollywood edited out of its out “professional” cinema.
Where the avant-garde explored the life of the mind, The New American
Cinema Group wanted to explore social reality. As Mekas explained:
Where the experimentalists were concerned with the exploration of
the subconscious, this other group was interested in exploring the
world in realistic manner right here and right now.2 3
As Mekas clarified, The Group’s commitment to the “right here and right now” and
to reaching large audiences separated it from the avant-garde. For The Group, the
here and now held the “truth.” Where the avant-garde understood truth in abstract,
existential terms, The Group sought a truth grounded in material reality.
The New American Cinema Group is not the first to understand truth in this
way. The Group’s ideas about truth and realism speak to those of the German
playwright Bertolt Brecht. In his 1938 essay “Popularity and Realism,” in fact,
Brecht argued that “truth” was that which was absent from the dominant culture’s
version of reality: For Brecht, “the ruling classes use lies. To tell the truth is clearly
an urgent task.” Brecht believed that it was the job of the artist to reveal the
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people’s truth. He wanted his theatre to reach the people with a language they could
understand. He wanted “to speak their language., .in other words, the popular.”
Brecht’s public theatre ascribed to a “realistic” and “popular” aesthetic. For
Brecht:
Realistic means discovering that causal complexes of
society/unmasking the prevailing view of things as the view of those
who are in power. Popular means intelligible to the broad masses,
adopting and enriching their forms of expression/assuming their
standpoint, confirming and correcting it.2 4
Like Brecht, The Group combined the self-consciousness of the more elite modem
arts with the conventions of popular culture to educate “the people” as to the truth
of their social existence. Like Brecht, The Group was not a member of the class it
hoped to reach, but belonged to the very class that produced the kind of art that it
considered to be out of touch with the people. For this reason, The Group, like
Brecht, wanted to be free from the formalism and tradition of the bourgeoisie. The
Group was not an “aesthetic school that restricts filmmakers to dead principles” for
the same reasons as Brecht declared: “We shall allow the artist to employ his
fantasy, his originality, his humor, his invention.. .we shall not bind the artist to
rigidly defined modes of narrative.”
Even before The Group formed, Mekas envisioned a new American cinema
for a new American audience. His editorial for the first issue of Film Culture in
1958 reads as a call for a new American cinema audience. For Mekas:
Today, the needs for a searching evaluation of the aesthetic standards
of filmmakers and film audiences and for a thorough revision of the
prevalent attitude to the function of cinema have assumed more
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challenging proportions than ever before. Cinematic creation tends to
be approached primarily as a production of commodities, and large
sections of the public-to whom film going is still merely a mode of
diversion—remain unaware of the full significance of filmic art.2 5
Three issues later, in his infamous essay “The Experimental Film in America,”
Mekas attacked what he understood to be the narcissism of the experimental
cinema. Mekas explained that the cinema “needs a larger movement than that of the
experimental filmmakers to break the stifling conventions of the dramatic film.”
The personal lyricism of experimental cinema, for Mekas, was adolescent. Such
films represented:
Escapism, unresolved frustrations, sadism and cruelty, fatalism and
juvenile pessimism.. .The film poets are so fascinated with their
personal worlds that they do not feel a need to communicate or give
their characters or stories a larger and more human scope.2 6
For Mekas, experimental films were totally cut off from the people. Using the
words of literary theorist C.P. Snow, Mekas compared the experimental cinema to
modernist literature. For Snow:
With a readership of approximately one, which alone is treated as Art,
and on the other side, popular novelists give up the struggle for any
glint of truth and get read in millions at the price of surrender to the
mass media, the condensations, films, television. It is arguably that
such polarization is the fate of all art in advanced technological
society. If that happens, and it shall happen, we shall have committed
cultural suicide.2 7
Using Snow, Mekas argued that the experimental cinema was “free” but useless
“with a readership of approximately one.” For Mekas, the experimental cinema’s
detachment from society at large rendered it as “beautifully dead” as a lavish
Hollywood spectacle. This detachment was for Mekas a cultural suicide. As The
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Group would echo several years later, Mekas thought that art needed to reach in
between high Art and popular culture to engage those “large sections of the public-
to whom film-going is still merely a mode of diversion.” In order to reach this
pubic, The Group embraced realism over abstraction. Like Brecht, The Group
wanted to speak to the people “in a language in which they could understand.”
The Group’s embrace of realism can also be understood in relation to the
fate of Abstract Expressionism. Lead by painters Mark Rothko, Larry Rivers and
Jackson Pollack, The New York School of Abstract Expressionism formed during
the post-war period in reaction to the previous generation of New Deal
representational artists. Jackson Pollock’s mentor had in fact been the leading
Regionalist painter under the New Deal arts programs. Pollack once commented
that Thomas Benton gave him an aesthetic to rebel from. For Pollock and the other
abstract painters of his generation, Abstract Expressionism was a radical break from
tradition and formalism. For them, abstraction was personal and spontaneous, free
from representational art’s contract with reality.
At first, conservative politicians thought that Abstract Expressionism was an
affront to American values. Congressman George A. Dondero of Michigan
infamously declared that Abstraction Expressionism was clearly an expression of
the artist’s latent desires for a communist nation state. For Dondero:
Modem art is communistic because it is distorted and ugly, because it
does not glorify our beautiful country, our beautiful smiling people,
and our material progress. It is therefore opposed to our government
and those who create and promote it are enemies.2 8
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The Museum of Modem Art during “The New American Painting in 1959”
represented the official turn in thought on the abstract aesthetic. A decade after
Pollock made the cover Life, MoMA celebrated the abstract painters as the new
American heroes. The paintings were now signs of American democracy,
expressions of the kind of “principled” individualism that was impossible under
Communism. From as early as 1952, in fact, in an essay entitled “Is Modem Art
Communistic?” for The New York Times, director of MoMA collections, Alfred H.
Barr Jr., defended abstract art against the charge of Communism. For Barr, “many
don’t like and understand modem art, they call it communistic. They couldn’t’ be
more mistaken.” Barr continued:
Whatever a Western leader’s point of view of artistic matters may be,
he would not want to impose his taste upon his countrymen or
interfere with their creative freedom. The totalitarian dictators of Nazi
Germany and Soviet Russia, on the contrary, did want to: the modem
artist’s non-conformity and love of freedom cannot be tolerated
within a monolithic tyranny and modem art is useless for the
dictators’ propaganda, because while it is still modem, it has little
popular appeal. The dictators wanted to impose their artistic
convictions. They could. They did and the Russians still do.2 9
Barr associated abstract art with freedom of expression precisely because it is
cryptic and non-representational. Since the meaning of an abstract painting is
relative to the individual viewer’s experience of the painting, as Barr argued, then
abstract art is free of all propaganda. For Barr, abstract art was thus the art of
American democracy.
During the “New American Painting” exhibit seven years later, Barr argued
that the abstract aesthetic represented “a stubborn, difficult, and even desperate
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effort to discover the self.” The museum’s head of foreign acquisitions, Rene
d’Hamovcort then explained that self-expression was a privilege of capitalism and
the “foremost symbol” of American democracy. The very qualities that had in the
previous decade made the aesthetic seem radical and even Communist were now
what made this art patriotic. Now Abstract Expressionism signified the kind of
freedom of expression possible only in America.3 0
The year after the “New American Painting” show, John F. Kennedy
became the first American President to have a poet speak at his inauguration. For
the audience of politicians and nearly two hundred other American artists, Frost
prophesized “a golden age of poetry and power” for the new America. Kennedy
returned the favor in 1963 when he spoke at the opening of the Robert Frost Library
at Amherst College. There Kennedy declared that Frost was “supremely two things:
an artist and an American.” Kennedy lauded the “great artist” for being a cultural
hero, a “solitary figure.. .in perusing his perceptions of reality he must often sail
against the currents of his time.” Kennedy continued:
Art is a nation’s most precious heritage, for it is in our works of art
that we reveal ourselves, and to others, the inner vision that guides us
as a nation. We in America have not always been kind to artists and
scholars who are the creators and the keepers of our vision. Somehow
the scientists always seem to get the penthouse, while the artists get
the basement.3 1
In America, Kennedy argued, the artist was free to say whatever he wanted about
himself. Democracy freed the individual artists to go within, to explore the depths of
his soul. “It may be different elsewhere,” Kennedy stated, “but in democratic
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society the highest duty of the writer, composer, the artist, is to remain true to
himself and let the chips fall where they many.” Where art within communism and
socialism was a function of the state, in America, Kennedy argued, art belonged the
individual artist. In a “free” society like America, Kennedy argued, art is personal
expression, and “not a weapon of polemics and ideology.”3 2
Maybe it was because The New American Cinema Group emerged as the
American government embraced the solitary artist and poet as signs of American
freedom that The Group so ardently rejected abstractions and personal expressions
for a more socially engaged critique of everyday life. The Group believed artists
should explore the social and not the self. Specifically, The Group believed what the
“Beat” writer William Burroughs believed, that artists were engineers for social
change. Burroughs argued:
Artists to my mind are the real architects of social change and not
political legislators, who implement change after the fact. Art tells us
what we know and don’t know that we know.3 3
The Group was part of The Beat Generation. Including most famously, Jack
Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, the Beat poets used the styles and
themes of jazz to create a “New Vision” in literature in the same way that Shadows
and Pull My Daisy used jazz to inspire a new vision in cinema. The Beats and The
Group both rejected formalism in life as in art. Both were critical of elitism in the
arts and injustice in “the American way of life.” Just as Allen Ginsberg expressed in
his poem “America” (1956), “America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing,”
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Mekas in Guns o f the Trees and The Brig critiqued the emptiness of Cold War
America.3 4
The Group wanted to engineer social change. The Group wanted to reach the
audience accustomed to studio films, and it didn’t want to use studio distributors to
achieve this goal. By the early 1960s, The Group had achieved a certain amount of
international notoriety. Shirley Clarke’s The Connection (1959), John Cassavetes’
Shadows (1959), Lionel Rogosin’s On the Bowery (1956), and Mekas’ Guns o f the
Trees (1961) and The Brig (1963) won numerous film festival awards. Yet this
acclaim was beside the point if The Group couldn’t reach the people. Group films
had a hard time attracting domestic distributors. Rogosin opened the Bleaker Street
Theatre in 1960 to exhibit his and other independent films, and there was always
The Paris Theatre, The New York Theatre, Cinema 16 and the Charles Theatre, but
The Group wanted to reach audiences outside of New York City.
The Group’s ambitions auspiciously coincided with the end of the studio era.
As film historians have well documented, the Classical Hollywood Cinema as a
mode of film production transitioned in the 1950s. In The Genius o f the System, film
scholar Thomas Schatz summarizes “classical” Hollywood as a period from the
1930s through the 1950s:
...when various social, industrial, economic, and aesthetic forces
struck a delicate balance. That balance was ever shifting but stable
enough through four decades to provide a consistent system of
production and consumption and thus a body of work with a uniform
style, a standard way of telling stories, from camera work and cutting
to plot structure and thematics.3 5
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The studio system that Schatz refers to began in the 1930s when the studios moved
from the East Coast to the Los Angeles area generally known as “Hollywood.”
Although there were number of “poverty row” studios and “independent” film
producers like David O. Selznick, the big studios (MGM, Warner, Universal,
Paramount, and Twentieth Century Fox) produced the greatest percentage of
Hollywood films during the studio era. The “big five” functioned like factories with
in house directors, producers, writers, and even movie stars, all working under a
single studio brand name. The studios competed for the mass audiences by
specializing in particular genres. While MGM was known for musicals, Universal
was known for its horror films. Warner specialized in gangster films. The major
studios function collectively as a system and independently as individual studios
with discrete in house styles, movie stars and genres.
If the studio era, as Schatz argues, resulted from a “delicate balance struck”
between these “various social, industrial, economic, and aesthetic forces,” then this
era ended in the 1950s because a new set of social, industrial, and economic factors
undermined this balance. The studio era officially ended after the 1948 Paramount
Decrees made the studios sell off their theatre chains. The advent of television
simultaneously challenged the film industry’s control over America’s entertainment
industry. After federal legislation during the post-war period made home ownership
possible to more Americans than ever before, the bread and butter audience of the
studios moved from the cities, where most of the first run theatres were located, to
the suburbs, where television now appealed as the newest and more convenient
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form of leisure time entertainment.3 6 Combined with the internal strife of the HUAC
hearings and blacklists, the studios domestic box office dropped dramatically during
the post-war period. As film historians David Bordwell and Kristen Thompson have
estimated, box office returns for the studios dropped 74% between 1947-57. Where
returns were at an all time high in 1946, with Hollywood films attracting
approximately 98 million viewers a week, by 1957, the domestic box office was at
an all time low, with only half as many movie goers willing to travel to see the latest
studio film.3 7
Hollywood films from the time like Sunset Boulevard (1950), The Bad and
the Beautiful (1951) and Singing in the Rain (1952) show the break down of the
modem studio system. All of these films incorporate the otherwise “behind the
scenes activities” of the movie business into the narrative proper. Sunset Boulevard
dramatizes how the shift to sound films affected silent movie stars. The Bad and
The Beautiful shows the corruption of the studio system. Singing in the Rain details
the coming of sound. These films suggest a heightened self-awareness on the part of
the studio system that might not have been possible outside of its demise. On
another level, these films convert crisis into entertainment and profit.
The Hollywood cinema changed in other ways during the post-war period.
As the government monitored the studios’ vertical integration, the major studios
moved away from in house film production to independent film distribution. MGM
is a case in point for Bordwell and Thompson. Although MGM produced all of the
films it distributed in 1954, by 1959, nearly 70% of the films MGM distributed had
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been produced by smaller studios or independent production companies.”3 8 At the
same time, many studios moved into television production even as they began to
differentiate their film product (Technicolor, widescreen, etc.) from the small, black
and white home theatre.
The 1956 Academy Award films exemplify Hollywood’s move into
spectacle epics during the late 1950s. Although Marty won Best Picture in 1955,
possibly signaling a turn toward shorter, more intimate character study dramas to
complement “home theater,” the Best Picture nominees for 1956, The King and I,
The Ten Commandments, Around the World in 80 Days, Giant and Friendly
Persuasion were all expensive “event” films.
The 1956 Best Picture winner, Michael Todd’s Around the World in 80
Days was “the biggest” in the category. Produced independently by first time
producer Michael Todd, who sold the film’s distribution rights to United Artists,
Around the World in 80 Days was spectacular in size and magnitude. Based on Jules
Verne’s famous novel, and with a score from the reputable Victor Young, the film
was shot “around the world” on location in eight countries and five studio lots. The
film featured a cast of nearly fifty internationally famous movie stars, from the
Mexican comedian Cantinflas to Marlene Dietrich. Shot for $60 million dollars in
Todd-AO style, using Technicolor and widescreen, Around the World in 80 Days,
according to Life, depicted the world “when it was wider” as “good fun and
frolic.”3 9 The film was marketed as “the fist with the most.” Around the World in 80
Days premiered in a Broadway theatre where guests were given a special Around
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the World Almanac to serve as a playbill for the film. The Almanac bragged of the
film’s excessiveness, arguing the film was an expression of America’s affluent
society. Around the World in 80 Days was a land of plenty: the most miles traveled,
costumes designed, people photographed, sets used, even the most hot meals served
to cast and crew while shooting.4 0
While Hollywood films grew more lavish and expensive, many of the
country’s newly independent theatres began to experiment with different and more
affordable types of non-studio films. In Sure Seaters: The Emergence o f Art House
Cinema, film scholar Barbara Wilinsky reports that the number of art house theatres
in America more than doubled during the 1950s.4 1 As Hollywood films grew
increasingly lavish and more expensive to rent, many theater owners turned to less
expensive art, exploitation, and independent films. Luckily for the theaters, these
films were also very popular with the new youth audience. Starting as early as 1948,
even foreign companies like Pathe noticed this shift and opened art house theaters in
America’s urban centers. At the same time, many of the country’s newsreel and
ethnic theatres converted to art house theatres.
As many film scholars have note, Rome Open City began the art house boom
in America. Rossellini’s film reconstructed life in Rome during the first months of
1944 when it was under German occupation. Rome Open City changed film history.
As film historian David Forgacs explains:
It was essentially a transitional film—for Rossellini, for the cinema,
for a society coming out of two decades of Fascism-rather than a
wholly new kind of work. ..It is a hybrid, in which cinematic
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innovation is grafted onto dramatic convention, the values of anti-
Fascism and working class collectivism onto a narrative with a
conservative sexual and social ethos. It is also a film where
photographic documentation and historical testimony coexist with a
mythical reconstruction of the past in which good memories are made
to drive out bad.4 2
For Fogacs, Rome Open City “consisted not of direct representations of events in
reality but of textual elaborations of already represented events.” Even so, the film
was popular. Rome Open City spent a record breaking one hundred weeks in Times
Square in 1946 and single handedly inspired Manhattan’s Trans-Lux newsreel
theatres to convert into art house theatres in 1948. The review of the film in The
New Masses, a popular Communist newspaper in America at the time, argued that
the film proved “that a low budget picture can be magnificently successful, that
such films can be made by progressive groups...that we do not have to depend upon
Hollywood and commercial production exclusively for the kind of films that should
be made.” What The New Masses saw in Open City, The Group saw in Shadows.
These films proved that low budget, socially conscious films could compete thrive
in the American marketplace.
The same month The New American Cinema Group met at the Producers
Theatre, the Theatre Arts Guild of America held a symposium on the American arts
at Antioch College. Contrary to what might have been expected of a panel devoted
to the filmic arts, the panel did not discuss avant-garde filmmaking. The “Expensive
Arts” panel instead discussed “the problem of the independent or unusual film in
America.” Hosted by Film Quarterly president John Adams, the panel included
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Shirley Clarke along with Edward Harrison, art film importer and distributor, Ben
Kenly, theatre manager, Elodie Osborn, president of a film society, and Cinema 16
president Amos Vogel. The panel discussed its desires to create a new art cinema
apart from the avant-garde.
Published in Film Quarterly, the article included a lengthy introduction that
explained the distribution problem facing the new American cinema. The article
began:
The problem of the independent or unusual film in America is to an
astounding extent a problem of distribution, as anyone attempting to
secure backing for a film speedily discovers. Unless a film is
sponsored by a company or government agency (which brings other
handicaps in its train) its costs must be regained through some
distribution mechanism: it must be taken to the exhibitors, and the
exhibitors must take it the audiences, who must see it and pay for
doing so. This linkage is a symbiotic one: no element can exist
without the others, and they stand or fall together.
Unfortunately, to date they have mostly fallen, so far as offbeat films
are concerned. The dominant system of film distribution, keyed to the
Hollywood product, has no place for the limited audience film, and no
established means of reaching specialized audiences. The art house
chains, while they have been growing somewhat, cannot as yet offer a
financial basis upon which independent production can be sustained,
and the distributors who supply them with films cannot either.
Paradoxically, we might say that both the Hollywood and foreign film
distribution systems are too ‘efficient’: they cannot afford the risks
that are necessary if film art is to develop healthily in this
country—the mutations, so to speak, of which, many must be
sacrificed that the growth of new forms may proceed. The task
devolves upon those who will benefit from new films: the filmmakers
and their potential film audiences.
The tasks are clearly formidable, for film is evidently a medium
whose distribution and exhibition patterns tend strongly toward
centralization and standardization. But it is essential that solutions be
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found if film is to become freer as an art, to break out of the rigid
commercial pattern that has prevailed hitherto. Some freak
occurrences will always take place—when creative men manage to
seize the main chance. But it would be good to know what may be
done in a systematic way.4 3
As the article’s introduction detailed, the new cinema wanted to get into the
commercial marketplace but it didn’t know how. The new cinema wanted to reach
the same audience as the Hollywood cinema, but it didn’t want to become a mini-
Hollywood in the process. In other words, the new cinema wanted to succeed
without selling out.
The new cinema faced another challenge. The new cinema was that it didn’t
really know how to relate to large audiences. Emerging from the avant-garde, the
new cinema was didn’t know how to relate to “the people.” In order to “reach those
large segments of the population accustomed to filmed entertainment,” the new
cinema would have to overcome its cultural isolation. The new cinema was totally
unprepared for this step. As Cinema 16 President Amos Vogel explained:
We are faced with what I would call a general and complete lack of
film culture. There is not enough support and there’s not enough
understanding of this medium. We have magazines like Film
Quarterly and Film Culture, but they don’t reach the masses.
The challenge was great, but not impossible. Vogel concluded optimistically:
Now I contend that the so-called “average mass audience” would be
capable, would be eminently capable of enjoying the films we enjoy.
We are not in that sense elite, or, if we are, that can be changed.
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The new cinema would be an “art” cinema to the extent that “art” meant socially
engaged and politically motivated. The new cinema would be “commercial” to the
extent that it reached a commercial audience.
As this chapter has shown, The Group’s desire for a new American cinema
emerged from a specific political and cultural landscape. The breakdown of the
studio system along with the government’s appropriation of abstraction during the
Cold War created the cultural opening necessary for The Group to imagine feature
films for large audiences. If a film like Open City could succeed in the American
marketplace without selling out, the new cinema wondered, then shouldn’t an
American independent filmmaker be able to use neo-realism for the same ends?
5 5
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1 Brian Frye. “An Interview with Jonas Mekas.” Senses o f Cinema 2000.
2 Michael Renov. “Video Confessions.” Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg, Eds.
Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, ed. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 78-101.
3 Jack Sargeant. Naked Lens: Beat Cinema. London: Creation Books, 1997.
4 The Brig was a Living Theatre production before the FBI closed the theatre for
alleged tax evasion during the early 1960s. Two years later, Mekas shot his filmed
version of the stage play illegally over the course of several nights at The Living
Theatre while friends stood outside the theatre on watch for the police.
5 James Roy MacBean. “Come Back Africa, The Brig.” The American New Wave:
1958-1967. Buffalo: Walker Art Center, 1982, pp. 56-61.
6 MacBean. “Come Back Africa, The Brig,” pg. 61.
7 Leo Marx. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea in
America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964, pg. 229.
8 Marx. The Machine in the Garden, pg. 8
9 Mekas also filmed Street Songs (1966) which documents a scene of The Living
Theatre’s “Mysteries and Smaller Pieces,” and Cup/Saucer/Two Dancers/Radio
(1965), a documentary about the dancer Kenneth King, during the early 1960s.
1 0 The Film Culture Reader, pg. 4.
1 1 Pierre Bourdieu. The Field o f Cultural Production. Columbia: Columbia
University Press, 1993.
1 2 Lauren Rabinovitz. Points of Resistance: Women, Power, and Politics in the New
York Avant-garde Cinema, 1943-7 l.Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991,
Pg- 81.
1 3 Clement Greenberg. “The Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” Charles Harrison and Paul
Wood, Art in Theory 1900-1990. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992. pp. 529-541.
1 4 Serge Guilbaut. How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1983.
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1 5 Schlesinger. The Politics o f Freedom, pp. 658-660.
1 6 Schlesinger. The Politics of Freedom, pg. 657.
1 7 John Handhart. A History o f the American Avant-Garde Cinema. New York:
American Federation of Arts Press, 1976, pg. 21.
1 8 Here I’m referring specifically to Brakhage’s early filmmaking and also to Carolee
Schneeman’s Fuses (1967), which is in many ways homage to Brackhage’s early
films. In both instances, the filmmakers overexposed, scratched, and glued grass and
other organic components to their films.
1 9 Lucy Fischer. “Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde.” A History of the
American Avant-Garde Cinema. New York: American Federation of Arts Press,
1976, pp. 1-23.
2 0 Stan Brakhage. Metaphors on Vision. New York: Film Culture, 1963.
2 1 Maya Deren. “Movie Journal.” Film Culture Number 39, pp. 49-55.
2 2 Deren. Film Culture, pg. 54.
2 3 Jonas Mekas. “Notes on a New American Cinema.” The Film Culture Reader, pp.
87-107.
2 4 Berolt Brecht. “Popularity and Realism.” Art in Theory: 1900-1990. pp. 489-49.
2 5 Sitney. The Film Culture Reader, pg. 25.
2 6 Jonas Mekas. “The Experimental Film in America.” The Film Culture Reader, pp.
21-27. Mekas has since become one of the most outspoken advocates for avant-garde
film in America. Yet the point is that he did at the time of writing this essay feel as if
another film movement was needed for a “complete derangement of the cinematic
senses.”
2 7 Mekas. “The Experimental Film In America,” pg. 22.
2 8 William Hauptman. “The Suppression of Art in the McCarthy Decade.”
Artforum 17 October 1973, pp. 48-52.
5 7
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2 9 Alfred H. Barr Jr. “Is Modem Art Communistic.” The New York Sunday Times
Magazine 14 December 1952, pp. 22-23. This essay quotes Barr’s article as
reproduced in Art and Society, pp. 660-663.
3 0 It is by now relatively well known that the government appropriated Abstract
Expressionism during the Cold War. For more on this topic see Serge Guilbaut. How
New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Or, for a recent account see Frances Stoner
Saunders. The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. New
York: The New Press, 1999.
3 1 Michael Brenson. Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress, and the Place of
Visual Arts in America. New York: New Press, 2001, pp. 15-58.
3 2 Brenson. Visionaries and Outcasts, pg. 20.
3 3 Ann Charters. The Beat Reader. New York: Penguin Books, 1992, xxxi.
3 4 The poem is remarkable in its entirety. Like so many Beat poems, this one is best
read aloud. My favorite line, “I’m addressing you. Are you going let Time magazine
ran you life? I ’m obsessed with Time. I read it everyday,” conveys the Beat
generation’s feelings of betrayal at the hands of the mass media and confusion over
what it means to be an American citizen.
3 5 Thomas Schatz. The Genius of the System. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996,
pp. 8-9.
3 6 According to Kristen Thompson and David Bordwell, by the end of the 1950s,
90% of U.S. homes had televisions. Film History. An Introduction. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1994, pg. 375.
3 7 Thompson and Bordwell. Film History, pp. 373-376.
3 8 Thompson and Bordwell. Film History, pg 375.
3 9 “When this World was Wider: Mike Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days in Good
Fun and Frolic,” Life 1956, pp. 84-91.
4 0 Mike Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days Almanac. New York: Random House,
1956.
4 1 Mike Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days Almanac, pg. 65.
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4 2 David Forgacs. Rome Open City. London: BFI Publishing, 2000, pp. 11-12.
4 3 “The Expensive Art: A Discussion of Film Distribution and Exhibition in the U.S.”
Film Quarterly Summer 1960, pp. 19-34.
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CHAPTER TWO
THE CHANGING LANGUAGE OF THE NEW CINEMA
“The Changing Language of Cinema” was the title Jonas Mekas gave to
his Village Voice column in January of 1962. “This is what it is all about, “ he
argued, “new times, new content, new language.” Mekas traced the “new”
cinema back to James Agee’s film In the Streets (1948) and Sidney Meyers The
Quiet One (1949), a film about a “lonely psychologically disturbed Negro boy.”1
Like the new American films that followed, Morris Engel’s The Little Fugitive
(1953), John Cassavetes’ Shadows (1959), Shirley Clarke’s The Connection
(1959), Lionel Rogosin’s Come Back Africa (1959) or Robert Frank’s The Sins
of Jesus (1961), In the Streets and The Quiet One are fictional films that look
like documentary films. As Mekas explained, “both films dealt with realistic
subject matter, both used non-professional actors; both were shot on actual
location, often with concealed cameras. And they both had spontaneity of action
and camera that was very different from their documentary predecessors.. .and
the experimental films made at about the same time.” 2 Outside of the film
studios and the art museums, Mekas reported, the new generation was changing
the language of the American cinema.
American independent cinema was changing in the early 1960s;
however, these changes were neither “new” nor purely American in origin.
Agee called for new American cinema ten years before he made In the Streets.
“The films I’m most eagerly looking forward to will not be documentaries,”
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Agee argued, “but works of fiction, played against and into and in collaboration
with unrehearsed and un-invented reality.”3 Decades later, the New American
Cinema retrospective, curator Melinda Ward explained the new cinema along
similar lines, arguing that the new cinema’s vitality emerged from its
“unrehearsed quality and engagement with the cultural and political realities of
the disenfranchised.”4 As Agee had predicted, the new American cinema was a
sort of American neo-Realism. The new cinema represented contemporary
social issues in a visual language of “un-invented reality,” with location
shooting, sound and light design, vernacular language and non-professional
actors. The new cinema looked like Italian neo-Realism while its content was
specifically “American.”
The new American cinema recalled the New Deal public arts. James
Agee’s In the Streets, for example, in many ways just extended Agee’s
collaboration with Walker Evans on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) for
the new times. With Agee’s poetic, stream of consciousness text and Evan’s
staged documentary photos, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) made the
Alabama tenet farmer into an iconic hero for a Depression era America. Evans
took the photographs of the tenant families in their everyday situations with
natural lighting, but he did so in the portraiture style of a classically trained
photographer. This juxtaposition between content and style gave the work its
political and emotional charge. As the book’s title evinces, Evans portraits
elevated the poor tenant farmer to a status generally reserved for “famous men.”
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As with the new cinema, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was the work of
formally trained artists who wanted to take their art to the street and connect
with “the people.”
Like the new cinema, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is in part a
critique of the intellectual aloofness of modem art.5 Agee and Evans organized
the book’s photographs in the popular style of a family album. They argue in
the prologue that the reader should not interpret the book as “art.” Such an
interpretation, the argued, would undercut the book’s politics. As Agee put it,
“Every fury has been absorbed in time, as art, or as religion, or as authority in
some way or another. The deadliest blow the enemy of the human soul can
strike is to do fury honor.. .Above all else: in God’s name don’t think of it as
Art.”6 The new cinema felt the same way.
In Photography (1969), Walker Evans elaborated on why his generation
held such contempt for art. Evens and his generation came of age in the shadow
of Alfred Steigliz, one of the first American photographers to be internationally
regarded as a “great” American artist. Steiglitz’s city images were painterly,
emotive, and abstract. For Evans, these images converted the reality of city
streets into a “high” art. Evans appreciated Steiglitz’s careful mastery of the
craft of photography, but considered his photos to be stuffy, and divorced from
social reality. Evans built his career on a different notion of art and the artist. In
Photography, Evans explained:
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The photographer who knows he is an artist is a very special
individual.. .after a certain point in his formative years, he learns
his looking outside of art museums: his place is in the streets, the
village, and the ordinary countryside. For his eye: the raw feast:
much used shops, bedrooms, and yards, far from the halls of full
dress architecture, landscape splendor, or the more scenic nature.
The deepest and purest photographers now tend to be self-taught;
at least they have not as a rule been near any formal photography
courses.7
As this quote suggests, Evans believed that real art happened outside of the art
schools and museums. Art happened instead in the streets, villages, and the
ordinary countrysides. For Evans, the artists’ job was to capture the art in the
“much used shops, bedrooms, and yards.” Like the new cinema some years
later, Evans believed in socially engaged, politically motivated popular art, one
grounded in everyday locations. “In the arts,” as Evans argued, “meaning is
always grounded in time, place, and social reality.”
Evans’ ideas about art are representative of the New Deal era arts in
general. From King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread (1932) to Dorthea Lange’s
Migrant Mother (1936), Margaret Bourke-White’s You Haven’t Seen Their
Faces (1937) and John Steinback’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), American art
of the 1930s in general focused on the struggles of the working class. This
tendency grew out of the New Deal public arts program. In the face of economic
depression, Franklin Roosevelt hoped that the public arts programs could work
with public works programs to unite the people for a better future. New Deal
artists upheld values of work, sacrifice, and community. These artists used
representational as opposed to abstract images to everyday people in a
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straightforward language. Like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the public arts
made heroes out of otherwise invisible people.
The group of painters called “The Regionalists” was the most celebrated
of the New Deal arts. Thomas Hart Benton, John Stuart Curry, and Grant Smith
were “regionalist” because their murals and paintings depicted the local cultures
of different American states. Benton favored Missouri (A Social History of the
State o f Missouri, 1936). Curry represented Kansas {Baptism in Kansas, 1928).
Wood painted Iowa (American Gothic, 1930). The Regionalist murals and
paintings celebrated self-reliance, hard work, and community within specific
locations. The Regionalists forwarded a worker-based economy and implicitly
critiqued corporate greed. Perhaps the most renowned of the Regionalists,
Thomas Hart Benton explained his arts relationship to reformist politics. For
Benton:
The artistic projects of the New Deal were largely sparked by
attitudes already affirmed by Wood, Curry, and myself. Roosevelt’s
early social moves were were concentrated on the solution of
specifically American problems. This Americanism found its
aesthetic expression in Regionalism.8
Thomas Hart Benton became the face of Regionalism when his self-
portrait made the cover of Time in 1934. According to Time, Regionalism was the
new American art and Benton was its father. The son of a U.S Attorney from
Missouri, Benton began his art career in the movies, painting scenic backdrops for
Fox and Pathe studios in New Jersey. Benton joined the New York based People’s
Art Guild during the 1920s to bring art to the people with settlement house shows
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and community art classes. The American Historical Epic (1927-27) from this
time is a series of mural sized paintings (the size of movie backdrops in fact)
depicting a people’s history of America. Benten’s characters are icons, including
cowboys, pioneers, Native Americans and missionaries. All characters are
represented as strong, dignified, working people on the frontiers, mountains, in
the factories and fields of a great land. According to Benton, “I tried to show that
people’s behaviors, their action on the open land, was the primary reality of
American life.”9
Benton’s America Today mural series for The New School for Social
Research during the New Deal arts represents the daily activities of common men
as epics. The characters are burlesque dancers, boxers, movie watchers,
bartenders, factory workers and farmers. Characters, colors, and shapes collide
like montage. American Today shows Benton’s relationship to cinema.
Specifically, the work combines the codes of popular cinema with the avant-garde
to bring a reformist message to a mass audience. As art theorist Erika Doss
argues:
Benton’s style is diametrically opposed to the long-standing pictorial
conventions of scientific perspective, symmetrical order, realistic
anatomy, modeling according to the incidence of light, and a fixed or
static point of views. His regionalist murals are formally predicated
on the modem spatial concepts of avant-garde art and popular movies.
There is a fast paced intensity to his spontaneous scenes of Americans
at work and play, the same dynamic energy of early 1930s movies,
with their split screens, zip pans, moving cameras, all combined to
force the narrative pace relentlessly.1 0
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Benton’s Hollywood painting, which was commissioned but never
published by Life magazine in 1937, evinces Doss’ point about Benton’s style and
politics. Based on Benton’s experiences at Twentieth Century Fox, Hollywood
represents a major studio’s behind the scenes activities. To support the union
struggles that were embroiling the movie industry at the time, Hollywood reveals
the labor that produces a single movie image: the actors, directors, make-up artists
and the various crew members and their machines (cameras, spotlights,
microphones, soundboards, wind makers, and electric generators). The painting
celebrates labor as it criticizes the industry’s superficiality. The young, nearly
naked blonde woman is the painting’s superficial focal point. Although she is
centrally located, she is flat and uninteresting when compared to workers that
surround her. “She” represents what obfuscates the labor involved in making
movies. As with all of Benton’s work, Hollywood tells the working people’s story
of big business. For Benton, “I wanted to give the idea that the machinery of the
industry, cameras, carpenters, big generators, and high voltage wires is directed
mainly toward what young ladies have under their clothes.”1 1
Like Benton, the New Deal arts in general merged the codes of popular
culture with the politics of the avant-garde to send a reformist message to the
largest possible audience. New Deal arts critiqued high art for being out of
touch with the needs of the country. Like Agee and Evans, The Regionalists
found the art in the everyday. The “new” artist was connected to social reality.
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The new cinema aligns with the New Deal arts even as it emerged from
another socio-political context. The new cinema was not government
sponsored. Where the New Deal arts spoke for the government through public
arts, the new cinema spoke against the government and even government
supported arts like Abstract Expressionism.1 2 The new cinema wanted to
represent what the popular sociologist and public intellectual Michael
Harrington in 1962 called “the other America.” 1 3 The new cinema like the
New Deal arts wanted to make the country a better place for everyone.
However, if the New Deal arts spoke the government’s plan for social reform,
the new cinema critiqued the government.1 4 Like Hollywood, the government
was for the new cinema an oppressive institution.
The new cinema was an expression of a “new” generation that held the
government responsible for the country’s uneven economic development. While
the government promoted America as the most “affluent society” in the world,
and for the new middle class this was absolutely true, underlying the economic
prosperity and patriotism, chaos and nihilism brewed. The new generation
explored these feelings. As Norman Mailer explained in his 1957 essay, “The
White Negro”:
Probably we will never be able to determine the psychic havoc of the
concentration camps and the atom bomb upon the unconscious minds
of almost everyone alive in these years. ..It is on this bleak scene that
a phenomenon has appeared—the American existentialist-the hipster,
the man who knows that if our collective condition is to live with
instant death by atomic war, relatively quick death by the state, or a
slow death by conformity., .if the fate of twentieth century man is to
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life with death from adolescence to premature senescence,
why then the only life giving answer is to accept the terms of death,
and to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out
on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self.1 5
For Mailer, the new American existentialist was the white, middle class hipster
with the privilege to divorce himself from society to explore the depths of his
soul, outside of the (white) mainstream, and in the streets of segregated America.
Here, the “white negro” learned how to at least look cool like jazz. With its
emphasis improvisation, personal expression or “flow” and spontaneity, jazz
became the metaphor for individual freedom for the new generation.
In “The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose,” Jack Kerouac used jazz as a
metaphor for the purity and freedom of beat prose: “sketching language is like
undisturbed flow from the mind.. .blow!”1 6 For Kerouac and the rest of the Beats,
jazz was a musical, literary and lifestyle. It was rebellion and social critique. Jazz,
for the “white Negro,” was freedom from formalities in art and in daily life. Jazz
made art out of daily life for the Beat generation, which Norman Mailer
appropriately describes as a generation of “white Negroes.”
Although “beat” implied many things, during his famous appearance on
“The Steve Allen Show” in 1959, Kerouac defined beat as meaning
“sympathetic.” The “white negro” lifted his style of rebellion from black
culture and jazz. This appropriation was a kind of theft, yet it was also a kind of
appreciation. As Kerouac explained, there was a kind of sympathy that came
from this act of love and theft. Arguably, the “white Negro” Beats initiated the
integration process of the Civil Rights movement.
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By the 1960s, the time of the new cinema, the political nihilism of the
Beat generation had become political activism and liberal humanist of the New
Left. As the New Left’s manifesto, The Port Heron Statement of The Students
for a Democratic Society (SDS) explained, the new generation, like the new
cinema, wanted to represent the other America. The new generation was
uncomfortable with their middle class comforts. As the SDS manifesto
explained, “We are the people of this generation, bred in at least modest
comfort, housed now in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we
inherit.” The New Left converted Beat attitudes into social change. The
Berkeley Free Speech Movement expanded Kerouac’s ideas about spontaneous
prose to demand the right for free speech on college campuses. Where the
Beat’s used their mind for self-discovery and expression, the New Left, the
new generation and the new cinema believed that mind was a tool for social
change. The new movement was “a left with real intellectual skills, committed
to deliberativeness, honesty, reflection as working tools.”1 1 The new cinema
was part of this movement.
Specifically, the new cinema was a New Left art movement. The new
cinema rebelled against the old notions of art as the new generation of social
activist rejected the “old” Left’s interest in the Soviet Union. The new cinema also
embraced the New Left’s reformist politics and liberal humanist ideals about
social change. The new cinema attached itself to the Civil Rights movement,
which in the late 1950s launched the most profound critique American democracy
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in history. Civil Rights began on the buses, streets, lunch counters, voting poles,
and in the high schools of small towns all across the South, from Montgomery to
Birmingham and Little Rock. Southern black leaders, black citizens and the
middle class white youth migrated to the South for Civil Rights in much the same
way that the new cinema wanted to take to the streets to initiate social change.
Civil Rights reinvigorated the many of the American arts including the cinema
with a fresh purpose. However, to appreciate the ways that the Civil Rights
movement changed the American arts, it is useful to appreciate Civil Rights as an
art movement of its own.
There are at least two ways to appreciate the art of the Civil Rights
movement. The first is the more obvious and includes the work of the Freedom
Singers and the way that singing in general united, mobilized and energized the
people of the meetings, marches, and other public demonstrations. To
accompany her speech for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, for
example, Fanny Lou Hammer sang “This Little Light of Mine” for a television
audience during the 1964 Democratic Convention. The small, black and white
image of Hammer singing about hope and justice merged the codes of popular
culture with Civil Rights politics in much the same way that the new Deal artists
did during their day. Many of the Civil Rights demonstrations were televised.
Here, Civil Rights activists demonstrated in their best Sunday suits and dresses
the ugliness of Southern racism. Television cameras and newspapers brought
this violent spectacle to an international audiences and humiliated federal
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government. The memorable images of the dogs and the water hoses
contradicted the government’s argument that America was the freest place in the
world. Here, Civil Rights was in many ways a byproduct of the mass media,
what the new cinema called popular art.
The “reality” of these images must have made the abstract expressions of
the previous generation appear self-involved, elitist and esoteric, for it was
precisely for “reality” that the new generation of artists hit the streets. In 1958, for
example, Robert Frank {Pull My Daisy) published his photo-joumal of his road
trip across America. Following Kerouac’s stream of consciousness introduction,
The Americans features eighty-three black and white photos of daily America life.
As with Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Frank’s images reveal dignity of
poverty. Frank’s images also critique the idea of the American dream. “Hoboken,
New Jersey,” for instance, shows a tattered American flag as it covers the people
of a run down tenement building. Where the flag in the 1950s was typically
represented in all its glory, Frank’s flag is lifeless, black and white, and partially
cropped out of the image.
“Charleston, South Carolina” engages Civil Rights. Here, a centrally
framed middle-aged black woman in a surgically white nurse uniform leans
against a white brick fence with a white baby wrapped in a white blanket in her
arms. The woman in this image is smothered by whiteness. “Trolley, New
Orleans” also depicts segregation. From left to right, the image communicates
the South’s racial hierarchy, starting with a white male, then a white woman,
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two white children, a black male, and finally a black woman. Like the images
in The Americans, this one documents social injustice.
The new American cinema is similar in tone and style to The Americans.
The remainder of this chapter discusses the new American cinema through
filmmaker Shirley Clarke and her films The Connection (1959), The Cool World
(1964) and Portrait of Jason (1967). Clarke’s films show how new cinema films
connected to the New Left, Civil Rights, and harked back to the New Deal arts.
Clarke is also interesting because of her “otherness” within the new American
cinema. A lone woman in a sea of male filmmakers, Clarke’s films give a
different perspective on the similar issues. Like Shadows or The Quiet One,
Clarke’s The Connection, The Cool World, and Portrait o f Jason critique America
from the perspective of a black male character. Yet Clarke’s films are unique from
these other new cinema films because they also critique “the white man’s”
fascination with black masculinity.
Shirley Clarke, A New American Filmmaker
Now I want to break away from the other conventions, the idea of heavy
production, artificial lighting, all of the slickness that plagues the movies. I want
to just pick up a camera and go out and shoot the world as it really is.
“Woman Director Makes the Scene,” The New York Times 19621 8
For years I’d felt like an outsider so I identified with the problems of minority
groups. I used all kinds of stand-ins for me in my films because I didn’t think
anyone was interested in my personal life as a woman. I thought it was more
important to be some kind of goddamned junkie who felt alienated rather than to
say that I am alienated as a woman who doesn’t feel part of the world and who
wants in.
“An Out of the System Person,” The Los Angeles Times 19751 9
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Shirley Clarke is one of the few women filmmakers in American history.
Like the other women who occupy this small group, Shirley Clarke was able to
transcend gender barriers because she had economic privilege. Shirley Brenberg
Clarke was bom in 1925 in New York City to a wealthy Park Avenue Jewish
family. Shirley’s father was a millionaire in the manufacturing business. Her
mother was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. The oldest of three daughters,
Shirley was raised by nannies and in private schools. Although her dyslexia
prevented her from learning to read and write until the fifth grade, Shirley was
adept in the arts. Dance especially provided her with a healthy outlet for her
feelings of estrangement from her peers as well as from her father, whom she later
in life described as an emotionally aloof man. Shirley had a lonely childhood.
Years later, she explained how her lonely childhood shaped her adult self and film
career. “The child who observes from the outside has many advantages, “ Clarke
remarked. “Eventually she learns to identify with out people.” 2 0 Clarke’s new
American cinema films, The Connection, The Cool World and Portrait o f Jason
take the outsider’s perspective.
Shirley attended but never graduated from some of the country’s most
prestigious universities, including Bennington, Stephens College and Johns
Hopkins. Shirley did not want to be university student. She wanted to be a
professional dancer. At 19 years of age, Shirley married Bert Clarke, a “good
Jewish boy” fourteen years her senior. Shirley used the trust money she received
for her wedding to pay for dance lessons with some of New York City’s most
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renowned modem dancers, including Martha Graham and Hanya Holm. Shirley
also studied at the Dance Theatre of the Young Men’s and Young Women’s
Hebrew Association, one of the city’s more experimental dance theatres. At the
height of her dance studies, Shirley and Bert had a daughter, Wendy (now a
filmmaker in her own right). Not long after, and in the face of a failing dance
career, Shirley bought her first Bolex camera and enrolled in Hans Richter’s City
College film program.
Following Maya Deren, who also began her filmmaker career as a modem
dancer, Clarke’s early films are choreographies of movement and light.2 1 A Dance
in the Sun (1953), In Paris Parks (1954) and A Moment in Love (1957) celebrate
the camera’s ability to transform urban space into a city symphony of image and
music. Clarke’s most respected city symphony, Bridges Go Round (1958) creates
a rich, dream like atmosphere of movement, image, and sound.2 2 However, Clarke
soon abandoned short, experimental cinema for documentary. In the late 1950s,
she established a cooperative film company called Filmmakers Inc. with William
van Dyke, D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock and Albert Maysles, who
introduced her to Fredrick Wiseman. Before Wiseman was a filmmaker in his
own right, he was an attorney and a film producer. Wiseman produced Clarke’s
second feature film, The Cool World (1964), a film that merges the experimental
cinema with documentary and fiction.2 3
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Clarke’s first fictional film interrogates the documentary cinema’s “fly on
the wall” technique. Like Mekas’ The Brig, Clarke’s The Connection (based on
Jack Gilbert’s novel) began as a Living Theatre production. The Living Theater
was to Broadway what the new cinema hoped to be to Hollywood. Judith Malina,
a protegee of Erwin Piscator, a New School professor and theater director known
for adapting classical plays for contemporary times, and Julian Beck, a Abstract
Expressionist painter, began The Living Theatre in New York City in the late
1940s in response to Broadway’s tendency for escapist entertainment. The Living
Theater productions focused instead on social realism through some of the more
radical playwrights and authors of the time, from Brecht to Gertrude Stein. For
this reason, The Living Theatre productions like The Brig and The Connection
were perfect for the new cinema.
The Living Theatre’s The Connection merged direct address and other
distanciation techniques associated with radical theatre with a contemporary
subject and mood. The play tells a day in the life of a group of junkies anxiously
awaiting a heroin connection. The strung out junkies are also jazz musicians. The
production featured a realistic stage design. According to Julian Beck, “there had
to be real dirt, not simulations.” The production also featured “live” jazz. Besides
the non-linear narrative, the play also includes characters that, like jazz musicians,
spontaneously speak with improvised dialogue. As theatre scholar Bradford
Martin has argued, the play “anticipated the New Left’s concern with poverty and
other urban ills during the 1960s.” For Beck, “We had to talk about heroin
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addicts. It was important to show that these people who, in 1959, were considered
the lowest of the low were human.. .and that what the addicts had come to was not
the result of an indigenous personality evil, but was symptomatic of the errors of
the whole world.”2 4
Shot on The Living Theatre’s stage, Shirley Clarke’s The Connection
(1959) is a grainy, black and white film tightly based on the stage play. Like the
play, Clarke told the story with a gritty realism. Although the censors abhorred the
film’s grit, and delayed the film’s United States release for nearly a year, the press
welcomed the film’s reality as fresh and exciting. Clarke’s film was “raw and
profane” but refreshing.2 5 The New York Times celebrated it over Hollywood’s big
budget spectacles: “At a time when Hollywood’s attention is focused on the
spectacle of Elizabeth Taylor barging down the Nile... The Connection is a small-
scale, black and white, uncompromisingly realistic study of dope addiction put
together at an infinitesimal cost by a handful of little known but enthusiastic
partisans from the off-Broadway stage and screen.” The Connection was the little
film that could. As The Times continued, “Its defeated protagonists, sitting
drearily around a Greenwich Village pad waiting for their fix.. .are presumably
the logical products of the conformity, insecurity, and hopelessness of the era of
the H-Bomb. The whole world, as one of the characters defines the theme, is
hooked.”2 6
Clarke’s The Connection turns on a conceit. “I’m JJ. Burden.” A voice
over tells us in the beginning that what we are about to see is the left over footage
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Clarke’s The Connection turns on a conceit. “I’m J.J. Burden.” A voice
over tells us in the beginning that what we are about to see is the left over footage
from a failed documentary. Burden then reads his closing statement:
Jim Dunn turned over all the footage to me before he left. I worked
with him as cameraman and we shot the whole thing in a drug
addict’s apartment early one evening last fall. The responsibility of
putting together this material is fully mine.
Burden’s statement suggests that something must have gone horribly wrong
during the shoot for the director to turn the footage over to the cameraman.
The Connection happens the director’s and Burden’s camera, which
captures the white hipster director prodding the junkies to “make it real” for the
home audience. However, the director can’t handle the reality he simulates. His
inability to do so is the film’s true spectacle. The director wants to be like the hip
junkies, yet there are awkward flaws in his performance of hip-ness. His jeans are
rolled too high. His tennis shoes are obscenely white. His hair is wrong. The
junkies have to correct his street slang. The Connection makes a fool of the
director for trying to appropriate “cool” for himself and his film.
After “Cowboy” coxes the director to try the “junk” for himself, the
director finally learns what the junkies really feel like. The director confesses,
“there’s something dirty about peeking into people’s lives,” and then breaks
down, “stop looking at me!” In the end, Burden, the voice that claimed to have
edited the director’s footage into an expose of the white hipster is, in fact, a black
man. Burden is also Clarke’s fictional persona.
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The Connection is part of a larger cultural phenomenon of the late 1950s
and early 1960s. While Civil Rights made the news, “the black experience”
became a popular trope within literature, trade books, magazines and even films.
While black authors like James Baldwin {Go Tell It On the Mountain, 1959),
Paule Marshal (Browngirl, Brownstone, 1961) and Claude Browne {Manchild in
the Promised Land, 1965) wrote thinly veiled autobiographies about growing up
in Harlem, white authors explored “the black experience” from another
perspective. While authors like Baldwin and Marshal were inclined to represent a
continuum of emotions within “the black experience,” from joy to anger to
sadness, books by white authors like Black Like Me (John Howard Griffin) or The
Cool World (Warren Miller) tended to reduce “the black experience” to tragedy.
Warren Miller’s The Cool World (1960) details a week in the life of Duke,
a young boy and gang member from Harlem. More than anything else in the
world, Duke wants the respect of his male peers. He lives with his mother and
grandmother, but doesn’t know his biological father, who left the family just
before Duke was bom. For this reason, Duke looks to the local drug dealer as a
father figure. Yet it is Priest who coaxes Duke into selling drugs. Duke agrees
because he wants to buy a gun. The gun, he thinks, will earn him the respect he
years for. He fantasizes about what people will say when they see his piece: “Here
come Duke. He cool. He got heart. When they see me strut they know a rumble
on.”2 7 However, in the end, Priest is murdered while Duke is arrested for
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murder. A moral tale about the harsh realities of life in Harlem, The Cool World
exploits “the black experience” as melodrama. Duke’s vernacular speech grants
the novel “authenticity,” but without any larger social critique, the novel’s claims
to authenticity ultimately just exoticize the “black experience” for entertainment
purposes.
The Cool World (1964) is Shirley Clarke’s second new American cinema
film. Just before the film was released, Clarke wrote an essay on the film for
Films & Filming Magazine. Her essay explains very little about the filmmaking
process, as one might expect from an article for a filmmaking magazine. Clarke
instead focuses on the film’s subject matter. According to Clarke, The Cool World
takes us to the heart of race relations in America. Although it might now be
difficult to imagine anyone not knowing about Harlem, at the time it was still a
relatively unknown place for many white middle class audiences. For this reason,
Clarke’s first paragraph explains where Harlem is exactly and ties this location to
the film’s larger message. As Clarke details:
Harlem is geographically located at the very tip of Manhattan Island
and it is fascinating to realize that 5th Avenue, one of the most elegant
and beautiful residential and shopping avenues in the world, as it
comes to an end passes through the worst slum area in New York. 5th
Avenue from 115th to 120th , from Lenox to Madison Avenue, the very
heart of the ghetto of central Harlem, is the location of The Cool
World and is the location of our film.2 8
Many reviewers used the same metaphor, tone, and even stream of
consciousness hipster talk when describing the film. This performance was clearly
part of the film’s appeal for these reviewers. Like Clarke, the reviewers enjoyed
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the ethnographic journey into the Harlem darkness. For one, the film showed “the
Harlem world of violence-of slums, rats, drugs, knives, guns, gangs, rumbles,
mugging and murder—in other words, the Harlem jungles and the kid killers
growing up in the asphalt hell, are the subject of this fervent and fevered, but
never quite satisfactory, movie drama.”2 9
The same reviews also praised the film’s gritty realism as a testament to
the seriousness of its subject matter. For Newsweek, “this is not a series of squalid
35mm picture post cards, but a work of art informed by knowing compassion.”3 0
For Time, “Who will not remember the beautiful, wild faces of the children,
blooming like bright manna in the desolation. To see them is to die a little.”3 1
Other reviews noted the film’s neo-Realistic style. For one, “none of the kids in
the film had any previous acting experience. But it is their naturalness that makes
The Cool World authentic and an engrossing and overpowering movie.” Another
review celebrated the “stark realism throughout...(the film) portrays an element of
American life which many would like to pretend does not exist.” The Saturday
Post hoped “that many, many Americans black and white will come to see the
face of their grief and conscience: it is the face of a black boy as beautiful as he is
condemned.”3 2
The Cool World is similar to other ethnographic miniatures about “the
black experience” that were popular with middle class white Americans during
the Civil Rights era. Even The Saturday Evening Post published a photo
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collection called “The Invisible Americans.” The photographer of “The Invisible
Americans,” Ben Bagdikian eventually published his photos as a book, In the
Land of Plenty (1963), which references a John Kennedy quote. In a letter
Kennedy wrote to Lyndon Johnson in 1963, the young Kennedy said: “Poverty
in the midst of plenty is a paradox that must not go unchallenged in this
country.” Like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men or even The Americans, In the
Midst of Plenty documents the other side of American prosperity. The images
focus specifically on racial injustice.
Like The Cool World, In the Midst of Plenty takes the viewer into
segregated America. Bagdikian even described his journey in a way similar to
how Clarke details her travels into Harlem in her essay about The Cool World.
Bagdikian explains his journey:
As I drove the car through downtown Columbia I knew that
somewhere behind the big buildings were the row houses of the urban
Negro poor. I drove by graceful homes aglow with azalea, through the
outskirts with their Dairy Queens and root beer stands, until there was
only field and forest. Then I took the first side road I could find, then
another, each time choosing for the smaller of every fork until I
turned into one lane just wide enough for the car and had to stop
short.3 3
Bagdikian finds “urban Negro poor” just as Clarke discovers Harlem. Bagdikian
stars in front of the beautiful buildings of downtown Columbia before
descending into “urban Negro poor” just as Clarke finds Harlem from 5th
Avenue, “one of the most elegant and beautiful residential and shopping
avenues in the world.” In each case, the contrast between wealth and poverty
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and white and black provides both social critique and melodrama. Both Clarke
and Bagdikian position themselves as tour guides, bringing the privileged to the
other side of segregation and economic prosperity.
The Cool World begins with a field trip out of Harlem. Duke and his
school friend board the bus at the nagging requests of their high school teacher, a
sweaty white man in a white linen suit, for a day trip around New York City. The
bus moves past Central Park, down 5th Avenue, (“the richest avenue in New
York,” according to the teacher), past the public library to Greenwich Village. The
bus ride ends in front of the courthouse, where the teacher shouts American
history trivia as Duke discusses his gun with friends. The scene shows that
American history is irrelevant within the context of Duke’s situation as it reverses
the journey of the filmmaker and hypothetical audience member into Harlem to
Duke’s day trip out of Harlem.
In one of the many interviews that accompanied the film’s release, Clarke
explained that The Cool World was her rebuttal to Hollywood’s social problem
films. For Clarke:
In the mid-1950s we were shown a film about lynching with Lana
Turner in it. I found it very false. I did not believe it. To my eyes and
the way I saw things, all that lighting so carefully lighting Lana
Turner, a so properly coiffed and neatly dressed Lana, who was
supposed to be witnessing a lynching in a square in the South
somewhere was just not believable. And I said to myself, ‘that’s not
the way I would make a film. That just looks silly.3 4
Clarke’s description of Hollywood evokes Thomas Benton’s Hollywood. Just as
Benton had the blonde starlet stand for Hollywood’s corrupt value system, Clarke
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uses Lana Turner to symbolize Hollywood’s distance from social reality. Clarke
continued:
Hollywood has always shown the Negro in some fantasy trying
constantly to foster the image of Negros as they would like them to
be, “the happy singing children.” In The Cool World, we deal with
Negroes as human beings, people who reflect their background and
environment. We show how the oppression of enforced segregation
distorts the lives of a group of young boys, who at the threshold of
manhood, find that heir only choice is the ghetto and the choice of
what ghetto life offers. This leads to their ultimate destruction as boys
and as potential men capable of making constructive contributions to
society.
A magazine recently ran an article on the hundred richest Negroes in
America. They were doctors, entertainers, and undertakers: and a
great many others try making their money in the rackets. Five to ten
thousand Negroes in the United States may find a way out from their
misery; but we are thinking of the fifteen million.
Clarke’s message was even larger that this. She concluded her essay by calling for
total integration. She argued:
I think the Negroes should marry our sisters and our brothers and our
mothers: the answer to the so-called Negro question in the United
States of America is total integration on all levels. I don’t believe it
should be an economic revolution for better jobs and decent treatment
in hotels. It has to be complete psychological and social freedom.3 5
Clarke’s views on integration and Hollywood like her and her film to the
new cinema and the New Deal arts. Her views also come from her personal life.
At the time of The Cool World, Clarke was intimately involved with Carl Lee, the
black actor who played “Cowboy” in The Connection and “Priest” in The Cool
World. Clarke had by then divorced Bert Clarke. Besides acting in the film, Lee
co-wrote The Cool World with Clarke. He also coached the film’s non-actors. As
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Clarke explained, “Lee went throughout Harlem gathering together talented
children from actual street gangs. We then interviewed many other children at
which a while series of questions were asked: Did they have a gun? Would they
want a gun? And so on. From those answers and from Carle’s own experiences in
Harlem we developed the second stage, which was a shooting of the script.” 3 6 Lee
was as integral to the film as he was to Clarke’s view on “total integration.”
Like The Connection, The Cool World critiques white masculinity. The
film opens with a close up on an evangelical looking black man shouting, “Do
you want to know the Truth about the white man...white is but the absence of
color.” The camera then pulls out to reveal the socio-political context of this
statement. A montage sequence follows, showing the people of Harlem: black
women, men, young and old, a black baby wrapped in a white blanket, a surly
white police officer, and a stained glass image of a blue eyed Jesus. The montage
supports the speaker’s point about black empowerment and connects urban
poverty to police oppression and (white) Christianity. The montage also grounds
the film’s larger message: the individual is inseparable from the society in which
he lives. Like the New Deal arts and the new cinema at large, The Cool World
sees individuals as expressions of their socio-economic contexts.
In his essay on The Cool World, film scholar Noel Carroll argues:
Much of the activity of the American independent film movement is
best comprehended within the context of the mounting battle for
cultural representation. The Cool World strove to confront the
dominant cinema on a series of issues, both in terms of style and
content...(the film) presented sub-cultural, counter-cultural and
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minority culture versions of the American scene, presupposing the
necessity of representing these viewpoints as a crucial means of
enfranchising other than mainstream variations on our national
experience.3 7
Carroll links the representational politics of films like The Cool World to Civil
Rights as the “first of the great, post-World War egalitarian revolutions.” For
Carroll, The Cool World “bear(s) the pre-Watts and pre-Black Power
stamp. ..(its) form of address is not that of the firebrand or the revolutionary
upheaval or violent apocalypse but instead try(s) to show how discrimination
leads to the needless waste of lives.”
Like the New Deal arts and other new American films, The Cool World
exhibits a liberal humanism that believes that revealing the humanity within a
social problem is tantamount to solving it. For Clarke, The Cool World revealed:
For the young boys and girls trying to grow up in this ghetto their
only answer is to “play it cool.” If you’re cool you take nothing from
no one and get what you can. Your heroes are the coolest of all: the
slick racketeer, the “cats” with the money and the respect of the street,
even if this respect is based on fear. They have found a way out of the
reality that for them the “good life” of the white world doesn’t apply.
To make it out they have to beat the “man” the cops or the white
employer downtown; in fact, the whole white world that believes that
from the day they were bom they would be nothing but crooks or
gangsters. As one of the boys in the film says, “if they treat me like
shit well then that’s what I’m going to be.”
The film’s final scene brings this message home. Duke never gets the
money to buy the gun from Priest. Instead, Duke accidentally stabs and kills a
rival gang member. When Duke runs to his hide out to escape from the police, he
finds Priest shot dead next to the gun that was supposed to solve all of his
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problems. Once the police arrive and arrest Duke, the final image shows Duke in
the back of a police car slowly moving away from the camera into the night.
Clarke juxtaposes this scene against the sounds of a radio announcer celebrating
the moon landing along with Duke’s prophetic statement from earlier: “There
goes Duke. He’s a cold killer. He’s cool.” According to The Cool World, the only
way out of Harlem for the young people who live there in the back of a police
vehicle.3 8 While new American films like Shadows reveled in the idea of “cool,”
The Cool World critiques “cool” as an emotional front.
The Cool World also displays “the changing language of cinema” that
Mekas celebrated in his Village Voice column. Clarke’s film adheres to the new
cinema’s principles for a free cinema. Like Shadows, The Cool World used non
professional actors, improvised dialogue, location sound, lighting and set design,
and featured a jazz soundtrack.3 9 Besides the opening montage sequence, most of
the film is recorded in medium and long takes in the spirit of neo-Realism.4 0
Clarke combined montage with neo-Realism in much the same way that Benton
collided color and figure in his representational murals. Although Clarke and
Benton wanted to reach a popular audience, the montage in both is what ties their
work to the avant-garde.
Clarke’s final film of the 1960s was also collaboration with Carl Lee.
According to The Los Angeles Times, A Portrait of Jason (1967), is a portrait of
“no ordinary man.” Jason is “(1). A Negro, (2). A Homosexual.”4 1 The New York
Times called the film “a revelation about what being a Negro can do to a man; it’s
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a terrifying view of a man who is disintegrating before our eyes; it’s a not very
could sound from hell; it’s an eruption from the underground.”4 2 Shot on 16mm
black and white, A Portrait o f Jason is a three-hour interview cut from Clarke and
Lee’s twelve-hour sitting with Aaron Payne or “Jason Holiday” as he calls
himself. “A male prostitute night club entertainer houseboy intellectual.”4 3 As
Clarke argued, Jason is a fabulous queen. Clark’s film would have been better
titled Let Us Now Praise Fabulous Men. Jason performs famous monologues
(Mae West, Scarlet O’Hara, Barbara Streisand) and other important people, from
Miles Davis to the rich white woman he works for as a houseboy.
It is impossible to tell who is exploiting whom in A Portrait of Jason. The
film uses Jason for entertainment just as it provides him with his moment to shine.
Jason says in the film:
This is my moment. I’m like here on the thrown. I can say whatever I
damn well please. But it’s got to be righteous. This is my chance to
really feel myself and say: “Yes, I’m the bitch. You amateur cunts
need to take notice.”
The film fades out and then back again onto a tight close up on Jason who is now
drunk and sad, looking down into his drink. Lee provokes Jason to perform his
“real” self: “We can all tell that you’re a great actress and that you don’t care
about nothing and nobody but you. There’s only one role that you can’t play and
that’s yourself.” Like Clarke’s other films, this one expresses the Leftist politics
of the time. If Clarke’s other films define individuals within their socio-economic
context, A Portrait of Jason shows the social and political context within the
individual.
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In this way, A Portrait of Jason speaks to Warhol’s films of the time.
Sleep, Haircut, Eat, Kiss and Empire, a twenty-four hour tripod shot of the
Empire State Building, took cinema “back to its origins” for “a rejuvenation and
a cleansing.”4 4 Just like A Portrait of Jason, Warhol’s films are tripod films
about single actions like sleeping, kissing or eating. These films “brought
cinema back to its origins” as they recall the early days of cinema. Warhol’s
films evoke the early films of D.W. Griffith and other cinema pioneers, films
about single events like kissing, dancing, or the arrival of a train.
Like Warhol’s films, A Portrait o f Jason put the portable hand held
camera, which initiated the new American cinema in the first place, back on the
tripod in order to focus on the depths of a single person in one location. Clarke’s
transition stands for a larger transition. A Portrait of Jason symbolizes the new
American cinema’s retreat from the streets of America back into New York
City’s more elite art world.
Even so, The Connection, The Cool World and A Portrait o f Jason are
some of the first films by a white American filmmaker to grant a black male
character the powers of rational thought. Here, Clarke’s cinema recalls a tradition
in social protest that links to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Toms Cabin. Clarke
and Beecher Stowe were both white women who authored texts about the negative
effects of racism on black people in America. The difference is that Beecher
Stowe’s protest novel strips the black male character of all mental powers. As
Beecher wrote him, “Uncle Tom”:
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...is a large, broad-chested, powerfully made mad of full glossy black,
and a face whose truly African features were characterized by an
expression of grave and steady good sense, united with much
kindliness and benevolence. There was something about his whole air,
self-respecting and dignified, yet united with confiding and humble
simplicity.4 5
Uncle Tom is a self-abnegating, asexual man-child. The flip side of the buck
stereotype, Tom is a grinning victim, totally devoid of any thought and emotional
depth. He is a spectacle. In his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James
Baldwin argued that “Tom” expressed Beecher Stowe’s “pure sentimentality” and
her “ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion.” As Baldwin
explained him, “Tom” testified to the author’s “inability to feel; the wet eyes of
the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart;
it is always, therefore, the signal of secrete and violent inhumanity, the mask of
cruelty.”4 6
Clarke’s films flip the script of the “Tom” character. Although The
Connection, The Cool World and A Portrait o f Jason have exploitative aspects to
them, these films are the first films about what it means to be black in America to
make spectacles out of racist white men. In the process, these films grant the
leading black male characters the power of rational thought. While the director
character in The Connection and the teacher character in The Cool World are
defined by their abject corporeality, Burden and Duke are thinking men. The
thoughts of these characters push the narrative. By making the white men
physically abject, Clarke flips the script to the benefit of the black male
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characters, which debunk stereotypes about black masculinity and virility.4 7 A
Portrait of Jason is still one of the only American films, independent or
otherwise, to represent a black man with a spectrum of thoughts, emotions and
sexualities.
During a 1975 panel at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, Clarke
was asked an important question: “Why don’t you make films about women.”
Clarke answered:
Would you believe that I never felt that I was very interesting. So I
used the black man to express my feelings of alienation. Only now
can I admit it. The women’s movement made me realize how
brainwashed I had been; that because I was a “female” filmmaker, my
work was worthless, significant only to myself. But that has changed,
and a female is the protagonist in my next film.4 8
Unfortunately, Clarke never did get the funding for a female centered film.4 9
After teaching for many years at the prestigious UCLA film school, Clarke died
in 1997 at the age of 77 from complications due to Alzheimer s. Her final film,
which she completed in 1985, was a documentary on the jazz great Ornette
Coleman. Made in America: Ornette Coleman, Jazz Sax kept with Clarke new
American films. Clarke celebrates Coleman’s jazz as an expression of the
American experience. For Clarke, “My suspicion is that all I’ve done is partly
autobiographical and personal, but that was the only way I was able to handle
those problems.”5 0
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1 For the extended version of Mekas’ “Changing Language of the Cinema” see his
“Notes on a New American Cinema.” The Film Culture Reader, pp. 87-107.
2 Mekas. The Film Culture Reader, pp. 87-107.
3 Mekas. The Film Culture Reader, pp. 87-107.
4 Melinda Ward. The American New Wave 1958-1967. Buffalo: Walker Art Center,
1987, pg. 3.
5 Evans photographed the families in their everyday lives and locations only his
images aren’t candid so much as formally composed portraits. The people of the
images are posed, centrally framed, and look directly into the camera.
6 Scholars trace the beginnings photojournalism about everyday people and places
back to the late 18th century with Jacob Riis’ How the Other H alf Lives (1890) and
Lewis W. Hine’s Men at Work (1932).
7 Walker Evans. The Masters o f Photography. New York: New York Press, 2001.
8 Erika Doss. “The Art of Cultural Politics.” Larry May. Recasting America.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 195-220.
9 Doss. “The Art of Cultural Politics,” pg. 202.
1 0 Doss. “The Art of Cultural Politics,” pg. 202.
1 1 Doss. “The Art of Cultural Politics,” pg 206.
1 2 The New Deal also had filmmakers working under its public arts projects. FDR’s
Resettlement Administration, for example, part of the second phase of the New Deal
program that began in 1935 worked with the Department of Agriculture on the
relocation of impoverished farm families and the prevention of unprofitable farming
techniques and improper land use. The Resettlement Administration chose Pare
Lorentz to be its film consultant. Lorentz made The River and The Plow that Broke the
Plains for the Tennessee Valley Authority during the late 1930s. Like the New Deal
arts in general, Lorentz’ films are optimistic about the country’s ability to rebuild itself
through its natural resources and the hard work of the people. Lorentz films are non
fiction representations of the strength of “the river” and “the land” accompanied by an
authoritarian voice over, explaining the film’s social message. According to scholar
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Kathleen M. Hogen, “in the face of the great hardship that the United States was
experiencing, Lorentz and others like him looked back with a traditional fascination at
America’s pastoral qualities for answers to the questions that plagued an ever more
modem nation. The images that he employed in his films, the lone cowboy, waving
fields of grass, the merging of the tributaries into the great Mississippi River, the
simplicity of small town New England life, all spoke to a simpler, golden past.” For
more on this, please reference Kathleen M. Hogan, “The 1930’s Project American
Studies.” Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998.
1 3 Michael Harrington. The Other America. New York: Macmillan, 1962.
1 4 This is not to say that the FSA photographers were totally uncritical of American
propaganda. Margaret Bourke-White’s photograph, The Louisville Flood (1937), for
instance, shows a group of black and poor Kentucky citizens before a billboard that
shows a happy middle class white family in their new car. Above this image reads:
“World’s Highest Standard of Living.” Robert Frank continues this exact tone and
critique of racial injustice and the American way in his photo journal The Americans
(1958). The difference is that, unlike FDR’s New Deal government, which sponsored
the FSA critiques of American capitalism, the American government in the 1950 was
totally aligned with big business, pushing The American Way blind to the country’s
racism and poverty.
1 5 Norman Mailer. “The White Negro.” Dissent. San Francisco: City Lights Books,
1957.
1 6 Jack Kerouac. “The Essentials of Spontaneous Prose.” Ann Charter. The Portable
Beat Reader. New York: Penguin, 1992. pg. 57.
1 7 Tom Hayden. “The Port Heron Statement.” Peter Levy. America in the Sixties:
Right, Left, and Center. Westport: Praeger, 1998. pp. 47-48.
1 8 Eugine Archer. “Women Director Makes the Scene.” The New York Times 26
August 1962, pg 45.
1 9 Linda Gross. “An Out of the System Person.” The Los Angeles Times 21 July
1978.
2 0 Yvette Biro. “Medium Hot.” The Village Voice 6 April 1984. Clarke’s argues in
full, “As a little girl I was dyslexic and couldn’t learn to read and write until I was
quite old. So all my efforts went towards hiding it. Maybe it helped me, because I
became inventive; I remembered things because I needed to, and I was constantly
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compelled to express myself physically and be efficient about it. The woman issue is
more ambiguous. In the dance world it was comfortable to be a woman, in the
cinema far less. However, that was kind of an advantage: I was really alone-
independent.”
2 1 Interestingly enough, Maya Deren, Shirley Clarke and Yvonne Rainer all began
their filmmaking careers as modem dancers.
2 2 Rabonivtz. Points o f Resistance, pg.102.
2 3 Specifically, the Drew Associate Filmmakers, headed by former Time-Life
photographer Robert Drew, made Primary, about the Kennedy/Nixon debates, and
The Children Were Watching, about desegregation in the South, for ABC in 1960.
2 4 Bradford Martin. “The Freedom Singers, the Living Theatre, and Public
Performance.” Alexander Bloom, Ed. Long Time Gone: Sixties America Then and
Now. New York: Oxford: 2001, pp. 159-187.
2 5 The Los Angeles Mirror 1 April 1961.
2 6 Eugine Archer. “Woman Director Makes the Scene.” The New York Times
Magazine 26 August 1962.
2 7 Warren Miller. The Cool World. New York: Fawcett, 1959.
2 8 Shirley Clarke. “The Cool World.” Films & Filmmaking Magazine. December
1963, pp. 7-8.
2 9 Cue Magazine 3 March 1965.
3 0 Quoted on the back of The Cool World movie poster by OSTI Films, 264 Third
Street: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1965.
3 1 The Cool World poster.
3 2 The Cool World poster.
3 3 Ben H. Bagdikian. In The Midst of Plenty: The Poor in America. Boston: Beacon
Press, 1964, pg. 2
3 4 Melinda Ward. The American New Wave 1958-1967, pp. 18-25.
3 5 Clarke. Films & Filmmaking Magazine, pg. 8
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3 6 Clarke. Films & Filmmaking Magazine, pg. 7.
3 7 Noel Carroll. “The Cool World. Nothing But A Man.” The American New Wave
1958-1967, pp. 40-48.
3 8 Dizzy Gillesp created the soundtrack.
3 9 It is interesting to compare Clarke’s take on life in Harlem with that of Roy
DeCarava and Langston Hughes in their photo-joumal about Harlem, The Sweet
Flypaper of Life (1955). As the title suggests, The Sweet Flypaper o f Life shows the
bittersweet aspects to Harlem as both a symptom of segregation and a source of
cultural pride for the blacks who live there. DeCarava took many of the photographs
after receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, the first ever to a black photographer. His
images are gentle accounts of the many ranges of people and experiences of
everyday life in Harlem. They are strikingly different in content and tone from the
harsh realities of life in The Cool World.
4 0 The Los Angeles Times 5 June 1968.
4 1 The New York Times 17 August 1967.
4 2 The New York Times 7 August 1967.
4 3 David Bourdon. Warhol. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989, pg. 168.
4 4 Harriet Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Penguin: New York, 1996.
4 5 James Baldwin. “Everyone’s Protest Novel.” Notes o f a Native Son. New York:
Beacon Press, 1955, pp. 3-24.
4 6 Shirley Clarke’s films rest exactly in between Hollywood’s social problem films
and Blaxploitation. Beginning with Melvin van Peeples’ Sweet Sweetback’s
Badasssss Song (1971), the rational black man anti-hero and the sweaty, fat white
man or “boss hog” are familiar character types in this genre. As an aside, Carl Lee
played the “Edie” character in Gordon Park’s Superfly (1972).
4 7 Sandra Schevey. “Pic-Maker Shirley Clarke Says Second Class Status of Women
in Films is Result of Viewers’ Standards.” Variety 1 September 1975.
4 8 Clarke wanted to adapt Joan Didion’s A Book of Common Prayer.
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4 9 Yvette Biro. “Medium Hot.” The Village Voice 4 June 1984.
5 0 Quoted in Biro, “Medium Hot,” The Village Voice 4 June 1984.
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CHAPTER THREE
HOW THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE STOLE THE NEW CINEMA
The problems are many, but until we have art theatres in the Fargos as well as in New
York and Pittsburgh, the movement will never be built on solid foundation. Neither of the
ancient bogeys-the Hollywood mogels or inflexible exhibitors— stand in the way. All that
is necessary is for the intellectuals to stop paying lip service to the better cinema and to
start paying admission.
Arthur Mayer, U.S. distributor of Open City in 19561
We know that the potential for the popular reception of quality films has existed for some
time.. .We know too that a series of interrelated social and economic events have provided
the means of presenting to discriminating audiences film of artistic quality.
Roger Manvell, The Film and the Public in 19552
The Center for Advanced Film Studies can be part of a chain linking the film education
system in the United States with the film profession, closing the circuit between a
generation of young people who wish to express themselves through a career in film and
the world of art and industry which they seek to join and change.
George Stevens Jr., AFI Director in 19733
Since American independent filmmakers during the post-war period had greater
access to affordable film stock, cameras and non-studio crews than ever before, the struggle
to achieve a free cinema quickly turned into a struggle over access to distribution and
exhibition. New American filmmakers wanted to reach large audiences only they couldn’t
even get their films into second run or art house theaters. Theaters owners relied on
Hollywood’s brand name to turn a buck, and they were not about to risk loosing a screen to
a independent film with non-entity actors and low-budget aesthetics. Art house and second
run theatres at the time survived on exploitation and foreign art films, which, with their
offbeat themes, brazen sexuality and stylish intellectualism, attracted youth audiences.
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Even if a new American filmmaker could convince an art house theater owner to take a
chance on her film, art house theaters were for the most part independently owned and
operated. Unlike the country’s first and second run theaters, which were organized into a
circuit, art house theaters were like islands in a stream. Distributors booked art house
theaters individually and laboriously. In other words, if the new American cinema wanted
to systematically change the American cinema, then it would have to systematically change
the country’s distribution and exhibition systems.
According to Ben Kenly, a New York theatre manager who served on the
“Expensive Art” panel during the Antioch Symposium:
In New York and in the rest of the country, the theatre owner wants to
be guaranteed that he’s not going to lose money. Consequently he is
quite unwilling to book a “non-entity.” A festival winner is not
necessarily going to be a box office winner in this country.4
Foreign art film importer and distributor Edward Harrison supported Kenly’s sentiment.
According to Harrison:
You have to live with the picture for maybe the first four or five
months of its existence. You have to devote a great deal of time and
effort to the picture, to prepare it and to see that it is properly
launched and to see that it gets a chance to live.5
As Harrison implied, art house distribution was timely and more expensive than expected.
Besides covering the price of the negative, a master print and several copies, a trailer,
press packet and a modest advertising budget for the film, art house distributors had to be
willing to invest up to five months to give the film enough time to turn a profit through
word of mouth as opposed to mainstream advertising. Regardless of how little the
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filmmaker spent on the film, from the distributor’s perspective, independent cinema was
an “expensive art.”
In the fall of 1961, a UCLA film professor by the name of Colin Young published
what he imagined as a solution to the dilemmas facing the independent America cinema.
He called this solution the American Film Institute (AFT), and published it in Film
Quarterly. The West Coast editor of Film Quarterly at the time, Young explained his
proposal in epic terms in the essay’s introduction. For Young:
The problems of distribution and exhibition of foreign and unusual
films, discussed at the Antioch Symposium last year.. .constitute one
reason why such an institute is necessary. But it is also hoped, as the
following proposal indicates in detail, that an American Film Institute
can function to bring a new focus to a wide rang of archival,
cataloguing, educational, publishing, and even producing activities.6
Young based his proposal on discussions he had with some of the country’s most
respected independent filmmakers and intellectuals including John Cassavetes, Amos
Vogel, Shirley Clarke, Adolfas and Jonas Mekas, Frances Flaherty, Pauline Kael, Eric
Bamow, Cecil Starr, Gideon Bachmann and Robert Hughes, the New York editor of Film
Quarterly. Young also based his proposal on other successful national film institutes such
as The British Film Institute and The Cinematecheque Francaise. Like these national film
institutes, an American Film Institute, Young hoped, would “bring a new focus to a wide
range of archival, cataloguing, educational, and publishing activities.”
For Young, the Institute’s “concern would be to create and organize an audience
for meritorious films, and to encourage production of films for such an audience.” Young
understood what Amos Vogel meant when he said during the “Expensive Arts” panel that
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independent filmmakers in America, unlike those in England and France, faced “a
complete lack of film culture.” American audiences had developed a taste for slick
narrative films, exactly the kinds of films that the independent cinema detested and
couldn’t afford to make anyway. Following Vogel, Young felt that mainstream American
audiences remained by and large ignorant of the art of cinema. If the new cinema were to
survive, it would have to create an audience willing to pay the price of admission for
American art films.
Young proposed that the Institute include seven programs: a national film archive,
catalogue, public education, exhibition and circulation, publications, production and
festivals. The archive would work with other organizations and museums like the
Hollywood museum and the Museum of Modem Art to locate and preserve existing film
negatives. A national film catalogue would serve as a database for the archive and other
American films, recording information about film titles, credits, manuscripts, stills and
other research materials. At the time, a national catalogue was an ambitious goal since
there was no central source of information for American film history except in the few
cases when the film had been copyrighted through the Library of Congress. The education
department would work with organizations like MOMA, the American Association of
Museums, the University Film Producers Association and various guilds such as the
Writers Guild and the Director’s Guild and public libraries, high schools, and even adult
extension programs to bring film literacy to the public. The American Film Institute would
also organize local lectures and screenings through these various organizations in support
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of artful, rare and unusual films. The publications department would publish scholarly
books as well as a monthly bulletin to announce up and coming screenings.
The year prior to Young’s proposal, John Adams, the President of Film Quarterly,
argued what so many in the independent film community were feeling at the time. The
independent cinema needed a stronger, more organized distribution and exhibitions system
if it wanted to reach broader audiences. To the independent film community, Adams
asked:
How may we strengthen the influence of museums, universities, film
festivals, film societies? How can publicity be improved, both in the
sense of devices to supplement advertising, such as mail schedules,
and in the sense of better journalism in magazines, radio, and even
television? 7
Answering these concerns, Young envisioned that an American Film Institute would serve
as a bridge between the independent filmmakers and the American public. The Institute
would work like the public library system. It would be centrally organized with regional
branches so that the new American cinema could reach audiences across the country. The
Institute would also help to keep the new American cinema “free” for both the filmmakers
and the viewing public. As a non-profit institute, the Institute would be safely located
outside the realm of commercial competition.
Young proposed that the exhibition department work with the American Federation
of Film Societies, the American Association of Museums, the Educational Film Library
Association and the American Library Association. “By establishing something a kin to a
national film theater,” Young argued, “an American Film Institute would make the
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arrangements for short term exposure of specific films of merit from all over the world, as
they become available from the producers.” These screenings would happen in major
urban centers like Los Angeles and New York where Institute members from around the
country could pick and choose films to bring home to their local affiliates. The circulation
program would work in conjunction with the exhibition department and national theatre to
ensure that “meritorious” films might also circulate around the country through non-profit
venues like film societies and universities where there was a growing demand for such
films.8
As Young explained it, the Institute would “have the same interests as a
conventional producer/distributor, but it would be mindful of the rather special audience to
which it had access through its won circuit.” The Institute would be organized and
systematic while maintaining its non-profit mission to strengthen the filmic arts in
America. The Institute would systematically change the American cinema. It would help
the new filmmakers create a new American cinema. “None of this is any longer a dream,”
Young concluded. “The first steps are before us. It only remains to take them.”
The American Film Institute was realized, only not as Young had imagined it. The
new cinema lost control over the project as it became a government sponsored project
under President Johnson’s Great Society Program. As with Kennedy before him, Johnson
had a very specific notion of art in democracy. After Johnson appointed George Stevens
Jr., the son of a well known Hollywood director and former head of the Motion Pictures
Department of the United States Information Agency (USIA) during the Cold War, the
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American Film Institute, with federal offices in D.C. and New York, and a home base in
Los Angeles, brought government and Hollywood together, strengthening both in the
process. The new American cinema was left out in the cold.
By the early 1970s, the Institute functioned like a talent agency for New
Hollywood. The few filmmakers who were lucky enough to received finishing funds from
the AFI were not so much independent filmmakers, free from the constraints of the
commercial film industry, but rather contract laborers working on location for the newly
reorganized Hollywood industry. Unfortunately for the new American cinema, the
American Film Institute coincided with the re-organization of the modem studio system
(as detailed in chapter one). The studios shifted their mode of production, from a modem
movie factory, where everything from the film’s conception to its distribution was done in
house, to a system based on the principles of flexible accumulation.
In The Condition of Postmodernity, geographer David Harvey explains flexible
accumulation. For Harvey, flexible accumulation:
is marked by a direct confrontation with the rigidities of Fordism. It is
characterized by the emergence of entirely new sectors of production,
new ways of providing financial services, new markets, and, above
all, greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and
organizational innovation.9
As Harvey explains, flexible accumulation is an extension of the modem factory system
and a modem mode of production and accumulation. For Harvey, the “new” postmodern
system of production and accumulation allowed industrial capitalism to thrive despite
having to change forms during the 1960s when industry faced a series of challenges
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including among other things the oil crisis and the overall shift from a producer to
consumer based economy. Flexible accumulation meant that modem industry could more
flexibly acquire cheap overseas labor as well as consumers through the various industry
mergers and new cross-markets.
Harvey’s theory of flexible accumulation applies to the studio system. During the
post-war period, the studio system faced a set of challenges to its monopoly stronghold
over the domestic box office. Studios now had to compete with television and other
cinemas at the box office. The studios were also desperately out of touch with the new
generation of filmgoers. By the 1960s, the majority of the studio directors were middle
aged if not older. The same goes for most of the studio heads over production. Classical
Hollywood was at a loss with the wants and tastes of the new demographic. To identify
with this audience, the studios needed a new generation of directors to accumulate the new
audience.
The studios developed a more flexible mode of production during the post-war
period. According to film historian Janet Staiger, the studios shifted during the post-war
period from a producer unit system to a package unit system of film production. During
the hey day of the modem studio system, producers were hired by a studio to package six
to eight films a year using the studio’s resources, including directors, writers, actors and
film technicians, all of whom were “owned” by the studios under rigid contracts. The
break-up of the self-contained studio meant that the studios no longer owned all of the
resources for film production. As Staiger explains, the package-unit system meant that
screenwriters, directors, producers, managers, agents, or even actors could even
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package a film and sell it to the studios to finance or distribute. The package unit system
was flexible to the benefit of the studios, which were able to maintain control over the film
business even as they bid farewell to the studio system.1 0
The American Film Institute emerged at an auspicious time for the studios. The
rest of this chapter details how the new American cinema lost control over the Institute by
focusing on the public discourse surrounding the Institute during its inception. This case
study is helpful to understanding the shifts affecting the American film industry at large
during the 1960s.
By 1965, Young had received a generous Stanford Research Institute grant, which
he used to established search committees in New York and Los Angeles. These
committees were set up to find private investors for the American Film Institute. The same
year, following the third annual New York Film Festival, Amos Vogel, a member of the
New York search committee, and festival programmer Richard Roud announced plans to
establish the Institute in conjunction with the New York Film Festival and the Lincoln
Center for the Performing Arts. For Vogel and Roud, New York would be a perfect
location for a national film institute. New York was home to the avant-garde, underground
cinema, The New American Cinema Group and more film societies, university film
classes, and art house theaters than any other city in the country. New York was also
arguably the cultural center of the world, home of Abstract Expressionism and MoMA. If
established through the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Vogel and Roud argued,
the Institute would naturally benefit from the center’s resources and reputation.1 1
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The same year, George Stevens Jr. spoke with Film Comment magazine about his
plans to expand American cinema. Funded by the Defense Department under President
Kennedy’s Cold War administration, the USIA film department was geared, as Stevens
explained, “to relate America and to explain its policies overseas.” Mainly, the USIA sent
propaganda films about “the American way” to Latin American and other “developing”
countries that might otherwise choose Communism. At the time of Stevens’ interview with
Film Comment, the USIA boasted that it played to the largest telecast audience in the
world, reaching eighty-two nations, broadcasting eight hundred and fifty hours a week in
thirty eight languages, publishing eighty magazines, more books than several of the largest
U.S. publishers, and with nearly four hundred shorts a year, more films than Warner.1 2
The USIA film department was incredibly productive under Stevens. By the 1960s,
Stevens at the USIA had developed two types of films. “Hard policy” films like Night of
the Dragon, which was a documentary about the Vietnam War that “reflects US policy by
stating that the conflict is not a civil war but a war caused by foreign invasion from the
North.” The USIA also had “Soft Policy” films like United States in Progress narrated by
John Houston which “shows with few words how Latin America can enjoy the fruits of its
own labors through international cooperation” with the American government.1 3 Because
he had such intimate Hollywood connections, Stevens was also able to lure Hollywood
directors to speak overseas. As Stevens explained to Film Comment:
We have found that people who are prominent in motion pictures
often have an opportunity to be heard in other countries. And those
that are articulate and well informed about their country can do us a
great service.1 4
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John Ford and Frank Capra, both of who specialized in “American” themes such as free
will and rugged individualism, were two of the USIA Ambassadors to speak to other
countries about the freedoms of art under American democracy.
Stevens actually interviewed with Film Comment to advertise his new internship
program. As Stevens explained it, the internship program provided six young people with
the opportunity to make short films for international audiences. As Stevens argued, the
USIA filmmakers also had a specific purpose. They would help to “put into perspective
the race situation in this country.” Stevens continued:
Recently, headlines around the world spoke of Oxford, Mississippi,
and the events that took place there certainly were matters of major
concern to most of our citizens. But I don’t think that that concern
was reflected overseas. The riots were reported, and the fact that a
Negro could not go to school. But it is not known that there is some
quarter of a million Negros in colleges around the country. I’m sure
that if you gave people abroad a Rorschach Test on race relations in
America, the first thing they would say would be “Little Rock” and
“Oxford.” Part of our USIA function is to put this problem in some
kind of perspective.. .We’ve done perhaps more than any other
country to solve a most difficult situation.1 5
Stevens hoped that by using young Americans, members of the generation associated
around the world with social protest, the USIA could begin to counteract the media’s
representation of America, the supposed land of the free and home of the brave, as a place
of domestic turmoil. In the process, Stevens also wanted the interns to “revive the
documentary tradition” of the New Deal. Through a socialist realist lens, in other words,
the visual language of the new cinema, the USIA filmmakers would help the USIA create
a more “positive” and “harmonious” image of America.
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Stevens never realized his USIA intership program because Johnson appointed him
to be the director of the new American Film Institute. The Variety headline read: “LB J Sets
Up Film Institute: Government with Train Youth in 20th Century Art Form.” Continuing
with Kennedy’s support of the American arts, Johnson established the American Film
Institute as part of his Arts and Humanities Bill, which funded the National Endowment for
the Arts and Humanities on a three year plan at twenty million dollar a year. Not since the
New Deal had the federal government so ardently funded the arts. President Johnson’s Arts
and Humanities Bill would provide federal grants to universities to hire artists, fund a
national opera, theatre and ballet company, give federal commissions to American
composers, and, most surprisingly, establish a national film institute.
Johnson’s support of the cinema was unprecedented. Like the new American
cinema filmmakers, Johnson didn’t support the cinema because he believed that it was a
high art like theatre, opera, or ballet. Johnson instead felt that cinema was an important
popular art. As he proclaimed during his public announcement for the Arts and Humanities
Bill:
It is in the neighborhoods of each community that a nation’s art is
bom. In countless American towns there live thousands of obscure
and unknown talents. What this bill really does is bring active support
to this national asset, and make fresher the winds of art in our land.
The arts and humanities belong to the people, for it is the people who
create them.1 6
In many ways, Johnson and The New American Cinema Group believed in the same kind
of popular cinema. Both celebrated a regionally specific, down home, “people’s cinema”
about specifically American issues. Johnson and The Group embraced the same aesthetic.
However, the two had significantly different ideas over content.1 7
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Johnson’s ideas about the cinema emerged from his plans for a “Great Society.”
During his commencement address in May of 1964 to the University of Michigan at Ann
Arbor, a location Johnson specifically chose to speak directly to the counter-culture,
Johnson explained his vision of a “Great Society.” He began, “for a century we labored to
settle and subdue a continent. For half a century, we called upon unbound invention and
untiring industry to create a land of plenty for all our people.” The Great Society was to be
the country’s reward for struggling during modem industrialization. It would re-unite the
country after a decade of civil unrest and make the cities beautiful again after a decade of
urban decay and suburbanization. As Johnson argued:
It is harder and harder to live the good life in American cities today.
There is the decay of the centers and the despoiling of the suburbs.
There is not enough housing for our people or transportation for our
traffic. Our land is vanishing and old landmarks are violated. Worst of
all, expansion is eroding the precious and time-honored values of
community with neighbors and communion with nature.1 8
As this quote evinces, Johnson’s dream was as much of an aesthetic as it was a politic.
“We have always prided ourselves on being not only America the strong, but America the
beautiful,” he argued. “Today that beauty is in danger.” The image of America the
beautiful was also what Johnson wanted from the American arts.
Johnson imagined Great Society as a Walden, a place where “man” can breathe
deeply and enjoy the sublime tranquility of a countryside that he “labored to settle and
subdue.” The Great Society, for Johnson:
...is a place where leisure is a welcomed chance to build and reflect,
not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the
city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of
commerce, but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.
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It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place
which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the
understanding of the race, where the meaning of our lives matches the
marvelous products of our labor.
In the Great Society, as Johnson implied, art would not be used for social protest but self
reflection. Keeping with Kennedy’s support of a very particular kind of modem art,
Johnson validated a socially disengaged art and artist. His ideas were populist to the extent
that he wanted all people to have the privilege of self-reflection.
Johnson’s plan for a new American cinema garnered immediate attention. The film
industry was especially wary. Variety responded with the provocative, “Who Runs the
Film Institute: Academia Versus Show Business,” that explained the commercial film
industry’s feelings on the matter. According to the show business daily magazine:
There already exists much scom in show business against the endless
proliferation of schools and students and of teaching teachers to teach
more teachers. This cynicism has been noted by the academic
establishment, which expresses itself baffled by the U.S. film
industry’s apparent lack of interest in college-educated aspirants.1 9
As Variety explained, the commercial film industry was threatened by the prospects of a
national film institute of “teachers teaching more teachers to teach.” Variety continued, “A
federally subsidized American Film Institute clearly throws an advance shadow of change.
Ready or not, willing or not, the commercial film interests and the craft unions too will be
hard put in the next ten years to avoid the mounting pressure of intellectual interest in
films.”
Within just two years, however, the industry had changed its attitude. This change
was due to George Stevens, Jr., who designed the API to help the studios overcome their
fears. The Institute’s first itinerary announced its mission in terms similar to Young:
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The Institute was founded as a nonprofit private corporate in response
to recognized needs for preserving America’s film heritage, for
developing new creative talent within the United States and for
expanding the opportunities for American’s to develop taste and
appreciation of film .2 0
While the institute under Stevens sounded like Young’s institute, the official board was
disproportionately slanted to best represent the interests of the commercial cinema. The
board did not include new American filmmakers, Amos Vogel, or even Colin Young.
Besides Richard Leacock, a young Francis Ford Coppola, film critic Arthur Knight, and
historian Arthur Schlesinger, the board was a who’s who of the film and television
industry. The AFI board included: Elizabeth Ashley, MPAA President Jack Valenti,
Executive Vice President of United Artists Arnold Picker, the President of Westinghouse
Broadcasting Company Donald H. McGannon, Sidney Poitier and Gregory Peck, who also
served as the Chairman of the Board.
Stevens maintained Young’s original departments (archives, audience development,
filmmaking training and development, production and publications), only now these
departments worked for a Hollywood. Notice the Institute’s first statement on the archiving
program: “It is a sad comment on our sense of history that certain films of America’s great
John Ford exist only in Prague with Czech subtitles.” This Hollywood bias also emerged in
the filmmaker training and development program. Where Young’s program was going to
establish a distribution system for the new generation of American independent filmmakers,
now the AFI was going to sponsor short films by first time filmmakers. After all, many of
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Hollywood’s greats began with short films. According to the first itinerary, “the list of
important filmmaker whose careers began with the short form of film is imposing.. .great
names like Griffith, Chaplin, Capra, Wyler and Ford started with short films.” In supporting
short films over independent features, the AFI would help preserve the commercial
cinema’s economic and ideological stronghold over the American feature film while
providing the industry with a talent pool of young filmmakers.
The real shock came when the AFI announced its plans in 1967 to build a Center for
Advanced Film Studies in Beverly Hills, California. Not only was this location thousands
of miles away from the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, where Vogel had
envisioned the American Film Institute, the Beverly Hills Center for Advanced Film
Studies was in Hollywood’s backyard in the newly refurbished Greystone Mansion. “This
Center will serve as a bridge between scholarship and practice,” according to institute’s
press release:
It will provide students an opportunity to see and study all films of
importance; to meet with and share the experiences of accomplished
writers, directors, and producers and craftsmen; and to make their
own films and move on to the sphere of professional work that
attracts them.2 1
The Center for Advanced Film Studies was going to teach young American filmmakers the
profession of filmmaking, exactly the kind of filmmaking that The New American Cinema
Group despised. According to Stevens, in a Los Angeles magazine article entitled
“Building The American New Wave at AFI,” the Center for Advanced Film Studies was to
be a “bridge between film companies and filmmakers.”2 2 Graduates of the Center for
Advanced Film study would be professionally trained and ready to work in the business.
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The same year, Cecil Starr, a film teacher at Hunter College whose family had
been in the film theatre business in American since the 1920s, wrote an open letter to the
AFI’s Chairman of the Board Gregory Peck in Readers and Writers magazine. Under the
heading “Film Artists Fear AFI Will Go Hollywood,” Starr stated the case of the film artist
community: Starr argued:
We fear that the Hollywood-dominated Advisory Council does not
clearly recognize the difference between film art and entertainment.
In its years of plenty, Hollywood showed very little interest in raising
the level of public appreciation of film as an art; in helping schools
and colleges teach the art of the film and filmmaking, and in
encouraging film artists to work freely toward experimenting.
Hollywood should be represented on the committee, but why as a
majority?2 3
Starr continued:
Why does the Film Advisory Board not include a representative of the
film society movement; of some of the large and small universities
where filmmaking has been taught for 5 to 20 years; of non-
Hollywood, non-governmental filmmakers to whom we must
inevitably look for our next generation of film artists? Why are film
historians, familiar with long standing conflict between film artists
and film businessmen, and film critics not included on the Advisory
Council? And why are there no representatives of our film libraries in
museums, universities, and public libraries throughout the country?2 4
Starr’s letter expressed what many in the independent film community felt at the time. The
national film institute was not evolving as this community had hoped that it would.
Gregory Peck did not respond to Starr’s letter. Instead, he published a fee standing
letter to the public. In “The American Film Institute: An Answer to Public Demand,”
published in January of 1968 in Action magazine, Peck explained:
The Institute was created by the National Council on the Arts, a
democratic organization whose members represented all the fields of
the creative arts in this country. The Council became parent
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organization of the Film Institute which is not a government
organization though it is receiving one fourth of its financing from a
government agency—the National Endowment for the Arts. The other
three quarters of its financing are from outside the government—the
Ford Foundation, the MPAA, independent film companies, television
networks, private contributions, and so on. But it was bom out of the
National Endowment for the Arts and we think it exists because there
was a need for it.2 5
The National Council for the Arts might have given birth to the Institute, as Peck assured
his readers, but it would be the MPAA, film companies, television networks and other
private investors who would ran the Institute. As Peck explained, the Institute was not a
government propaganda agency, but a “democratic organization” built in response to
public demand. He didn’t address Hollywood’s investment in the national film institute
because he was speaking for that investment.
Jack Valenti also published a letter about the Institute. In an editorial he dictated to
Film Daily in October of 1967, Valenti, following Peck, began his letter by assuring the
public that the institute was free of all government controls. Valenti explained:
Though the federal government will be involved financially in the
Institute, it will have no control, no veto, no visible strings attached.
This is good. There is no need, and insufficient space available, to
summarize why the government ought not to be administratively
involved in a cultural enterprise. Let us simply say that it is better that
way and pass it on.2 6
Like Peck, Valenti told audiences that although the government funded the Institute, it
would not run the Institute.
Valenti then address critics like Starr. “There are those who question the
‘establishment’ complexion of the board, but it is as untrue to catalogue Sidney Poitier and
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Gregory Peck as guardians of the status quo as it is unjust to credit divine inspiration to
those who are not.” Valenti reminded the public that the board was culturally diverse.
After all, it included the esteemed black actor Sidney Poitier and Gregory Peck, an actor
known for his liberal film roles in To Kill a Mockingbird and A Gentleman’s Agreement, a
film where Peck is a journalist who pretends to be a Jew to write about anti-Semitism.
Valenti wasn’t done. “Controversy is certain to form about art versus commercial
films. It needn’t.” He concluded:
One significant lift to the Institute is the financial involvement of the
major motion picture companies. Without any caveats or any other
strings, the majors have donated money equal to the government and
the Ford Foundation to give life to the Institute. The presidents of the
major companies have told me they believe that anything that adds to
the sum of knowledge, talent and imagination residing in the industry
is in the long-range best interests of everyone who has a place in the
motion picture future. In my judgment this is one of the most
heartening, and hopeful assets in the Institute.
Valenti inadvertently solved the riddle of the studios’ involvement with the Institute. The
studios supported the Institute because they felt that this support would add “to the sum of
knowledge, talent, and imagination residing in the industry.”
In 1968, the American Film Institute announced its plans to make independent
feature films for the studios after all. “Film Institute as Producer!” Variety explained:
Plans are currently near completion for the American Film Institute to
produce feature-length motion pictures by new talents, at budgets up
to $400,000 supplied by the seven major U.S. companies and possibly
two or three others.2 7
CBS Films, Cinerama, Filmways, National General, Trans Lux theatre chains and nearly
all of the major film companies funded the AFI’s feature film department. Each Institute
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film would be financed by one of these companies, who would then get to distribute that
film at will.
The companies would also have final say over any the films. Varity explained:
Initially, the idea was for the Institute to have sole approval of projects and for the majors
simply to be “assigned” their pictures in order. But the companies are understood to have
said that they “can’t relinquish responsibility” for the pix they release, and current plans
call for initial approvals from the distributors as well as the Institute staff.2 8
As the above quote suggests, the studios would have as much control over the film’s
content and style as the Institute. The filmmaker’s opinions would be irrelevant. Now the
filmmaker was working for a national film institute, which was itself working for film
companies. The filmmaker was working indirectly for companies that although he
wouldn’t have any direct contact with would have authorial controls over his film.
Through this plan, the film companies would be able to flexibly accumulating a new pool
of labor.
Within months, the plan changed. Not only would the companies now earn a small
distribution fee while maintaining authorial control over the “independently” produced
films, the studios would also collect 40% of box office profits. According to one report,
“there will be no profit participation by filmmakers.”2 9 This news inspired more talk about
Stevens’ loyalty to the movie companies. “Some asked Stevens how his program differs
from what is being done by the film companies, and if he isn’t simply a ‘super agent’
packaging projects the usual way,” Variety reported. Stevens defend himself by arguing
that commercial agents worked for profit while the AFI worked “to advance the art of the
film.” Yet Variety was hard pressed to buy this excuse. The article concluded on a somber
note: “Nobody, not even Stevens claims this program is an ideal way of encouraging the
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degree of freedom and adventurous experimentation most people hoped an institute would
embody, but most agree that something is better than nothing.”3 0
The studios also funded the Institute’s archiving and national theatre. Paramount
donated one hundred and forty five of its silent films produced between 1914 and 1930 to
the AFI library for archiving and preservation.3 1 Mary Pickford donated her personal
collection of 50 Biograph films made between 1909-1913 to the Institute’s Collection at the
Library of Congress.3 2 Jack Warner gave $250 thousand dollars to help build the API’s
National Film Theatre at the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington,
D.C.3 3 The Institute returned the favor in full. The National Film Theatre in Washington D.C
opened with a Douglas Fairbanks-Mary Pickford film festival.3 4
The Institute also returned the favor with Hollywood based research projects. With
the help of a generous grant from the Louis B. Mayer foundation, the AFI Film History
Advisory Committee, made up of historians Kevin Brownlow and David Bradley,
screenwriter Casey Robinson (The Snows of Kilimanjiro, 1952) and the well-known auteur
critic Andrew Sarris, funded scholars, although none of them academics, to write a history
of the American cinema. Not surprisingly, this history was as generous to Hollywood as
Hollywood had been to the Institute.3 5
One project researched Louis B. Mayer at MGM while another was a recanting of
the making of An American in Paris. Other AFI research grants went to scholarship on the
careers of Erich Von Stroheim and Mary Pickford. The oral history project, which not
surprisingly took an auteur approach to Hollywood history, sponsored Peter
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Bogdanovich’s interviews with Raoul Walsh, for example, along with interviews with
screenwriters and cinematographers who had played an important role during the studio
era.3 6
The Institute’s first round of short films were eerily similar to the kinds of films
that Stevens wanted from his USIA interns. The Advisory Panel, which included Willard
Van Dyke, curator of the Museum of Modem Art, filmmakers James Blue and Richard
Leacock and Stanley Kauffmann, the New Republic film critic, overwhelmingly chose
films that presented positive, uncontroversial views on daily American life. One film was
“an experimental comment on personal relationships in contemporary America,” while
another documentary explored the work of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge. Others
were quaint portraits of small town life in America. The films had titles like “Frankfort,
Kentucky,” “Camden, Texas,” and “The National Flower of Brooklyn.”3 7 These shorts
documentaries romanticized small town America, outside of the squalor of urban decay
and chaos of social rest. As Stevens had hoped for his USIA intern films, the first
American Film Institute films put the country’s “race problem into a new perspective” by
ignoring it all together.
In July of 1968, Stevens announced his four-part plan to improve film education. His
announcement came during the Institute’s month long Leadership Seminar at the University
of California at Santa Barbara, a conference sponsored by the Office of Education under
Title XI of the National Defense Education Act. Stevens declared that the Institute would
“develop strategies for introducing quality film and television study into school.” It would
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“train master teachers to lead this movement,” and “sponsor a national organization of film
teachers to guide the movement.”3 8 Those attending the seminar included after much ado
Colin Young and some of Hollywood’s most respected old guard filmmakers, including
King Vidor, Jean Renoir and Billy Wilder. Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston were also
there along with the famous graphic designer Saul Bass and a handful of television
producers. The seminar bypassed the New York independent film community altogether.3 9
Either way, Stevens’ four-part dedication to the academic film community dissolved
within no time. By then, the Institute suffered a series of federal budget cuts. In the face of
this crunch, the Institute gutted its research and education departments. Most generally, the
Institute found the same fate as most of Johnson’s domestic agendas. The Vietnam War cost
the federal government billions of dollars, forcing Johnson to abandon his Great Society
programs to continue to fight what was from the start a loosing battle anyway. “I knew from
the start,” Johnson confessed in retrospect:
I was bound to be crucified either way I moved. If I left the woman I
really loved, the Great Society, in order to get involved with that bitch
of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything
at home. But if I left that war and let the Communists take over South
Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be
seen as an appeaser.4 0
Johnson left the “woman he loved” for the “bitch of a war.” Most of his Great
Society arts programs continued, but with devastatingly smaller budgets and much less
gusto than Johnson had initially planned.
The AFI also continued, but Stevens was forced to close the New York office and
fired most of his education and research staff at the Beverly Hills Center for Advanced
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Film Studies. Many survivors quit in protest, arguing that once again Stevens had shown
his true colors and saved Hollywood at the expense of the academic and independent film
community. Two key employees quit to form their own non-profit film education
organization. Ron Sutton, the head of the AFI education department in Washington, and
. T im Kitsis, of the Beverly Hills research faculty, left the AFI to start the National
Association of Media Educators (NAME). Yet NAME never got off the ground, and there
was talk that Stevens stymied the organization with red tape during the grant application
process.4 1
The academic film community was up in arms over the program cuts. The Film
Society Review devoted an entire volume in 1971 to the AFI scandal. Sponsored by the
American Federation of Film Societies, the journal critiqued the American Film Institute’s
emphasis on film production “at the expense of education and research,” and noted
“persistent reports of ‘arbitrary,’ ‘arrogant’ and ‘confused’ administration, ‘improvised
decisions’ and a ‘rapidly deteriorating situation’” at the Institute. The Review also included
the letter written by Ron Sutton and Jim Kitsis to the AFI upon their resignation. The
authors argued that the AFI, under George Stevens Jr.:
.. .had been hampered and finally hamstrung by a pattern of lack of
support and program cutbacks imposed from above, resulting from a
confusion of priorities and lack of direction.4 2
The volume’s editor William Starr agreed. For him, the AFI had abandoned the
independent film community. Yet, as Starr concluded:
The most striking aspect of the AFI has been its failure to try to reach
and develop an audience for its own topmost priorities, filmmaker
training and production, among the nation’s numerous campus film
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societies, where the best audience for those filmmakers and films
logically would not be found. The failure to thus develop key
programs even its own self-interest strengthens the feeling by many,
of the API’s socially irrelevant, Hollywood parochial central dis
orientation. And the belief that a nationally based, nationally relevant
American Film Institute still has yet to be built” (his emphasis).4 3
Variety noted, “The stress on production may have been supported by the Hollywood
establishment as a providing ground for potential workers in the “industry” but AFI films
have received little or no distribution from the major companies, and few of its young
directors and technicians have gone on to more commercial activity.”4 4
The MPAA withdrew its financial support in 1972 while a new committee of
trustees, none associated with the commercial industries, joined to re-evaluate the
Institute’s policies. The Ford Foundation increased its grant to the AFI, but by then the
AFI was in such bad shape that it had to use this money to pay off its deficit.4 5
After this, the American Film Institute quietly settled into the hills of Beverly Hills
to focus on its Center for Advanced Film Study, which enrolled some forty odd students
during the early 1970s. The AFI then started a respectable film journal, American Film, an
annual guide to film schools, and a short-lived television show, the “American Film
Institute Theatre,” which aired weekly on the Los Angeles public broadcasting station
KCET. The television show showcased student shorts along with an occasional interview
with a young Hollywood professional. Despite the scandals and failures, Stevens’ Institute
wanted to make good on its promise to bring the filmmakers to the industry.
Early on, the “American Film Institute Theater” interviewed Jack Nicholson, who
was there to promote his directorial debut, Drive, He Said, an official U.S entry at the
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1971 Cannes film festival.4 6 Nicholson was the perfect guest because he was a player in
what scholars now call “New Hollywood.” Nicholson was a part of the “Hollywood
Renaissance.” Back in the late 1960s, Nicholson was an actor involved with Rodger
Corman’s independent production company, American International Pictures (AIP), before
moving to Easy Rider (1969), Dennis Hopper’s studio film about the counter-culture, only
to land successfully as a New Hollywood actor with Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces
(1970). Now Nicholson was making his own films. He was exactly the kind of filmmaker
that the Institute hoped to manufacture.4 7 A professional with a counter-cultural attitude,
his “spirit” was independent even if his films were not.
Five years later, Raphael Silver, the husband of independent filmmaker Joan
Micklin Silver (Hester Street, 1974), explained the plight of the non-studio filmmaker.
“The toughest part of independent filmmaking is not financing the film or managing the
problems during production, though these are hard enough, but finding the proper way to
distribute film once it is finished.” He concluded, “Every independent filmmaker hopes his
film will be picked up by a major studio because the majors pay hard cash for the
privilege.”4 8
Silver’s observation is crucial. The AFT has given many grants to independent
filmmakers over the years. From July Dash to David Lynch, American cinema had truly
benefited from the AFI. Even so, the AFT is ultimately a disappointment because it could
have fundamentally changed the overarching structure of the American cinema. When all
was said and done, the AFT was at best an off-Hollywood production facility for the New
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Hollywood. Just as Silver explained, this move left independent filmmakers utterly
dependent on studio distributors while giving the studios a cheap, risk free way to
purchase niche films without having to produce them. In turn, if an American independent
filmmaker wants to reach an audience, then that filmmaker is indirectly working for the
studios. The American Film Institute participated in this unfortunate reality.
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I John E. Towmey. “Some Considerations of the Rise of the Art Film Theatre.” The
Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television spring 1956.
2 Roger Manville. The Film and the Public. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955, pp. 187-188.
3 George Stevens Jr. “Educating Filmmakers and Television Directors as Creative Artists
in the United States.” Arts In Society summer/fall 1973, pp. 198-208.
4 Stevens. “Educating Filmmakers and Television Directors as Creative Artists in the
United States,” pg. 20.
5 Stevens. “Educating Filmmakers and Television Directors as Creative Artists in the
United States,” pg. 26.
6 Colin Young. “An American Film Institute: A Proposal.” Film Quarterly fall 1961, pp.
37-50.
7 Amos Vogel. “An Expensive Art,” pg. 37.
8 According to Young, the number of film societies organized through university film
courses in American had increased exponentially from 250 to 4000 during the 1950s.
9 David Harvey. The Condition o f Postmodernity. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990, pg. 147.
1 0 Janet Staiger, David Bordwell, Kristen Thompson. The Classical Hollywood Cinema:
Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985,
pp. 330-337.
II “Following the New York Film Festival, National Film Institute Plotted.” Films in
Review Daily 9 October 1965.
12 «USIA Tops in Show Biz.” Variety 1 May 1966.
1 3 “Films from Uncle Sam.” Newsweek 4 September 1966.
1 4 “An Interview with George Stevens, Jr.” Film Comment 1965, pp. 2-7.
1 5 “An Interview with George Stevens, Jr.,” pp. 2-7.
1 6 Peter Levy. America in the Sixties: Right, Left, and Center. Westport: Praeger, 1998, pp.
106-109.
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1 7 The son of a Texas landowner and a six-term member of the Texas legislature, Johnson
graduated from the modest Southwest Texas State College in San Marcos to become a
public schoolteacher. Johnson then headed the Texas branch of the National Youth
Administration, which provided construction jobs to unemployed young men, as part of
Roosevelt’s New Deal America. When he won a congressional seat on the Texas
legislature soon thereafter, his campaign slogan, “Franklin D. and Lyndon B,” proudly
linked him to Roosevelt’s New Deal. In the next two decades, Johnson landed himself a
seat in the Senate and became a rich man through the broadcasting business, eventually
owing a small empire of television stations. Johnson was elected Senate minority leader in
1953. Two years later, when the Democrats regained control of the Senate, Johnson was
elected the Senate majority leader. Although the two politicians came from totally
different backgrounds, Kennedy picked Johnson to be his running mate in 1960 to secure
the Southern vote and the U.S Senate.
1 8 Levy. America in the Sixties: Right, Left, and Center, pp. 106-109.
1 9 “Who Runs Film Institute: Academia Versus Show Business.” Variety 10 June 1965.
2 0 News Release. American Film Institute. 11 Decemberl967.
2 1 News Release. American Film Institute. 11 December 1969.
2 2 Lynne Bennett. “Building a New Wave at AFT.” Los Angeles Magazine February 1970.
2 3 Cecil Starr. “Film Artists Fear AFT Will Go Hollywood.” Readers and Writers
April/May 1967, pp. 8-12.
2 4 Starr. “Film Artists Fear AFT Will Go Hollywood,” pg. 10.
2 5 Gregory Peck. “The American Film Institute: In Answer to Public Demand.” Action
J anuary/February 1968.
2 6 Jack Valenti. “Film Institute is Designed to Advance the Art Form in the U.S.” Film
Daily 10 November 1967.
2 7 “Film Institute as Producer: $400,000 Line of Pix Foreseen.” Variety 18 November
1967
2 8 “Film Institute as Producer.” Variety 18 November 1967
2 9 “Film Institute Productions: 400G Budgets; Distribs Get 40% of Profit.” Variety 19
March 1968.
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3 0 “Film Institute Productions.” Variety 19 March 1968.
3 1 “Paramount Donates 145 Pix of 1914-30 to Film Institute.” Variety 3 Novemberl970.
3 2 “Pickford Films Classics Given to Library.” Los Angeles Times 3 November 1970.
3 3 “Jack Warner Gift of $250,000 Aids AFI Theatre Construction.” The Hollywood
Reporter 26 November 1972.
3 4 “American Film Institute Unveils Its D.C. Theatre, L’Enfant.” Variety 8 April 1970.
3 5 The Louis B. Mayer Foundation gave the AFI a research grant of one hundred and fifty
thousand dollars in 1972. “AFI Commissions Research Projects with Mayer Grant.” The
Hollywood Reporter 22 August 1972.
3 6 The oral history project interviewed screenwriter Samson Raphelson and
cinematographer John F. Seitz. “Film Institute Research Grants.” Variety 5 May 1971.
3 7 News Release. The American Film Institute. 15 April 1968.
3 8 “Remarks of George Stevens, Jr., Director of The American Film Institute at The
Opening AFI Leadership on Teaching The Film, Santa Barbara, California, July 8, 1968.”
The Filmmakers Newsletter summer 1968.
3 9 “Crash Course in Speeding Film Study.” Los Angeles Times 7 September 1968.
“George Stevens Jr. Offers 4-Point Plan ‘To Elevate Quality of Film Study’.” Variety 1
September 1968.
4 0 Doris Kearns. Lyndon Johnson and The American Dream. New York: Harper & Row,
1976, pg. 252.
4 1 Ron Sutton was the head of the AFI Education Department who quit in 1970 to form
NAME. For more on the AFI’s intentional sabotaging of NAME see the essay by Harvey
R. Deneroff, another ex-staffer of the AFI who quit in protest, entitled “Exposed Film:
Scandal in the American Film Institute” in The Los Angeles Herald 12 May 1972.
4 2 “Federation of Film Societies Voices Criticism of American Film Institute’s Priorities.”
Variety 3 October 1971.
4 3 William Starr. Film Society Review February 1971.
4 4 Starr, Film Society Review February 1971.
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4 5 “George Stevens Jr., “Under Fire for Steering Film Institute on Present Course.” Variety
30 June 1971.
4 6 “Television Review: American Film Theatre.” The Hollywood Reporter 14 May 1971.
4 7 Five Easy Pieces fits with David Bordwell definition of the typical art film. The “hero”
is internally conflicted and the narrative is non-linear and full of the kind of inexplicable,
spontaneous interruptions that made Cassavetes’ Shadows seem original some years
earlier.
4 8 Joan Micklin Silver and Raphael Silver. “On Hester Street.” American Film October
1975.
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CHAPTER FOUR
THE AMERICAN NEW WAVE
Federal support of the American arts during the 1970s sustained independent
filmmaking despite the waste that was. the AFI. The NEA, NEH and PBS in particular
supported uncommon stories and formal experimentation by first time filmmakers. PBS
was especially significant since it gave independent filmmakers a national exhibition
outlet for their films. If the independent cinema wanted to reach a large audience, then it
would have to use television to do so. Interestingly enough, the idea of television as a
possible outlet for American independent films came up during the Antioch Symposium
in 1960. After explaining just how expensive it is to program an independent film in an
art house theatre, John Adams, the President of Film Quarterly, suggested that television
might provide a possible solution to the dilemma. However, Shirley Clarke would not
hear of exhibiting her films on the small screen. “I would like to vote violently against
it,” Clarke insisted, “for the reason that I think it is absolutely destructive to the art of the
film.” Clarke continued, “These films are made as films, not for a teeny little box, and I
don’t care how many people see it, they will not be seeing a film.”1
A decade later, the new cinema could not afford to be so insistent. Nor did it want
to be. The new wave spoke a different language than Clarke’s generation. The new wave
opposed commercialization, but never talked about “freeing the American cinema.”
Vietnam and Watergate had dulled the optimism of the 1960s, creating a “more realistic”
generation of social activists. In turn, the American new wave had a different
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understanding of political cinema than did Clarke and The New American Cinema
Group. When Clarke said that television would destroy the “art” of her films, she was
being an elitist artist, but she was also expressing what her generation in general
understood as the relationship between television and politics. For this generation, the
“teeny little box” could only shrink the power of political filmmaking. This is why, as
Clarke said, it wouldn’t matter how many people saw her films on television. Clarke
believed that the small screen would reduce her political film to mere entertainment. For
this reason, Clarke believed that television was “destructive to the art of the film.”
The American new wave believed in the power of everyday media. In the era of
Marshal Mcluhan’s Understanding Media (1964), the new wave accepted that all media,
film, television and even video, shaped individual, cultural and national identities. As
Mcluhan predicted, “A new form of ‘politics’ is emerging, and in ways that we haven’t
yet noticed. The living room has become a voting booth. Participation via television in
Freedom Marches, in war, revolution, pollution, and other events is changing
everything”2 The new wave was this “new form of politics” that McLuhan had called for.
The new wave embraced television as a powerful political media and for this reason felt
that television would be the perfect exhibition outlet for socially conscious cinema. Even
more so than the cinema, television was centrally located in the American people’s daily
lives. For this reason, the new wave believed that television was the ideal outlet for
socially conscious cinema about everyday people, places, and even everyday revolutions.
Through the 1970s, non-profit organizations like Film Fund emerged in urban
centers, especially New York City, to help independent filmmakers with their funding
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for political media. These organizations were the fundraising arms for the American new
wave. A former AFI board member, John Culkin, started the Center for Understanding
Media in New York City during the early 1970s to help the public better “understand
media.” A San Francisco based organization, CiniManifest geared itself to the same
goals. The Independent Feature Project (IFF), which published The Off-Hollywood
Report (now Filmmaker), the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers
(AIVF), which still publishes The Independent Film and Video Monthly, and Film Fund
opened their doors in New York City during the early part of the 1970s. Besides
allocating funds for independent filmmakers, these organizations created community
spaces where independent filmmakers could meet, share resources, crews, swap films,
and discuss all of the above over a cup of coffee. Film Fund was located down the hall
from the IFF in the same New York Lower East Side office building.
Following The New American Cinema Group, the American new wave wanted to
create a more politically radical “in touch” with the people American cinema. A case in
point, Film Fund began in 1976 “to further public understanding of social issues through
production and distribution of quality independent films on current social issues.”3 The
organization’s first annual report, entitled “Why Film Fund,” explained the new wave’s
founding missions. Just as The New American Cinema Group had formed to amend
Hollywood’s monopoly control over the American cinema, Film Fund formed to
compete with the multinational conglomerates controlling American media. “Visual
media, as the report explained, “exert an exceptional influence over public opinion in our
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society. And increasingly these media are dominated by large multinational interests
which are generally inaccessible and unaccountable to the large public.” The report
continued:
The directors, staff and supporters of the Film Fund believe that
independently produced visual media should be more widely
supported because in a powerful and unique way they can support
social change by providing the public with viewpoints and visions
often ignored by commercial media. Since the origin of the moving
picture image, film has been used to document inequities and
injustices, to educate the public and to inspire people to challenge
social roles and improve conditions around them. The Film Fund
was organized with that historical role in mind.4
Following The New American Cinema Group, Film Fund wanted socially conscious
films to reach an audience otherwise accustomed to “filmed entertainment.” Film Fund
wanted to make films that “the people” could relate to, but also films that could
intellectually engage viewers to see the world differently. As Film Fund’s first annual
report put it, “We are interested in films that respect the intelligence of viewers,
combine intellectual clarity with skillful and imaginative filmmaking, and that will try
to reach a broad audience.” Film Fund was a fund raising organization committed to
inspiring social change through mainstream exhibition outlets. As “What is Film
Fund?” forcefully concluded:
Priority is given to documentary and fiction films that take hard
looks at pressing social issues, that try to expand people’s
perceptions of what is real or possible, that encourage activity rather
than passivity.5
Like The Group, Film Fund believed that cinema could create positive social change.
Film Fund, like The Group, supported documentary aesthetics about contemporary social
issues. Film Fund wanted to create a new American cinema through the audience.
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Film Fund’s first organizers, Barbara Kopple (Harlan County, USA, 1977) and
Haskell Wexler (Medium Cool, 1969), maintained the political beliefs of The New
American Cinema Group even as they resolved to be “more realistic” about the rules of
the marketplace. First and foremost, Film Fund was a fundraising organization. The
organization wanted the American independent cinema to become self-sustaining if not
profitable.
The press called Film Fund an “inherited wealth movement” because its
benefactors, David Crocker, George Pillsbury, and Obie Benz, were from old money
families. For precisely this reason, though, Film Fund was able to raise tax-deductible
money from the country’s rich and powerful. When Norman Lear hosted Film Fund’s
first fundraiser at the home of the well to do Hollywood producer Michael Phillips, all of
the major studios attended, and each donated $5 thousand dollars.6 The same year, the
NEH donated $300 thousand dollars. The NEA gave Film Fund an additional eighteen
thousand dollars. With this money, Film Fund produced many socially conscious films
and documentaries, including Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, Sylvia Morales’
Chicana, Hale Gerima’s Wilmington 10, the groundbreaking feminist documentaries
Union Maids and With Babies and Banners, and The Atomic Cafe, a remarkable
documentary that reframes found footage to critique Cold War American. For better or
worse, the “inheritance movement” was what resuscitated the dream of a new American
cinema.
The new wave was also a product of Nixon’s tax breaks for commercial film
investment. In Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadows of Watergate and
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Vietnam, 1970-1979, David Cook explains that the Nixon administration, “at the urgent
request of industry leadership,” created tax shelters and income tax credits to reward
private investors of domestic cinema. The Nixon Administration’s tax breaks stimulated
commercial film production in a decade of economic depression for the studios.
According to Cook, “until they were prohibited by tax reform legislation in 1976,”
Nixon’s tax breaks financed “20 percent of all film starts between 1973 and 1976.. .and
roughly $150 million in production money between 1971 and 1976.”7 Fortuitously,
Nixon’s tax breaks also stimulated non-studio domestic film production. David Crocker,
George Pillsbury and Obie Benz initiated Film Fund under Nixon’s tax shelter
legislation, for example.
Film Fund began after Barbara Koppel received a generous NEA grant to
complete Harlan County, USA. This grant was unprecedented for its time. For most of
their histories, the NEA and NEH had supported a trickle down approach to supporting
the arts. The NEA and NEH favored large non-profit organizations (like the AFI) to
individual artists and small projects. According to the NEA art specialist at the time,
Barbara’s Kopple’s footage was “so overwhelmingly good” as to encourage a
precedent.8 However, the bicentennial, and, specifically, The Bicentennial Arts Projects,
were the real catalysts for the federal art agencies change in heart during the 1970s.
Inspired by the New Deal arts programs, Senator Walter Mondale pitched his
idea for a Bicentennial Arts Project to Congress in 1975. Mondale wanted do for
America, which was suffering the greatest economic depression since the 1930s, what
the New Deal arts had done for the country during the Great Depression. The
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Bicentennial Arts Projects would create a documentary record of the country, create
jobs for American artists, and in the process raise the country’s mood.
The NEA embraced Mondale’s idea immediately. By the mid-1970s, the NEA
was finally capable of a national arts project. When the NEA began in 1965, the agency
had fewer than twelve employees and an annual budget of just $2.5 million. By the time
of Mondale’s proposal, the NEA had over 250 employees and an annual budget of $74
million dollars.9 The NEA was ready to make history. The Bicentennial Arts Project
provided the NEA and the NEH with an opportunity to do what these organizations
were founded to do under The Great Society—to support art for and by the American
people.
Between 1974-1979, the Bicentennial Arts Project sponsored seventy
photographic surveys of the American people. Like the New Deal photographs, the
Bicentennial photos were regionally specific portraits of common people in familiar
situations. “The purpose of the Arlington Photographic Documentary Project is to create
a record of the people and landscape of Arlington, Va„” argued the Virginia project
photographers.1 0 Like Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the Arlington photographs
make heroes out of otherwise “un-famous” people. “Framing Mr. and Mrs. Windsor,”
taken by Paula Endo, depicts an elderly couple in modest clothing sitting side by side at
their kitchen table. Facing the viewer directly, the couple sits respectfully under a
reproduction of a 17th century painting of a priest deep in prayer as the image evokes
themes of faith and sacrifice. “Richard Walker,” one of Lloyd Wolf’s photographs from
the Arlington collection, features a working class black man in a weathered set of
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overalls and beat up flannel shirt, in the doorway a dilapidated feed store. While
“Richard Walker” is less optimistic than “Framing Mr. and Mrs. Windsor,” together
these images show how the color line affected everyday life in Arlington in the 1970s.
The Miami Beach Photographic Project, by Gary Monroe and Andy Sweet,
documents the region’s elderly Jewish population. One image shows three elderly
women playing as free and happy as children in the ocean. Another photo reveals an
elderly man standing aimlessly before an empty refrigerator. Like the Arlington images,
the Miami Photographic Project represents the various identities within a community of
regionally if not culturally specific people.
The Shrewsbury Street Photographic Project, by Robert Simone, represents the
eclectic variety of people on Shrewsbury Street in Worcester, Massachusetts. “Aldo
Gatti” captures an older man painting happily in front a wall full of completed portraits.
“Ms. Edna Vincent” is a close up image of a proud young woman. Like the other
Bicentennial Photography Projects, this one represents the various class, ethnic, gender,
age, and sexualities of the people living in one specific American region.
The Bicentennial State Film Project provided finishing funds of up to $50
thousand dollars for seven features. The NEA also established the Media Arts Program to
showcase short independent films in commercial movie houses nationwide. The federal
government’s support of public broadcasting was equally unprecedented. With a $5
million dollar federal grant, PBS’s “The American Short Story” of 1974 and again in
1980 funded and exhibited 17 non-studio feature films with “American” themes. The
series, narrated by Henry Fonda, recalling his The Grapes of Wrath days, included films
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that had been based on the short stories of popular American authors like Willa Cather,
Ambrose Bierce, Mark Twain, Nathaniel Hawthorn and Stephen Crane, authors known
for regionally specific stories. Like Bicentennial Photography Project, the PBS films
were shot on location with a representational visual style. While several of the program’s
directors had come from commercial cinema, many, like Joan Micklin Silver (Hester
Street, 1974), were first time filmmakers.1 1
PBS also produced the “American Playhouse” series during the Bicentennial
decade. With funding from the NEA, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, U.S.
Public Television Stations and Chubbs insurance company, “American Playhouse” was a
joint venture from the producers of KCET in Los Angeles, SCETV in Columbia, South
Carolina, NGBH in Boston and WNET in New York.1 2 Like the “American Short Story,”
“American Playhouse” was a reaction to the criticism that PBS was an “un-American”
public broadcasting service. At the time, PBS imported the majority of its content from
the BBC and other foreign outlets. Using this as their trump card, the producers
successfully pitched “American Playhouse” as “American” content for PBS. By the early
1990s, the critically lauded series had an annual budget of 21 million dollars. “American
Playhouse” broadcast the first films of Victor Nunez (A Flash o f Green), Wayne Wang
(Dim Sum), James Ivory (The Europeans), Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line), Gregory
Nava (El Norte) and Todd Haynes (Swoon).1 3
These films were also popular because the idea of knowing one’s “roots” was in
style during the Bicentennial. The 1970s is the decade of the docu-drama, when nearly
10 million people tuned into PBS’s twelve-hour documentary series An American Family
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(1973) and another 40 million turned on CBS for seven nights of Roots (1977). Like
these hugely popular television series, “American Playhouse” films were historically
minded while they tackled controversial social issues like AIDS, immigration and police
brutality. These films also told minority stories and histories with minority actors taking
the leading roles. Where Hollywood films of the time rarely included minorities or
women as anything other than secondary or tertiary characters, “American Playhouse”
told stories from these secondary and tertiary perspectives, including women, blacks,
gays, and Latinos.
“American Playhouse” films were so popular with critics and audiences that the
producers eventually started to think bigger than television. In a move that would
foreshadow the fate of so many of New York City’s non-profit film organizations,
“American Playhouse,” led by producer Lindsey Law, signed a $70 million dollar
contract with Samuel Goldwyn Company for Playhouse Pictures, a specialty division of
the major studio that in three years was slated to produce fifteen feature films for
“special” audiences for domestic and international release. Just as Paramount created
Paramount Classics, Sony created Sony Classics, and Twentieth Century Fox created
Fox Searchlight, Samuel Goldwyn created Playhouse Pictures in order to produce and
distribute niche films for theatrical release during the early 1990s.
Sandra Schulberg was one of the “American Playhouse” producers to move into
commercial film production in the early 1990s. Schulberg began her career as a story
editor for a PBS series called “Visions” in the early 1970s. Schulberg was from a long
line of American film mavericks. Her father, Stuart Schulberg, produced “The Today
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Show” and “David Brinkley’s Journal” for NBC in the 1960s. His brother, B.P.
Schulberg, who wrote What Makes Sammy Run (1941) and founded the left wing Watts
Writers Workshop. Stuart and Budd’s father, B.P. Schulberg Senior, was head of
production at Paramount during the 1930s. Sandra Schulberg inherited from her family a
deep understanding of American show business along with an even deeper allegiance to
left wing politics. She was perfectly suited for the American new wave.
To The New York Times in 1979, in an article entitled “Champion of Independent
Cinema,” the 29-year-old Sandra Schulberg explained her relationship to “the
movement”:
Film helped me understand the economy of this country and its
people, their means of survival and relationships. As filmmakers, we
have the same kind of struggle. We need to find humanistic, socially
responsible ways to contribute to society, and be entertaining.. .if we
don’t make this movement succeed, we’re going to be in hock to the
major studios, and that will take the work away from out souls.1 4
The year before the Times interview, Schulberg was at the Rotterdam film festival with
twelve films from her “Visions” series. Like “The American Short Story” or
“American Playhouse,” “Visions” was a funded by the NEA, NEH and the Ford
Foundation during the Bicentennial. In turn, “Visions” films were regionally specific
portraits of American culture and history. Alambrista! (Robert Young), The
Gardener’s Son (Richard Pierce), Under, Sideways Down (San Francisco’s Cini
Manifest), Harlan County, USA (Barbara Kopple), Joe and Maxi (Maxi Cohn, Joel
Gold), and Girlfriends (Claudia Weil) were all surprise hits on the festival circuit.
Alambrista! and Northern Lights won the Camera d’Or Award at Cannes while Girl
Friends won the grand prize at the Utah Film Festival (now Sundance). Harlan County
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won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Heartland (Richard Pierce,
1977), a painterly portrait of Montana pioneer women, earned the Golden Bear Award
at the Berlin Film Festival. Even more surprisingly, Schulberg sold nearly all of the
“Visions” films to foreign television and film markets hungry for “American” themed
films. A West German television station even funded Mark Rappaport’s The Scenic
Route (1978) to secure first dibs on the film’s overseas distribution rights.1 5
Critics dubbed the new movement “Hollywood without Makeup.”1 6 The films
were shot on location, with vernacular and conversational dialogue, and inexpensive
lighting and sound design. The “Visions” films were careful to accurately and
“realistically” represent their respective cultures to keep with PBS’s mission to educate
and entertain viewers. “Visions” films were also open ended, which fit with the
“Hollywood Without Makeup” moniker. The films were received as closer to real life
than Hollywood cinema because the films were realistic, attempted to be authentic, and
because the “Visions” films refused to give the viewer a cathartic experience. Following
The New American Cinema Group films, the “Visions” films refused to make life
“pretty” because the filmmakers wanted and had been hired by PBS to represent life in
America “as it really is,” realistically, or “without make-up.”
For Sandra Schulberg, the success of the “Hollywood without Make-up” films:
.. .demonstrated that there was great vitality not only in New York
and LA, but in the regions, among the 60s generation filmmakers,
and a hunger not only to make experimental films and
documentaries, but also to produce works of fiction that would turn
Hollywood on its ear.1 7
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Upon her return from Rotterdam, Schulberg applied for grant money from the NEA and
NYSCA (New York State Council of Arts) to start her own non-profit organization for
“the movement.” By January of 1979, just months later, Schulberg had received enough
grant money to set up a small office down the hall from Barbara Kopple and Film Fund.
The Independent Feature Project (IFP) was bom.
The IFP went public during the 1979 New York Film Festival. Schulberg
convinced the festival programmer Richard Roud, who had once hoped to start the
American Film Institute at the Lincoln Center with Amos Vogel, to support a new
sidebar addition to the festival. Roud agreed, although he wasn’t convinced that the new
wave films would draw the audience to warrant such a sidebar. Round packaged the new
films in an American film retrospective that included Killers Kiss (Stanley Kubrick,
1955) Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles, 1971), The Brig (Jonas
Mekas, 1963), The Cool World (Shirley Clarke, 1967), Trash (Andy Warhol, 1970),
Badlands (Terrence Mallick, 1973), which premiered at the festival, Glen and Randa
(Jim McBride, 1971) and Crazy Quilt (John Korty, 1966).
Schulberg’s “American Independents” sidebar included these six new wave
films: Alambrista! (Robert Young), Heartland (Richard Pearce), Bush Mama (Haile
Gerima), The Scenic Route (Marc Rappaport), Northern Lights (John Hanson, Rob
Nilsson), and Gal Young’ Un (Victor Nunez). “Determined to offer sufficient
contemporary films to induce foreign buyers to make the trip,” Schulberg screened
twenty additional new wave films in a private venue during the New York Film Festival.
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Schulberg and Miles Mogulescu {Union Maids) from Film Fund drafted a
manifesto to accompany the screenings. “The films in this special program are part of a
growing independent American film movement, linked together not by any single artistic
or political point of view, but by a common insistence on the freedom to explore a wider
range of feelings and ideas that is normally possible in the commercial film industry.”
The manifesto continued:
If there is a common thread running through them it is a
commitment to an American cinema that mirrors the diversity of
American society, that is entertaining while being provocative, that
combines technical quality with an awareness of the issues of the
day, that comes from the land and the stories of its people rather
than from a dream factory. It is not a new movement. As long as
there has been a film industry, independents have struggled for the
right and the means to make their films and have them seen. It is,
and has always been, an uphill battle, a battle fought with scarce
capital in the face of exhibition patterns dominated by commercial
product.
The growing institutionalization of the film industry and the trend
towards high budget “blockbusters” has largely eliminated the
smaller, more personal films from the studios production schedule.
American independents have often had to look abroad for
models—to Italian Neo-Realism, the British Free Cinema, the
French New Wave, the Brazilian Cinema Novo, the Cuban Cinema,
and The New German Cinema. Ironically, representatives of these
overseas movements often receive wider exposure in America than
our own independent products. Even more ironic, American
independent features, which have gone unnoticed at home, have
often won wide acclaim and exposure abroad. Despite these
handicaps, increasing numbers of talented filmmakers, directors,
writers and producers are choosing to work outside the studio
structure in order to make films that more closely express their
personal artistic vision. Their work represents a wide range of
genres, styles and subjects. Often the films show the flaws of lack of
resources and relative inexperience; but they have something
important to express and in many ways do it brilliantly and
bravely.1 8
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As Schulberg’s manifesto suggests, the new wave was an amalgam of The Group
and the post-war avant-garde cinema. Like the avant-garde, the new wave was an auteur
cinema. Like The Group, the American new wave was a collective film movement united
with shared goals and ideals. The new wave wanted to compete with “the dream factory”
version of social reality. Like The Group, the new wave embraced location shooting,
non-professional actors, vernacular dialogue, sparse lighting and minimal sound design
as more affordable and political choices than typical studio filmmaking.
However, where The Group detested the “professionalization” of art in capitalism,
the new wave was a “professional” film movement. New wave producers prided
themselves as movers and shakers in the industry. “Though not perhaps the ultimate word
on a fairly broad topic,” as the IFP/West executive direct Lynette Mathis once explained,
“we do have something quite definite in mind in referring to ‘American Independent
Film.’” Mathis continued:
At its best, these are its elements: quality (movies from the heart
with something to say); creative control (the filmmakers are in
charge); diversity of theme (cultural, regional, ethnic, sexual,
political, etc.); bold, risky, aesthetic; moderate budget, maximum
use of resources; financing obtained outside established channels of
commercial film industry.1 9
Like Mathis’ definition of independent cinema exemplifies, new wavers spoke industry
speak. Independent films were called “quality” films. They were “bold, risky, aesthetic.”
The Group would never use such language, for words like “quality” implied that social
standards were busy at work against the art of political filmmaking. However, the new
wave is not less political than The Group for this difference in discourse. In many ways,
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the new wave is the product of The Group’s failure to succeed in the marketplace. New
wavers knew that they would have to mingle with industry to survive.
The new wave had an altogether different relationship with the studios than The
New American Cinema Group. By the 1970s, studio distributors looked to independent,
foreign, and exploitation cinema to pull in the niche audiences with “bold, risky,
aesthetic” films. While the studios used blockbuster films like Jaws (1975) to attract the
largest possible audience, studios needed independent films to attract niche audiences. If
producers like Lynette Mathis spoke industry language, then it is because these
producers knew that the industry had the keys to the theatrical marketplace.
There is one more major difference between the American new wave and The
New American Cinema Group. Where The Group’s filmmakers like Shirley Clarke were
inclined to critique American society from the perspective of Civil Rights, or through the
eyes of an imaginary black “other,” new wave filmmakers told stories that were closer to
home, stories that spoke to the director’s life, culture, and social identity. The new wave
considered itself a director or auteur cinema for this reason. The new wave filmmaker
was an auteur because her film was formally unique from studio films, but also because
her film spoke to her personal history as an American minority. In this way, the new
wave was very much an extension of the “identity politics” that replaced the group-based
politics of the 1960s. New wave films simultaneously stressed the value of community
and collective resistance.
Hester Street, Girl Friends, Northern Lights, El Norte and Bush Mama are
exemplar new wave films. The rest of this chapter explains why. All of these films
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screened as part of the “American Independent” sidebar of the 17th New York Film
Festival, or on one of the PBS series, or both. That the NEA or NEH funded these films
testifies to the importance of non-profit support of the arts, especially in the corporate
climate of the American media. Each film tells a very different story, but collectively the
films show the new wave’s “commitment to an American cinema that mirrors the
diversity of American society.” Whether the film is about a first generation Russian-
Jewish immigrant family, a young Jewish woman trying to make it as a photographer in
New York City, the farmers struggle in North Dakota, or whether the film portrays the
difficulties that two young migrant workers encounter in trying to cross the border, new
wave films tell stories about American minorities. Like the Bicentennial or even the New
Deal arts, the new wave gave invisible social identities humanity.
At the same time, the new wave is best understood within the context of the
women’s liberation movement and the documentary cinema. Because women’s
liberation and the documentary cinema shared the same political agenda as the new
wave (to document marginal social identities and validate minority people’s struggle for
civil and social rights), the boundaries between the new wave, the women’s movement
and the documentary cinema are tenuous at best.
Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA is a case in point. The film documents the
Harlan County, Kentucky coal miners’ strike against the Brookside Mine of the Eastover
Mining Company during the early 1970s. The 25-year-old Kopple spent a year living
with the coal miners as they struggled in dire poverty to get the mining company to
recognize the United Miners of America regulations. The film weaves folk songs,
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interviews, and documentary footage into a portrait of this regionally specific workers
struggle. The film also documents the mining company’s violence against the coal
miners. The film helped the coal miners win their struggle by incriminate the mining
company on film. At the same time, since the film focuses specifically on the wives of
the coal miners, plus the fact that Kopple is herself a “women filmmaker,” Harlan
County, USA is also a “feminist” film. Like With Babies and Banners, Union Maids, or
Janie’s Jane, Kopple’s Harlan County, takes a “woman’s” perspective of American life,
history, and culture.
Harlan County, USA also ties to the New Deal arts. Like Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men, The film is a simultaneously realistic and mythic portrait of poor or
working class people. For film historian William Rothman, Harlan County invites
viewers into a mythic world based in reality. Rothman explains:
The world of Harlan County is and is not our world, the “real”
world. In our world conflicts are complex and we cannot easily
know which side is right and where we stand. These miners and
their families inhabit a world that brutally victimizes those who do
not stand up for their rights, but it is also a world where heroism is
possible.. .Harlan County reveals a place in America, but apart from
America, where the good fight is still being fought.2 0
Many new wave films merge reality and myth. Like Harlan County, USA, Hester Street,
Northern Lights and El Norte can be said to romanticize the social reality of “common
folk” into a social struggle of epic proportions. At the same time, these films bring
otherwise invisible social identities to the forefront of culture and politics. New wave
films were in many cases part of the social struggles they documented. Harlan Country,
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El Norte and Northern Lights publicized and in this way aided otherwise invisible social
struggles.
Hester Street (Joan Micklin Silver, 1974)
Hester Street was based on Yekl, a story written in the 1890s by Abraham Cahan,
a Russian Jewish immigrant living in New York City’s the Lower East Side.2 1 Cahan
was a journalist for The Jewish Daily Forward, which published Yekl for a culturally
specific audience of first generation Russian-Jewish immigrants like Cahan. Yekl
validates the struggles of this audience. “Yekl” is an illiterate sewing machine Lothario.
He shaves his beard, takes English classes, and adorns the latest New York fashions.
Yekl wants so badly to fit into American culture that he eventually changes his name to
“Jake.” Jake’s roommate, “Bernstein” is a humble scholar of the Torah. He speaks
Yiddish, keeps a beard, and wears orthodox clothing. “Mamie” is a hard working
waitress who, like Jake, has totally cut ties from her roots.
Jake’s mistress. “Getl” is Jake’s wife. She is a submissive orthodox wife. She
speaks Yiddish and wears the orthodox wig. “Mrs. Kavarsky” is the perfect mixture of
Getl and Mamie’s charcters. Mrs Kavarsky has managed to fit into American culture
without deserting her Russian-Jewish heritage. In Hester Street, the characters are the
story, the women characters especially. In fact, Cahan’s story appealed to Joan Micklin
Silver because it included “three reasonably interesting women roles and none of them a
cutie pie, a hooker, or one afflicted with a fatal disease.”2 2 Micklin Silver even changed
the story’s name from “Yekl” to Hester Street to accentuate the roles of the female
characters.
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Although there are many important characters in the film, Hester Street focuses
specifically on Getl’s struggles to find herself in America after Jake leaves her for
Mamie. Like Mrs. Kavarsky, Gelt learns how to respect her culture difference within
loosing ground in American society. Getl also gets the guy. Getl marries Bernstein and
Jake marries Mamie. The couples represent opposing strategies for survival in America.
Just as Jack and Mamie turn away from their roots to “make it” in America, Getl and
Bernstein embrace their heritage in the new world. The camera pulls away from the
couples walking in opposite directors down Hester Street in the film’s final scene.
Hester Street was shot for $350,000 on a grant from NEH and the NYSCA.2 3
Hester Street is a “realistic” period piece, with authentic costumes, location shooting and
vernacular dialogue. The film was shot with minimalist lighting and sound design (the
boom shows in one scene), but the camera work falls safely within the traditions of
professional filmmaking. There are more medium shots and fewer close-ups than the
average commercial film of the time, but this choice was mainly done for budget reasons
and also because Silver was interested in contextualizing the characters on Hester Street,
which is to say, the socio-political context of Russian Jewish immigrants in America in
the 1890s. In fact, the film’s opening sequence, like the final one, situates the story in a
specific place and time. As the camera descends onto “Hester Street” (Morton street in
Greenwich Village), the title, “The Lower East Side, 1890,” grounds the spectator in a
historical place. The story that follows humanizes this place in American history. Like
the Bicentennial photographs, or the New Deal arts, Hester Street tells an epic story at
the ground level. Otherwise mundane activities, like Yekl or “Jake” shaving his beard, or
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Getl trying on her first girdle, are here symptomatic of the lives of immigrants as they
chose whether or not to “become American.”
Hollywood would have never made Hester Street. Besides the fact that the film
was considered too “special” to attract large audiences, Hester Street is a story about first
generation Jewish immigrants. Hollywood has traditionally avoided these stories.
Although many of Hollywood’s most influential writers, directors, and producers were
first and second generation Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, early Hollywood
shied away from stories like Hester Street. In An Empire o f Their Own: How the Jews
Invented Hollywood, Neal Gabler explains why. For Gabler:
The paradox is that the American film industry, which Will Hays,
president of the original Motion Picture Producers and Distributors
of America, called “the quintessence of what we mean by
‘American,’” was founded and for more than thirty years operated
by Eastern European Jews. The much-vaunted studio system, which
provided a prodigious supply of films during the movies’ heyday,
was supervised by a second generation of Jews. The storefront
theaters of the late teens were transformed into the movie palaces of
the twenties by Jewish exhibitors. And when sound movies
commandeered the industry, Hollywood was invaded by a battalion
of Jewish writers, mostly from the East. The most powerful talent
agencies were run by Jews. Jewish lawyers transacted most of the
industry’s business and Jewish doctors ministered to the industry’s
sick. Above all, Jews produced the movies.2 4
According to Gabler, the “Hollywood Jews,” much like “Jake” in Hester Street, wanted
to quietly assimilate into American culture. As Gabler concludes, “The most striking
similarity among the Hollywood Jews wasn’t their Eastern European origins. What
united them in deep spiritual kinship was their utter and absolute rejection of their past
and their equally absolute devotion to their new country.”2 5
1 4 7
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Jewish producers, filmmakers, writers and actors were key players in the
American new wave. The difference between this generation and the “Hollywood Jews”
to which Gabler refers is that the new wave validated their cultural difference or “Jewish
ness” within their films. As Sandra Schulberg explained, the new wave was “an American
cinema that mirrors the diversity of American society,” and Jewish diversity was no
exception. Hester Street is still one the few American movies to validate Jewish culture
and tradition. The film’s characters speak Yiddish, study the Torah, practice orthodox
rituals, and many of the scenes function solely to document and educate mainstream
American audiences as to some of the differences between, as Jekl or “Jake” explains in
the film, Jews and Gentiles.
Hester Street was also the first new wave film to prove to the major distributors
that “special” films can turn a profit. Hester Street was the My Big Fat Greek Wedding of
its day. Micklin-Silver distributed the film with her husband attorney Raphael Silver
though Midwest Film Productions, a distribution company they started for Hester Street.
The film began on the festival circuit in 1975 as a surprise hit of the USA Film Festal in
Dallas (which was held at the Southern Methodist University of all places) and the
Cannes film festival, where the Silver’s sold the film to German, French, British and
Scandinavian distributors. As Silver remembers:
Because of the excellent reception at Cannes, many American
distributors decided to take another look at Hester Street. Most of
the majors looked and “passed” again, concluding that despite the
excellent reviews, the warm audience reception, and the growing
word of mouth, the film was still “too special.”2 6
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The Silvers started Midwestern Film Productions with tax shelter deals with private
investors. The decision was a good one. The film was a hit. At the Beverly Hills
Laemmle’s theater, Hester Street grossed $22,460 the first week to surpass Ingmar
Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage and become the theater’s first profitable American
made art film.2 7 Several months later, Midwestern Productions bought a page in Variety
to flaunt the film’s popularity with American audiences. “Why are these people
smiling?” appeared over the film’s poster, while the bottom of the advertisement listed
the first, second, third, and fourth week profits at New York Plaza theater, Boston’s
Orson Welles Cinema, and Washington D.C.’s Dupont Circle theater.2 8 The producers
purchased another Variety spread several months later. This one included the box office
numbers for the 12 first run theaters showing Hester Street along with the second and
third run art house theaters in St Louis, Baltimore, Cleveland, Chicago, Miami, San
Diego, Tucson, Phoenix, Atlanta, Berkeley, Columbus, Allentown, Louisville also
playing the movie.2 9
Hester Street broke into the mainstream media without having to disregard its
cultural specificity or sell itself to a studio distributor. Even Rex Reed at Vogue gave the
film three stars. “Filmed for a mere fraction of the budget of most of the awful movies
that are churning out of Hollywood,” Reed argued, ‘ ’ Hester Street has more humor,
charm, and decency that I though possible in an age of cinematic chaos.” 3 0 The headlines
read, “American Dream works for Hester Team.” The film also earned Carol Kane
(Getl) an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
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Girl Friends (Claudia Weill, 1976)
Girl Friends is Claudia Weill’s second feature film following The Other H alf of
the Sky (1974), a documentary about seven women delegates in China that Weil made
with Shirley MacLaine and Frank Yablans, former president of Paramount. Girl Friends
is not a documentary, but the film speaks to feminist documentaries like The Other Half
o f the Sky, Harlan County, USA, Growing Up Female, Union Maids, Janie’s Jane or
Joyce at 34, which were all aligned with Women’s Liberation Movement. As feminist
film theorist Julia Lesage explains:
Many of the first feminist documentaries used a simple format to
present to audiences (presumably composed primarily of women) a
picture of the ordinary details of women’s lives, their thoughts—told
directly by the protagonists to the camera—and their frustrated by
sometimes successful attempts to enter and deal with the public
world of work and power.3 1
The new wave and the feminist documentary cinema of the 1970s, an extension of the
Women’s Liberation Movement, made the personal political. As Lesage argues, the
feminist documentary cinema focused on the “ordinary details” of “women’s lives” just
as the new wave in general, with its roots in the New Deal, used familiar genres to
present the details of poor and working class people’s everyday lives to the people in a
language that they could decipher.
Girl Friends is a feminist film. Robin Wood has called the film the “only
American movie” to “explicitly call marriage as an institution into question.”3 2 The film
maps what the feminist geographer Doreen Massey has described as “the spatial
organization of society” as it relates to gender and power.3 3 Girl Friends does this in a
couple of ways, both of which tell us something about how the day’s feminism
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understood the relationship between space, power, and gender. “You can take care of
yourself, don’t you know that,” as the film’s leading character, “Susan Weinblatt” tells
her best friend “Annie” who is deciding whether or not to marry and move from the city
to the suburbs. Girl Friends validates Susan’s choice to stay in the city and pursue her
photography career by telling her story instead of Annie’s story, which is ultimately a
sad one since Annie has to forgo her writing career for marriage and motherhood. The
film distinguishes the city, where women are free, from the suburbs, where women are
trapped. The film represents the suburbs as trap because the women’s liberation
movement, at least since Betty Friedan diagnosed the feminine mystique in 1963,
believed that the suburbs and the domestic sphere in general are where (middle class)
women stay to die. A girl needed to leave her mother’s home in order to become a
woman and a feminist.
At the same time, Girl Friends liberates a space within the “women’s film” for
feminism. The Hollywood “women’s film” has typically punished women for valuing
their personal identities and careers over their roles as wives and mothers. Discussing
Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937), E. Ann Kaplin argues that the film punishes Stella for
wanting more than motherhood. “She objects to mothering because of the personal
sacrifices involved; then, she protests by expressing herself freely in her eccentric style
of dress. The film punishes her for both forms of resistance by turning her into a
spectacle” to be pitied and then laughed at. In Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1945),
“the mother is punished for trying to combine work and mothering., .the work of the
film is to reinscribe the Mother in the position that patriarchy desires for her and, in so
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doing, teaches the female audience the dangers of stepping out of a given position.”3 4
The greatest tragedy of the Hollywood “women’s film” is that this genre attracted
mostly female audiences. The “women’s film” therefore had a pedagogical function.
The Hollywood women’s film helped to ingrain the logic of patriarchal culture within
the very people whom it oppressed—women. Girl Friends liberates the same target
audience. The film opens a space within the genre for woman to become, as Linda
Williams argues in her essay on the women’s film, “something else besides a mother.”3 5
Only the independent cinema could have imagined this space. Susan Weinblatt is
positioned as a role model because she chooses to stay in the city where she can pursue
her career as a photographer. Susan’s career choice is also a sign of the times. As a
photographer, Susan controls “the gaze,” and controlling the gaze, according to feminist
film theory a la Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1976), was a
testament to that character’s autonomy and control over the narrative diagesis. Susan’s
desire to become an individual corresponds with her desire to control the gaze and
become a respected photographer. Susan accomplishes these goals simultaneously when
she gets her first gallery show at the film’s end.
Funded by the NEH, Girl Friends was shot in New York City and New Jersey
with all of the new wave stylistic markers. Director Claudia Weill wrote “Susan
Weinblatt” as a young Jewish woman. Susan has rabbi friends, tells culturally specific
jokes (What’s green and flies over Poland? Peter Pansky), and aspires to become more
than a Barmitzvah photographer. Her cultural uniqueness is absolutely central to the
story even as her story is more than her cultural uniqueness. Weill uses traditional
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Jewish music as a soundtrack for the same effect. Susan’s best friend “Annie” who
moves to the suburbs is thin, blonde and blue eyed, a “traditional” woman with
traditional good looks.
Melanie Mayron is perfectly cast as Susan with her Diana von Furstenberg
glasses, curly auburn hair, and full figure. Girl Friends is Mayron’s first leading role. A
decade later, Mayron adapted this role to the character “Melissa,” the unmarried
bohemian photographer character of thirty something. Otherwise, Mayron has struggled,
like most American actresses, to find well-rounded roles for unconventionally attractive
women. Other than Girl Friends, Mayron is best known for her performance as a ditzy
buxom cashier in the exploitation comedy Car Wash (Michael Schultz, 1976).
Girl Friends resists narrative closure. Just as Francios Truffaut concludes The
400 Blows (1959), a masterpiece of the French New Wave, Claudia Weill ends Girl
Friends on a freeze frame close up of Susan to suggest the impossibility of closure and
catharsis for both Susan and the film’s audience. After months of distance, Susan and
Annie have finally reconciled their friendship over tequila shots and jokes in Annie’s
New Jersey home. When Annie’s husband Martin returns home earlier than planned,
Susan reacts as if her friendship has once again been interrupted. As Annie instinctively
moves from the couch to greet Martin, the camera stays on a close up of Susan, who
expresses disappointment. “I didn’t leave you, I got married,” Annie tells Susan earlier in
the film. The final image suggests that Susan has yet to resolve her complicated reaction
to Annie’s marriage. The film cannot imagine marriage as anything other than a threat to
female friendship and women’s liberation, and for this reason ends on a freeze frame of
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Susan’s disappointed expression. After Girl Friends won the U.S/Utah Film Festival in
1979, Warner Brothers, having watched Hester Street earn so much money, bought the
film’s distribution rights and signed Claudia Weill to direct her first studio film.
Unfortunately, It’s My Turn (1980), with Jill Clayburgh and Michael Douglas, was a
critical and box office flop.
Northern Lights (Rob Nilsson and John Hanson, 1979)
The poster for Northern Lights described the film: “The Land. The People. The
Struggle.” Northern Lights explicitly embodies the new wave’s relationship to the New
Deal arts. The reviews of the film are telling in this regard. “Northern Lights Gleams
with Truth and Beauty,” for The Miami Herald?6 For The Seattle Post Intelligencer,
“Film Brings Farmers Struggle to Life.”3 7 Vincent Canby for The New York Times
commented that “what one remembers of Northern Lights are the more general
things—the look of the winter landscapes during a funeral, when the mourners are black
silhouettes and the sun is a dim white disk in a gray sky; the faces of the farmers as they
listen to Ray’s organizing speech, the jokes and songs at family celebrations. These
things have the truth of reportage of a very high order.” 3 8 The Los Angeles Times
reported, “Northern Lights Bucks the System.”3 9 The film played for Congress in the
Senate Caucus room in Washington D.C. on the same day that it had opened in Los
Angeles, thus maintaining its political purpose while succeeding at the commercial box
office.4 0 Film Journal arguing that the film “recalls early Robert Flaherty and The
Grapes of Wrath?’4 1
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Northern Lights began as a half-hour documentary, Prairie Fire, on the history of
the North Dakota Farmers Nonpartisan League, one of the most successful unions in
American history. Filmmakers Rob Nilsson and John Hanson have roots in North
Dakota. The film’s fictional hero, Ray Halsme (1893-1977), was based on the life of
Hanson’s grandfather. Ron Nilsson’s father is regarded as one of the first filmmakers of
North Dakota. Nilsson and Hanson, both Harvard graduates, met in San Francisco, where
the two men were active in Bay Area filmmaking community. Before starting
CiniManifest in 1971, Nilsson and Hanson were members in the Film Workers Union.
According to the filmmakers, “we wanted to show not the political outside but the human
experience of everyday life., .we want to present a picture of people trying to find a
communal answer to the problems they face.” CiniManifesto organized to bring
progressive films to mass audiences. Like the New Deal arts, or the Bicentennial
photograph projects, CiniManifest was a social movement through the arts. The
organization stressed the everyday value of art, especially as it relates to social change
and politics. Nilsson and Hanson believed that “the political is mixed up in everything
we do.”4 2
Nilsson and Hanson received enough state funding to turn Prairie Fire into a
feature film. The North Dakota Committee for Humanities funded Northern Lights for
$330,000. The rest of the funding came from PBS’s “American Playhouse” series, which
aired the film in 1980. Northern Lights was one of Schulberg’s films for the 1979 New
York Film Festival. For its painterly images of the North Dakota prairie, the film won the
Camera d’Qr at Cannes, where 16 foreign distributors (7 theatrical and 9 television
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stations) purchased the film for overseas distribution. Northern Lights attracted more
foreign distributors than any other new wave film. After the film screened at Filmex (the
Los Angeles International Film Exposition), Nilsson and Hanson explained that the film
was made to “reveal the radical roots of the conservative state.” In light of the neo
conservative biases of the Nixon administration, the filmmakers wanted to reminded
audiences that social change was still a possible and necessary right of the people. To do
so, the filmmakers shot Northern Lights in Crosby, North Dakota, used non-professional
actors, vernacular dialogue, and naturalistic lighting.
Northern Lights opens on an elderly man walking cautiously through the woods.
A voice-over tells his story: “I grew up in a small town called Sacred Heart. My father
was a farmer.” The man drives home and walks up the stairs to his apartment. “I recently
cam across an old diary written by Ray Thomstein.” At this point, the older man moves
to his typewriter and begins to type. The screen becomes text:
I remember North Dakota in the year 1915, when Ray’s diary
begins. The homesteaders’ sod shack had given way to the frame
houses of the family farm. But the small wheat farmers were poor,
exploited by the same men who had stolen the land from the
Indians— Eastern Industrialists who ran the grain trade, railroads and
banks.
Northern Lights announces right away that it is a people’s critique of industry. “I had
already lost my farm and was working with the Socialists when organizers began to
appear on the farms talking up a new organization—the Nonpartisan League.” The text
continues, “They had a plan. Throw out the politicians and elect farmers in the elections
of 1916. No deals, just take over the state and run it for the benefit of the people.”
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The film dramatizes the textual introduction from the perspective of Ray, the
author of the diary, and the farmer who organizes the farmers “to take over the state and
run it for the benefit of the people.” Like Hester Street, Northern Lights uses subtitles to
accentuate the cultural specificity of the story. Northern Lights also documents farming
labor. The farmers plow and slaughter a pig to a soundtrack of bagpipe music, which is
culturally appropriate to the farmers’ Scandinavian roots. The film shows women
working inside the home, cleaning and cooking, and celebrates the community as a
family structure. According to the filmmakers, Northern Lights paints “a picture of
people trying to find a communal answer to the problems they face.” Even the funeral
scene captures the strength and beauty of the community of farmers. The images are so
powerful that they overcome the film’s plot. As The New York Times review noted, the
images “have the truth of reportage of a very high order.”
Northern Lights is a socialist film. After the farmers take the election, the film
once again becomes political text: “The personal struggles and sacrifices of people like
Ray brought victory to the farms in the fall elections of 1916.” The text concludes:
Today the Nonpartisan league is largely unknown, its history
ignored or rewritten, separating people from their rebel roots. But
not everyone forgets. Not everyone refuses to speak.
The final scene returns to the elderly man. “Henry Martisan: 94 years old,” the
titles begin. “Farmer. Union Man. League Organizer. Poet. Lifelong Socialist.” The film
was based on Henry’s memories of Ray and the Nonpartisan League. His final voice
over says: “One of these days they’ll go to far, you know what I mean.. .1 know that
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good comes out of bad. Things are going to change. I’m sure of it. I’ve got time. I can
wait.” Or can he? The film urges the audience to act now.
E l Norte (Gregory Nava, 1980)
El Norte is the first film to emerge from Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute
Workshop. “American Playhouse” financed the film with the British television company,
Channel 4, which also bought advanced rights to the film’s foreign distribution. Filmed
in the highlands of the Chiapas and Mexico City; El Norte is the story two Guatemalan
refuges. Like Hester Street and Northern Lights, El Norte uses subtitles to validate the
cultural difference of its protagonists. According to the film’s screenwriter Anna Thomas
and director Gregory Nava, who himself grew up in San Diego or “the north,” where the
film’s protagonists aspire to live, El Norte was difficult to get made because it was so
culturally specific. Thomas explains:
We kept hearing again and again that we should make Americans
the main characters, but we wanted a film where Latin American
people were the protagonists. We wanted the film to be true to their
customs, their way of life and we wanted the characters to speak in
their own language.4 3
El Norte was the labor of love by Nava and Thomas, a husband and wife
filmmaking team. Thomas and Nava met as graduate students in the UCLA film school,
which at the time had a renowned ethnographic film department led by Colin Young,
who drafted an American Film Institute proposal for Film Quarterly. Besides Anna
Thompson and Gregory Nava, UCLA in the 1970s graduated David and Judith
MacDougall, and the LA Rebellion School of filmmakers including Charles Burnett,
Haile Gerima and Julie Dash.
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El Norte was the highest grossing Spanish language picture in American
history.4 4 The film spent seven weeks in five Los Angeles theaters alone, attracting
audiences from the art house crowd as well as the Latino community, which was starving
for affirmative images its history and culture. Like Hester Street, Girlfriends or Northern
Light, El Norte attracted a surprisingly large audience because it couched its cultural
specificity within a popular genre and familiar theme.
Of all the new wave films, El Norte received the most lackluster reviews. The
critics had a hard time discounting the film’s cultural significance, but otherwise felt like
the film was a testament to the limitations of the “marshmallow humanism” of the new
wave in general.4 5 El Norte is the most melodramatic of the new wave films. The
filmmakers’ description of the film evinces the melodramatic sentimentality of El Norte:
In a mountain village of northern Guatemala, dispossessed of their
land and ruthlessly exploited by their employers, Indian peasants
dream of overthrowing their oppressors. One night, during a secrete
meeting, their leaders are attacked and massacred by soldiers.4 6
Rosa and Enrique, brother and sister, escape to Tijuana, where they are forced to crawl
through rat-infested sewers to make it to San Diego and Los Angeles. As Nava and
Thomas continue, the next “odyssey begins as Rosa and Enrique are confronted with
modern technology and the treachery of the ‘system.’” Rosa dies from typhus (from the
sewer rats) forcing Enrique to miss his chance at a real job in Chicago. The film even
shows the plane taking off without him.
For the filmmakers, the film’s melodrama kept with a cultural tradition best
represented by the literary style of Gabriel Garcia Marquez (One Hundred Years of
Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera). Despite the critics, Latino audiences loved the
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film. The film even brought the Los Angeles Latino community together. The Los
Angeles Times did a four-part story on the film’s significance to the LA Latino
community.4 7 El Norte even won a Hispanic Media Image Award.4 8 Mother Jones also
ran a story on El Norte where mainstream film critic Rodger Ebert testified to the film’s
emotional power. “I have seen a movie that has altered my feelings about undocumented
workers from south of the border,” Ebert argued. “The movie does not present a political
position on the difficult question surrounding illegal migration into the US. It simply tells
the story of a brother and a sister.”4 9
Ebert’s take on the film as “a story, not politics” fulfills the filmmakers’ vision of
the film. Thomas and Nava did not want to make a film “about politics.” They wanted to
make a film “about people.” Nava and Thomas argued:
Our goal was not to make Rosa and Enrique examples of political
injustice. It’s too easy to take the approach that we should care about
these people because they’re oppresses and homeless and so on.
When you read about illegal migration or War in Central America,
it’s like looking at ants in an ant farm.5 0
Despite the filmmakers’ intentions, Ebert’s read of the film as “a story, not politics”
brings up an interesting debate about new wave films. El Norte is radical to the extent
that it validates the cultural specificity of the film’s target audience. However, to the
extent that Ebert can all but pity “those poor minorities,” El Norte is problematic. The
film’s melodrama reads one way for one audience and another for audiences like Ebert,
who digested the film as entertainment, not politics.
Like El Norte, Harlan County, Hester Street, Girlfriends and Northern Lights are
“humanistic” dramas. Unlike the characters in El Norte, however, the characters in the
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latter films are represented as more than just victims of systematic oppression. Susan
Weinblatt in Girlfriends, for example, is both “Jewish” and “Female,” but the film
represents these social markers as positive as well as oppressive within the dominant
social order. Susan Weinblatt is more than just an oppressed “other” to be pitied and
objectified. The viewer has to invest in Susan to know her. She is not knowable on sight
as a “Jew” or “Woman.” The film is about her character development through the
ordinary details of her personality and life. Girl Friends gives Susan a full subjectivity
that cannot be absorbed by the plot. In El Norte, Rosa and Enrique do nothing but serve
the melodramatic plot, which brings the hypothetical viewer to closure and catharsis.
With El Norte, the characters, like the plot, are to be consumed, digested, and
disregarded. Girl Friends, Harlan County, Northern Lights, and Hester Street invite the
hypothetical viewer to invest in their character’s world, to see life through another’s
eyes. The viewer’s investment is here radically empathetic and not sympathetic, as
Ebert’s is in El Norte, which allows him to leave the theater feeling superior to the
characters.
If El Norte is the most melodramatic of the new wave films, then The Scenic
Route is the most avant-garde and cerebral. One of Sandra Schulberg’s “American
Independents” during the 1979 New York Film Festival, Mark Rappaport’s The Scenic
Route won the British Film Institute’s Award for Best and Most Original Film and
screened as part of MOMA’s prestigious “New Directors” series in 1978. Rappaport’s
film experiments with the formal language of melodrama as it questions the way that
fantasy shapes female psychology. There really is no plot to The Scenic Route, but there
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is a main character, “Estelle,” who’s voice over guides the viewer through a series of
vignettes about her search for self and romantic love after her divorce. Like Girl Friends,
The Scenic Route is also a feminist comment on melodrama (Claudia Weill even shows
up as extra in the film). However, The Scenic Route is an experimental film that
constantly breaks the fourth wall. The film is Douglas Sirk without ties to narrative.
Rappaport uses heightened melodramatic music and obviously fake backdrops to critique
the conventions of Hollywood melodrama for being so divorced from female reality, and
especially female reality in America. Estelle’s bedroom walls are painted with the stars
of the American flag while red, white and blue is the film’s primary color scheme.
Throughout the film too, Estelle postures herself as characters from iconographic
Renaissance paintings in several of the film’s vignettes as The Scenic Route questions
how high and low brow images pervert women’s expectations of reality.
Bush Mama (Haile Gerima, 1976)
The Ethiopian bom Haile Gerima was one of the first of the Los Angeles School
or “LA Rebellion” school of black filmmakers to receive international acclaim. Gerima
along with Charles Bumett, Ben Caldwell, Larry Clark, Billy Woodberry, Alile Sharon
Larkin, Barbara McCullough, Carroll Parrott Blue, Zeinabu Irene Davis, Melvonna
Ballenger, and O. Funmilayo Makarah, among others, were UCLA film students in the
wake of the 1965 Watts Riots. Gerima’s Bush Mama, his UCLA thesis film, is a typical
LA Rebellion film in that it aligns the struggle of black Americans, specifically those
living in Los Angeles, with the liberation struggles of Third World nations. Most
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generally, the LA Rebellion filmmakers in initiated an independent film language to
express black people’s social and psychological experiences in America. The LA
Rebellion felt, as the poet Audre Lorde once explained, “the master’s tools will never
dismantle the master’s house.”
The LA Rebellion school films are truly remarkable. Ben Caldwell’s I and I: An
African Allegory (1977) is a meditation on African American spiritual identity. The film
uses African music to connect three narratives about the black American experience. One
narrative focuses on a black man dealing with the death of his white father while another
story depicts the emotional pain of an elderly black woman as she remembers her
grandfather’s lynching. The final story is about a contemporary black woman teaching
her son about his African heritage. I and /: An African Allegory interweaves these
realistically shot vignettes with flashbacks and other free associations, which give the
film the rhythm and texture of improvisation, which this school embraced as an African
American form of cultural expression.
Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977) is a portrait of a South Central family.
The film focuses on “Stan” who works at slaughterhouse, which becomes the film’s
central metaphor for the black experience in South Central LA and American in general.
By the film’s end, Stan’s soul is as gutted and dead as the sheep at the slaughterhouse.
Killer of Sheep, like all of the LA Rebellion films, juxtaposes oppositional film styles to
examine the painful duality of the black American experience. LA Rebellion films are
stoic representations of the everyday people’s reality, as with the tradition of realism and
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social change in the American arts and independent cinema. The films are also non
linear, abstracts on the inner turmoil of the film’s black characters.
As these two films show, the LA Rebellion created a film language to express an
idea that has been central to black thought since the turn of the century. Although Franz
Fannon Black Skin/White Masks (1952) might have been the more influential if not
contemporary thinker for the LA Rebellion filmmakers, Fannon’s ideas are traceable to
W.E.B. Du Bois and his revolutionary The Souls o f Black Folks (1903). Here, Du Bois
explained the dilemma of the African-American psyche. The hypothetical “black man”
can never truly know himself in country that once enslaved him, as Du Bois argued,
because his identity in such a place can always only be understood by self and others
through the logic of colonialism, slavery, and/or the white imagination. The African-
American psyche is therefore split into two contradictory parts, one “African” and the
other “American,” which creates a “double-ness” of self which prevents, according to Du
Bois, black Americans from being able to achieve the psychological wholeness deemed
necessary for inner peace and happiness.
For this reason, Du Bois explained, “the history of the black American is a
history of strife.” He continued:
This longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double
self into a better and truer self. One ever feels his two-ness, an
American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unrecognized
strivings.5 1
This “two-ness” is visible in the style of LA Rebellion films. The inner worlds of the
characters are abstract and kinetic. The characters’ outer world or social reality is
depicted with a blunt realism. The juxtaposition of these two worlds expresses the reality
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of these characters as they try to find inner peace as black people in a “white” world. The
viewer sees the double-ness of the characters daily lives and the pain this double-ness
brings.
African American art has traditionally expressed this two-ness. The first African
American artist to be signed on to the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) during the
Depression, Samuel Joseph Brown, although he painted a number of representational
narrative paintings and print works of black life in America, is perhaps best known for
his remarkable Self-Portrait (1941). In this introspective self-portrait, the artist looks
deeply at his own image reflected in a mirror. Brown in his Self-Portrait stylistically
distinguishes his reflected self from his true self. While the reflected self is painted with
loose brush strokes, and blurred boundary lines, Brown’s “real” self is much more
“representational” with tight brush strokes and more attention to detail. A significant
departure from “the more objective exploration of the exterior world so common in
WPA-sponsored art, Brown’s experimental self-portrait delves into the complexities of
the interior world,” and in a tradition specific to African American artists.
Julie Dash moved to Los Angeles from New York City to attend the AFT Center
for Advanced Film Study before earning an MFA in Film and Television Production
from UCLA. Her thesis film, Diary o f an African Nun (1977), is based on an Alice
Walker short story and explains an African nun’s inner process as she decides whether
or not to take her solemn vows of chastity, poverty and obedience to a church that has
colonized her people. The nun’s inner world is chaotic while her outer reality is
represented to be as orderly as a church.
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Dash’s Illusions (1983) is a black feminist critique of the Hollywood studio
system. The film shows the double life of an African American woman executive who is
passing for white in order “make it in Hollywood,” while documenting the ways that the
Hollywood studio system abused black labor. As the film’s name suggests, Classical
Hollywood was full of illusions, including the common practice of dubbing black voices
to white bodies. Like Diary of an African Nun, Illusions represents the dual identities of
its characters with oppositional film styles, realism and abstraction.5 2
Dash’s first feature, Daughters o f the Dust (1992) is lush fantasy of the Gull ah
subculture that lives on a barrier island off the coast of South Carolina, which is also the
fictional location in Gloria Naylor’s novel from the time, Mama Day (1989). Since the
Gullah have lived off the American mainland since slavery, the Gullah’s understanding
of black culture and identity is unique, and as Dash represents this culture, pure of the
racism of the dominant culture. Dash’s island imagery paints an undulating paradise,
foregrounding the Gullah’s spirituality. Like Dash’s other films, Daughters of the Dust
sees the duality in the black American experience. While the other films, set on the
mainland, express the character’s emotional turmoil and pain in a white reality,
Daughters of the Dusk is pure fantasy. Dash creates a black utopia. To do so, however,
the film has to take place off the mainland and in the past (1902). Otherwise, the film
implicitly argues, a peaceful African American existence would be possible to imagine.
Funded through the NEA, Bush Mama (1976) tells the story of Dorothy, a woman
living in Watts in 1976, pregnant and struggling to raise her daughter without her
husband, who is in jail for a crime that he did not commit. Gerima made the film with the
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help of his UCLA peers. Charles Burnett was on camera. Larry Clark and Ben Caldwell
helped with editing and sound design. The film is an explicit call for community
activism. Dorothy ignores the street rallies and various members of her community
involved in black empowerment until the film’s end, when she is herself in jail. Bush
Mama ends on a freeze frame image of Dorothy’s face. Now she looks like the woman in
the “Bush Mama” poster her neighbor brought over from the rally. Her voice over ends
the film with a call for community and self-empowerment: “W e’ve got to make changes.
We’ve got to read, study, and change.”
Like Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World, Gerima’s Bush Mama combines
documentary street footage, staged scenes, and random associations to form a densely
layered collage, not to be confused with montage. In his remarkable essay on Godard,
“Toward a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style,” Brian Henderson explains how montage and
collage differ. Henderson argues:
Montage fragments reality in order to reconstitute it in highly
organized synthetic emotional intellectual patterns. Collage does not
do this; it collects or sticks its fragments together. In a way that does
not entirely overcome their fragmentation...In regard to overall
form, it seeks to bring out the internal relations of its pieces,
whereas montage imposes a set of relations upon them and indeed
collects or creates its pieces to fill out a pre-existent plan.5 3
The film’s densely layered sound track creates a collage of city sounds, voice-overs,
funk music, African drums, babies crying, and homs honking, that refuses the viewer a
“bourgeois” or cathartic experience with the film. The sound track is also the film’s way
of involving the audience in Dorothy’s inner reality, where there is never even a
moment of silence. Like the other LA Rebellion films, Bush Mama establishes the two-
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ness of Dorothy’s life. The film’s creates an external reality or diagesis for Dorothy with
documentary street footage of Watts. Her inner reality is expressed in contrast with
expressive sound and image collages, which intensify in emotionally charged content
and speed (literally, the pacing of the editing) as Dorothy’s world crumbles.
Gerima skillfully aligns Dorothy’s story to the history of slavery. In direct
address, “J.C.,” Dorothy’s husband,” reads his letter to Dorothy from behind the bars of
his jail cell. As soon as J.C. begins his letter, the camera departs on a lateral tracking shot
down the jail hall capturing one black male after another behind bars. Like collage, the
lateral tracking shot, according to Henderson, flattens the screen space into a “synthetic
single layered construct which the viewer must examine critically, accept or reject. The
viewer is not drawn into the image, nor does he make choices within it; he stands outside
the image and judges it as a whole.” When J.C. says, “We are the sons of slaves,” the
camera halts its journey, stopping on a medium close up on the back of the last inmate.
Here is the deep scar, which symbolizes slavery, both physical and mental. The camera
then tracks slowly back over the inmates and stops on a close up of J.C. before dissolving
onto a close up of Dorothy, who is looking as longingly from her apartment window as
the inmates are from their respective jail cells. This set up makes the ending of Bush
Mama all the more painful. Dorothy is in prison, but her mind is finally free.
The American new wave ended with the 1970s. The Reagan administration
would gut the NEA and NEH while many new wavers entered the commercial film
industry. The “Band of Outsiders,” as The Village Voice in 1981 labeled them, was
finally ready for the big time. “Ready for Hollywood?” was the subtitled that appeared
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under a picture of Robert Young, Edward Gray, Catherine Orentreich, Maxi Cohen,
Barry Alexander Brown, Deborah Shaffer, Steward Bird, Christine Dali, Randall Conrad
and Mark Rappaport, all wearing stylish sunglasses as if to evoke the brightness of their
futures in Hollywood. These players had just formed First Run Features, an independent
film distribution company. As The Village Voice explained:
First Run Features was founded by indies caught between
Hollywood movies and avant-garde cinema. The independents
weren’t satisfied with the college and art-house circuit hospitable to
the avant-garde, their movies were more mass market. But getting
first run houses to book them was impossible: they made movies
without stars, without advertising budgets, without Hollywood
production values.5 4
First Run Features domestically distributed new wave films like Gal Young Un’,
Alambrista!, and Northern Lights, among others. “First Run is an indie-confab serving
the purpose of the major distributor, yet allowing each director to make final cut, final
word, and final decision about advertising.” “Until now,” First Run Features told The
Village Voice, independents and the industry “have always been unaffiliated. Now we’re
allies. We shoulda called ourselves American interdependents.” Truer words were never
spoken.
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1 Shirley Clarke. “The Expensive Art.” Film Quarterly summer 1960, pg. 28.
2 Marshal McLuhan. The Medium is the Massage. New York: Gingko Press, 1967, pg.
22.
3 “Why Film Fund?” The Film Fund Annual Report 1978.
4 “Why Film Fund?” pg. 13.
5 “Why Film Fund?” pg. 14.
6 Clarke Taylor. “Film Fund: The Search For Support.” The Los Angeles Times 14
January, 1982.
7 David Cook. Lost Illusions: American Cinema in the Shadow o f Watergate and
Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, pg. 13.
8 J. Hobberman. “The Non-Hollywood Hustle.” American Film October 1980, pp.
54-56, 88-89.
9 National Endowment for the Arts. National Endowment for the Arts, 1965-1995:
A Brief Chronology o f Federal Involvement in the Arts. District of Columbia: NEA,
1995.
1 0 Mark Rice.“Making History While Making Art: The NEA Photography Survey
Projects.” New York: New York University Press, 1990.
"Richard Noble. “A Bold Step Into Funding: American Playhouse Finances Films
for Independent Release.” The Los Angeles Herald 28 October 1991.
1 2 Clarke Taylor. “Big Movies on Little Budgets.” The New York Times 17 May
1992.
1 3 Jane Hall. “PBS is Telling Tales.” American Film January/February 1980, pg. 56-
61.
1 4 Clarke Taylor. “A Champion of Independent Films.” The New York Times 24
September 1979.
1 5 Andrea Stroud. “American Independents.” American Film January-February
1980, pp. 62-64.
1 7 0
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1 6 Sandra Schulberg. “Rebels With a Cause: The Founding of the Independent
Feature Project.” Sundance Film Institute, 1990.
1 7 Schulberg. “Rebels With a Cause: The Founding of the Independent Feature
Project.”
1 8 Schulberg. “Rebels With a Cause: The Founding of the Independent Feature
Project.”
1 9 Lynnette Mathis. “In 6 Years, IFP/W Gathers 900 Members,” Variety 16 June 1986.
2 0 William Rothman. “Looking Back and Turning Inward: American Documentary
Film of the Seventies.” David Cook, Lost Illusions, pp. 417-452.
2 1 Joan Micklin Silver and Ralph Silver. “On Hester Street” American Film
October, 1975, pp. 78-79.
2 2 Joan Micklin Silver and Ralph Silver. “On Hester Street, ” pp. 78-79.
2 3 J. Hobberman, “The Non-Hollywood Hustle,” pp. 54-56.
2 4 Neil Gabler. An Empire o f their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. New York:
Anchor Press, 1997, pp. 1-2.
2 5 Gabler. An Empire o f their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, pp. 1-2.
2 6 Silver. On Hester Street, ” pp 78-79.
2 7 Mary Murphy. “Hester Street.” The Los Angeles Times 12 August 1975.
2 8 Variety 11 Auguest 1975.
2 9 Variety 25 Febrary 1976.
3 0 Rex Reed. “Up Front: Movies.” Vogue November 1975.
3 1 Julia Lesage. “The Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film.” Patricia
Erens. Issues in Feminist Film Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990,
pp. 222 237.
3 2 Robin Wood. Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986, pg. 211.
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3 3 Doreen Massey. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1994.
3 4 E. Ann Kaplan. “The Case of the Missing Mother.” Issues in Feminist Film Criticism,
pp. 126-136.
3 5 Linda Williams. “Something Else Besides a Mother.” Issues in Feminist Film
Criticism, pp. 137-163.
3 6 The Miami Herald 15 January 1980.
3 7 The Seattle Post-Intelligencer 27 April 1979.
3 8 Vincent Canby. “ Northern Lights.” The New York Times 26 September 1979.
3 9 The Los Angeles Times 4 November 1979.
4 0 World Cinema 26 October 1979.
4 1 Film Journal 3 September 1981.
4 2 Mary Olmstead. “ Northern Lights: A Venture from the Heart.” The San Francisco
Chronicle 29 October 1979.
4 3 Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas, Press Release. El Norte 1984. Academy
Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences Archive.
4 4 Richard Gold. “Cinecom To Aim El Norte Release at Hispanic Venues.” Variety
21 July 1984.
4 5 Jon Jost quote in Andrea Stroud, “American Independents.” American Film
January-February 1980, pp. 62-64.
4 6 Nava and Thomas, pg. 23.
4 7 The Los Angeles Times 28 March 1984.
4 8 Gregg Barrios. “Now Playing: The Dark Side of Guatemala.” The Los Angeles
Times 14 Febrary 1984.
4 9 Roger Ebert. “El Norte.” Mother Jones Feb/March 1984, pp. 30-31, 50.
5 0 Nava and Thomas, pg. 23.
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5 1 W.E.B. De Bois. The Souls o f Black Folks. New York: Bantam Books, 1989,
pg. 3.
5 2 Lisa Mintz Messinger, Lisa Gail Collins, Rachel Mustalish. African-American
Artists, 1929-1945: Prints, Drawings, and Paintings in The Metropolitan Museum
of Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003, pg. 33.
5 3 Brian Henderson. “Toward a Non-Bourgeois Camera Style.” Bill Nichols. Movies and
Methods I. Berkleley: University of California Press, 1976, pp. 422-438.
5 4 Carrie Rickey. “Band of Outsiders.” The Village Voice 19 April 1981.
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CHAPTER FIVE
THE SUNBELT AND THE NEW REALISM OF THE RIGHT
The Sunbelt marks a critical turning point in American history, culture, and
politics. A region extending east to west, from the South to Southern California, The
Sunbelt is a product of the military industrial complex, urban decay, suburbanization,
and represents the country’s overall transition from industrial to post-industrial or
accelerated capitalism during the post-war period. The Sunbelt brought a “new
Republican majority” that elected Nixon in 1968, and Regan and Bush during the
1980s. This new majority was comprised mostly of working and middle class
Southern whites, a large portion of whom had migrated from the Democratic Party
during the social changes of the 1960s. In many ways, the new Republican majority
was a backlash to the social movements of the 1960s. Like the New Left, the new
Republican majority, or New Right, was a grass roots social movement for and by
the American people. Like the Left, the Right used popular culture for political
purposes.
The rise of the Sunbelt also coincides with what many scholars have named
as postmodernism. Though there have been many debates over whether
postmodernism is an end or merely an extension to modernism, most scholars agree
that things definitely did change in America during the 1960s. Postmodernism is how
scholars interpret these changes. Postmodernism is thought of in one of two ways. It
is either a radical break from or accelerated form of industrial capitalism. Mike
Davis has argued that Los Angeles tends to be described as either a place of sunshine
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Davis has argued that Los Angeles tends to be described as either a place of sunshine
or noir.1 Since Los Angeles is often considered the postmodern city, it is only fitting
that the city, like the theory that this city supposedly embodies, is either loved or
hated. Like Los Angeles, postmodernism is for scholars either a cause for celebration
or a sad diversion from the yet fulfilled project of modernism. Either way,
postmodernism ended the Left’s dream of the 1960s.
In Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined
Places, geographer Edward Soja welcomes postmodernism with open arms. Soja
argues:
In the late 1960s, in the midst of an urban or, looking back, a more
generally spatial crisis spreading all over the world, an Other form of
spatial awareness began to emerge. I have chosen to call this new
awareness Thirdspace and to initiate its evolving definition by
describing it as a product of a “thirding” of the spatial imagination,
the creation of another mode of thinking about space that draws upon
the material and mental spaces of the traditional dualism but extends
well beyond the scope, substance, and meaning.2
Thirding-as-othering, as Soja defines this mode of thought, does more than
synthesize the two sides of the binary into a “third.” Thirding as othering destroys
the binary altogether so that, to use one binary example, the “self’ no longer needs
an “other” for self-definition. Thirdspace is where others exist among a multitude of
other others. To Soja:
Thirding introduces a critical “other than” choice that speaks and
critiques through its otherness. That is to say, it does not derive
simply from an additive combination of its binary antecedents but
rather from a disordering, deconstruction, and tentative reconstitution
of their presumed totalization producing an open alternative that is
both similar and strikingly different.
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For Soja, “thirding” produces critical openings or thirdspaces within the modem
way of understanding or experiencing the world as an extension of Self. These
openings are to Soja spaces (both real and imagined) where freedom for everyone
can finally be realized.3
Los Angeles is for Soja a simultaneously real and imagined “thirdspace.”
Where modernity had New York or Chicago, today there is Los Angeles, a city
without a center or top down view of itself. Unlike New York, Chicago, or any of the
other “great” modem American cities, Los Angeles cannot be comprehended or
experienced as a totality, and anyone who lives in Los Angeles knows this to be true.
Los Angeles requires people to think in thirds because the city is without a highest
point or recognizable outside. Los Angeles is a pastiche of culturally specific
regions, valleys, beaches, canyons, and suburban sprawls. To really understand Los
Angeles, one has to feel the city from within, where the center is relative to where
you are standing at the time. For Soja, this spatial relativism makes Los Angeles a
simultaneously “real-and-imagined” place, and the best example of a post-modem
thirdspace city.
Another prominent geographer, David Harvey provides an alternative take on
postmodernism and postmodemity. In his book on the subject, The Postmodern
Condition, Harvey contests what he explains as the tendency of contemporary
intellectual thought to celebrate the post-modem world as if this world were radically
different from the modem world. The most “startling fact of postmodernism” is for
Harvey its “total acceptance of ephemerality, fragmentation, and discontinuity.”
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While Harvey agrees that modernism and modernity shifted in industrialized
nations like America during the late 1960s, he argues that post-modernism is not so
much a rupture or “break” from the past, as Soja argues that it is, but an accelerated
from of modernism. Modem industrial capitalism changed during the late 1960s,
Harvey argues:
but postmodernism responds to that fact in a very particular way. It
does not try to transcend it, counteract it, or even to define the eternal
and immutable elements that might lie within it. Postmodernism
swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and the chaotic currents of
change.
For Harvey, postmodernism is the cultural acceptance and even the celebration of
advanced capitalism. In other words, Harvey argues that postmodernism is the false
consciousness of the contemporary world, where production and accumulation are
flexible and fragmented over space and time.
The modem structures continue, Harvey insists, only these structures, because
they have been de-centered and dispersed, are nearly impossible to locate, feel,
critique and overturn in a “people’s” revolution. There is no longer a coherent sense
of “the people” much less “the enemy.” This is the problem, Harvey argues. We can’t
see the larger structures that are shaping our daily lives because we are standing right
in them, as Harvey argues, where these structures that are shaping our thoughts,
feelings, and understanding of the contemporary world feel liberating instead of
oppressive.
Fredric Jameson has also contributed to the debate on “the postmodern
condition.” In many ways, Jamson’s thoughts on the subject support those of David
Harvey. Jameson argues that postmodernism is the cultural logic of late capitalism,
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which Jameson, like Harvey, sees as an extension of modem industrialization.4 In his
well known Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic o f Late Capitalism, Jameson
describes postmodernism as a vague:
sense that something has changed, that things are different, that we
have gone through a transformation of the life world which is
somehow decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of
modernization and industrialization, less perceptible and dramatic,
somehow, but more permanent precisely because more thoroughgoing
and all pervasive.5
As this quotation suggests, Like Soja and Harvey, Jameson understands
postmodernism as an inability to conceptualize the world in modern terms, as a
unified totality. Like Soja and Harvey, Jameson explains postmodernism as a total
immersion or loss of distance necessary to “objectively” view culture, history,
knowledge and even the self. For Jameson, postmodernism is therefore a flat or depth-
less-ness, schizophrenia, or an inability to cognitively map or imagine one’s place in
the world of past, present and future. Boundaries that during modernism were obvious
and distinct, whether we use the example of self/other, public/private, or even
production/consumption, have for Jameson blurred beyond recognition during late
capitalism. Postmodernism is when one is no longer able to tell the difference
between the “real” and the “imagined,” or, to Jameson’s most powerful example,
between advertisement and art.
Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool allegorizes the end of the 1960s for the
American Left. The film takes place during the 1968 Democratic National
Convention in Chicago, “the great American city” as Norman Mailer explains
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Chicago in his essay on the convention.6 The assassination of Robert Kennedy, the
Yippies, the anti-war movement, the rioting and the endless police brutality,
shattered the Democratic Party into a thousand pieces during the pivotal convention,
creating the possibility for Nixon and the Republicans to win the 1968 election. In
this context, the film’s primary character, “John,” (written for John Cassavetes
initially), is an “objective” television news reporter assigned to cover the convention.
The opening sequence reveals John’s objective distance as he films the ruins of a
violent car accident without even a shred of emotion for the dead bodies. As the
story progresses, John looses his objective distance from Chicago through a romantic
relationship he begins with a beautiful Appalachian woman, who lives with her ten-
year-old son, “Harold,” in the heart of the city’s slums. In the film’s final sequence,
John and his girlfriend die in a violent car crash while looking for Harold. John’s
loss of objective distance has in fact ended his life.
Medium Cool also shows that studios relationship to art cinema. Paramount
bought Medium Cool from Haskell Wexler’s “independent” H and J Production
Company for international distribution. The film includes the nudity, political
content and intellectual stylishness that made foreign films so popular with youth
audiences during the post-war period. Wexler wanted John Cassavetes for the part of
“John” because it was his and the films of Godard that had inspired Wexler to make
the film in the first place. The acting styles and conversational dialogue in Medium
Cool are all Cassavetes while the film’s self-awareness, expressive use of color
lighting, and obsession with car crashes evokes Godard (especially Weekend). John
even poses as Belmondo under a Breathless poster. Like The New American Cinema
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Group, and the other new waves and neo-Realisms, Medium Cool weaves
documentary footage, (the military practicing riot control, the convention, and
various street scenes), with scripted scenes to establish the narrative’s relationship to
“real” socio-political issues. The film’s clever use of Frank Zappa’s “American is
Wonderful” evokes the Beat generation’s critique of “the American dream” even as
the film foreshadows the American new wave. The sub-narrative that eventually
overcomes the film’s ties to the convention includes “real” Appalachian music,
vernacular speech, locations, and non-actors. “Harold” was played by one of the
local kids Wexler met while shooting the film.
Is Medium Cool an example of the commercial cinema appropriating the art
cinema for new audiences? Is the film instead an example of a political director
taking his message to a larger audience? Did the John character literally die at the
film’s end? Or, is the film’s ending metaphorical? Whether or not postmodernism is
the false logic of accelerated capitalism or a radically new way of appreciating
cultural variety, first and foremost, postmodernism is a crisis in interpretation. One
can see this crisis enacted in the theories of intellectuals like Soja, Harvey, or
Jameson, theorists who accept the same premise, but interpret this premise in
contradictory ways, theorists who could probably identify with the John character.
For Soja, postmodernism is like a buffet of cultural variety. He gave up the big
picture, as his argument implies, but just look what he got in return. Here, John didn’t
so much die as dissolve into the Appalachian subtext, where “anything is possible.”
For Harvey and Jameson, John is dead. Where Soja sees as plurality, Harvey and
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Jameson find distractions in the fight for social justice. The value of Soja’s theory is
that at least it tries to bring theory back down to the ground level, where even an idea
as ominous as “capitalism” can be understood and even resisted as an everyday
practice rooted in place. Only there can be no middle ground between these dialectical
approaches: For Jameson, the ground level is where people lack the distance to see the
bigger picture. Here, people are too close to see the big picture. Here, people are
doomed to embody the logic that exploits them.
From another perspective, the coming of postmodernism signaled a change in
high art’s use of realism. For many, Pop Art is the first postmodern art. Pop Art
coincides the arrival of Los Angeles as one of the country’s major cultural centers.
Los Angeles’ Ferns Gallery gave Warhol his first solo show in 1962. Pop Art is also
postmodern for many because of its seeming emotional detachment and aloofness
from social reality.
The “New Realists” show at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York City in
1962 marks the arrival of Pop Art as a school of art beyond Warhol. Most critics
panned the show, which included the work of Roy Lichtenstein, Claus Oldenberg, and
Andy Warhol (among others), for being postmodern, aloof, or emotionally detached.
Writing for The Nation, Hilton Kramer explained the predominant read of the art at
the time. For Kramer:
Nowadays a new style of art that showed itself capable of making a
clear and powerful statement about life would indeed be an event. But
does this exhibit really constitute a serious comment on contemporary
life? I don’t think so. Like nearly all current art, it is only a comment
on art.7
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Art, which once brought us closer to our experience, has now joined
forces with the objects of the world which alienate us ever more
deeply from having a true sense of ourselves, and it is unclear whether
our experience can be aesthetically explored and repossessed without
abandoning art—at least art as we have known it in modem times.8
As Kramer implies, contrary to Abstract Expressionism, the predominant art of the
post-war period, Pop Art was not about self-exploration or personal expression. The
“new realism” was instead about the numbing effects of mass production. IF The New
American Cinema Group broke from avant-garde to interact with a more popular
cinema and culture, then Pop Art moved in the opposite direction at around the same
time. Pop Art brought pop culture into the realm of high art to explore the way that our
experience had become one of mass production or depth-less-ness. In this way, Pop
Art did have something to say about our experience, just not the most flattering aspects
of this experience.
However, despite the message of Pop Art, postmodernism did not eliminate
the possibility of radical art. During the 1960s, multiple groups claimed realism for
their own purposes. There was “The New Realists” of high art, the neo-realisms of
the new art cinema, and the New Country music. All of theses realisms claimed to
explain the reality of daily life in America. The New Country music was as
regionally specific, populist, and politically motivated as any of the films of The
New American Cinema Group or the American New Wave. The difference is that it
told “reality” from another perspective.
The New Country spoke for the new people’s movement. The “silent
majority,” as Nixon hailed this voting block of Sunbelt neo-conservatives, was a
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grass roots collective social movement that worked as a cultural front to change the
face of American politics. The New Right worked as a totality against another
totality—Communism, Liberals, Blacks, etc., all of which imaginary “others” the
Right connected to urban decay, or the death of the “great” modem cities, which
Nixon termed as “hot beads” of social deviance during his successful 1968
Presidential campaign. The neo-conservative social movement did not happen in the
great modem cities but in the suburbs, from where the modem city, as both a “real-
and-imagined place,” looked like a repository of everything that this social
movement wanted to change about American society and politics. Outside of the
modem cities, the New Right imagined and created a better world for themselves.
The New Country expressed the sentiment of a regionally specific group of
“the people.” Hank Williams Jr. sang, “We’re from North California and South
Alabam’ and little towns all around this land.” Nobody could have guessed that
when “the people” finally got the chance to speak for themselves, they would have
so much contempt for “city slicks” and “liberals,” to quote another Hank Jr. song.
However, before I discuss the larger implications of New Country music, it is
important to chronicle a brief history of the New Right.
The New Right began during the post-war period. As many scholars have
argued, post-war American was rich with challenges to modem America. In
Television: Technology and Cultural Form, for example, Raymond Williams argues
that television broadcasting magnified the paradox of modem social life. Industrial
“progress” promises greater geographic mobility, yet the everyday person’s
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experience of industrialization is actually one of intensified privatization. Williams
calls this paradox of “mobile privatization” and uses it to describe the experience of
television. Television marketed itself as a space and time machine, one which
promised to bring the outside world “home” to the home viewer, and vice versa,
offering the viewer, more social and cultural mobility than ever before. However, as
Williams argues, television actually functioned to perpetuate social and cultural
divisions within people’s everyday lives.9
In her book on the subject, Make Room For TV: Television and the Family
Ideal in Postwar America, Lynn Spigel explains how the middle class migration to
the suburbs along with the emergence of television or “home theatre” disrupted the
public/private divide that had shaped American ideas on gender and class since the
19th Century. Between 1948 and 1955, Spigel explains, approximately two thirds of
all American homes acquired at least one television set.
By 1960, nearly 90 percent of American homes had televisions and the
average person watched nearly 5 hours of television a day. Television challenged the
way the average, middle class American understood him or herself in relation to the
“external” world. Spigel also explains how television created a new cultural space in
America, and argues that this space became a site of struggle and contestation where
people processed older ideas about gender, class, work and leisure in light of the
challenges to these ideals that television initiated. Like Williams, Spigel argues that
television and the suburbs reorganized how the American middle class understood the
spatial dimensions of their everyday lives.1 0
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The Civil Rights movement also challenged binary divisions in American
society during the post-war period. As historian David Steigerwald argues in The
Sixties and the End o f Modernism in America:
The civil rights movement profoundly altered a large region of the
nation, reshaped United States history, mobilized the country’s most
oppressed group, forced the nation to reckon with its racism, its
original sin, and exposed the great gap between national myth and
promise on the one hand and reality on the other.1 1
As Steigerwald states broadly, Civil Rights asked the government to make good on
its promise of freedom and liberty for all. Where the voting booths, busses,
bathrooms, lunch counters and public schools in the American South had
historically been sites that maintained strict racial segregation, these social spaces
during the Civil Rights movement became places of struggle and change where
everyday people enacted with the past and future of race relations in American
society and culture. The mass media brought the spectacle of this struggle into the
homes of Americans all over the country, and in the process, transformed the South
into a “thirdspace” which forced Americans to reconsider the American dream in
terms of myth and reality, and to question in one way or another their understanding
of what it means to be a black or white American citizen.
Civil Rights initiated the migration of large numbers of Southern blacks to
the urban North, where factory jobs promised economic prosperity. The North also
meant an escape Southern racism. Steigerwald explains:
By 1960 nearly three-quarters of the nation’s population lived in
metropolitan areas (defined by the census as 250,000 or more). The
process of urbanization was most notable among African-Americans:
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by 1960, 73 percent of this traditionally southern and rural population
was urban; by 1967, almost half of all African Americans lived in the
North. Between 1940 and 1960, 2.75 million blacks left the South, for
all intents and purposes, for the cities. New York’s black population
increased two and half times in those twenty years, Philadelphia’s
doubled; and Detroit’s tripled. Chicago had a black population of
890,000 by 1960.
Black Americans entered the Northern cities while middle class whites in these
same areas left for the suburbs, which in turn began to receive more local and
federal aide than the inner cities. According to one report, between 1960-1965,
“62 percent of the nation’s new industrial building was constructed outside the
central cities while the vast majority of new manufacturing employment went with
it.”1 2
This migration greatly changed the flow of money into and out of
Northern cities. As scholar William K. Tabb explains:
Billions of dollars in highway subsidies went to build the costly
circumferential routes looping and bisecting the older cities. Billions
in housing subsidies allowed millions of Americans to acquire
suburban homes, generating millions of jobs and
billions in profits for construction, earth moving equipment, building
materials, appliances and autos and gasoline and indirectly as well for
the suppliers of these industries.1 3
This redistribution of wealth and power from the cities to the suburbs set the ground
for the subsequent deterioration of the inner cities which were left with a declining tax
base and large populations of unskilled workers with limited employment
opportunities. Steigerwald explains:
Middle-class flight from the central cities imposed great hardships on
urban areas, mostly immediately by reducing the tax base, which in
turn reduced city services, cut school funding, and forced cities to
raise taxes on those who stayed-thereby driving out more people.1 4
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To chart an example of Steigerwald’s claim, New York City, which during and
immediately after the Second World War was the symbol of modernism in
American culture and the arts, suffered a $500 million federal deficit by the early
1970s.
In his popular if not controversial book The Coming o f Post-Industrial
Society (1967), sociologist Daniel Bell projected that modem industrial capitalism
had reached a stage of over accumulation. Modem society would have to shift to
thinking and service industries to accommodate this surplus of manual labor. The
“great” modem cities would no longer serve as manufacturing centers.
As Bell predicted, manufacturing industries continued to employ blue-collar
labor, yet the total employment in the nation’s manufacturing industries grew more
for white-collar jobs than for blue-collar or manual labor during the decade. While
many of the biggest manufacturing factories dissembled into cheap contract labor
and built new factories in the suburban areas of the North, South and Southwest.
Between 1953-1965, Tabb estimates:
White-collar jobs in manufacturing increased by more than a million,
while blue-collar production jobs declined by a million. The
proportion of the work force engaged in manufacturing meanwhile
declined while the proportion engaged in service industries rose 60
percent.1 5
As the above quote argues, as white-collar jobs and work wages increased, the
average hours in the average workweek for the American middle class decreased
substantially. The new middle class had more time and income for leisurely
activities.
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In fact, the post-war middle-class had more leisure time and disposable
income than any previous generations in American history. The post-war period
also brought a spectrum of new consumer goods and a booming advertising industry
to accompany these goods on the marketplace. Products advertised to middle class
women especially played on the illusion that consuming more and more products
would free the consumer to better enjoy her leisure time more fully. As scholars
have also agued, American capitalism during this time shifted from a production
based to a consumer based economy.
The “death” of the “great” modem cities, to recall Jane Jacobs well known
book from the time, also coincides with the rise of what Kevin Phillips, the Harvard
graduate and Nixon team member in 1972, in his The Emerging New Republican
Majority (1969), calls “The Sunbelt.” The Sunbelt includes thirteen Southern and
Southwestern states: Virginia, North and South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi,
Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and the southern
portions of California or “Southern” California. Phillips astutely predicted that The
Sunbelt would become the stronghold of American political power. The Sunbelt
birthed “new Republican majority” which was in fact the same “silent majority” of
ex-Democrat Southerners who in 1968 elected Richard Nixon, the first Republican
President since Eisenhower. This election officially ended New Deal democracy
and the Welfare State, and auspiciously coincides with the arrival of a post
industrial economy and postmodern popular culture.
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The Sunbelt is also a product of the military industrial complex. During the
Second World War, the federal government built most of its new military bases and
factories to this region, which promised year round warm weather and fields of open
land where the government could build its factories for cheap, and outside of the
scope of the mass media and the American public. The implementation of air
condition in homes and public spaces during this decade also helped to make the
South a more appealing region than the North. The federal government moved into
the South and Southwest and established “growth poles” to support the communities
that were emerging around the new military industries and bases.
These “growth poles” were exponentially important to the emergence of The
Sunbelt as a new locus of political power. While the government paid for new
highways, streets, sewers, electric lines and airports, many of the country’s largest
and most powerful corporations moved their plants to The Sunbelt to take advantage
the region’s weather, land, and “right to work” laws. Where the North and Northeast
were unionized regions, The Sunbelt was not. Companies did not have to pay union
fees in most of the South and Southwest states. For all these reasons, during the
1960s, General Motors moved its shock absorber plant from Michigan to Georgia.
Lear Jet moved its primary plant to Tuscon. Shell relocated in Houston. Greyhound
built new national offices in Phoenix. Meanwhile, the defense industry became the
largest employer in Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee and New Mexico.
The New York Times ran a four part series in 1976 on The Sunbelt. In the first
article of the series, “Sunbelt leads Nation in Growth Population,” The Times reported
on population boom in Sunbelt states:
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According to the census bureau data the growth rate in the South
Atlantic was five times greater than that in the middle-Atlantic states.
At the same time, employment in manufacturing was increasing by 7
percent in the South while declining by 12 percent in the North.1 6
While Sunbelt cities like Houston were bursting at the seams with new jobs, the
Snowbelt cities like New York, Detroit, and Chicago suffered from rising
unemployment and crime rates. As The Times reported, “In 1929, the Southeastern
sates as a region had a per capita income that stood at 53 percent of the national
average. But in 1974 it had risen to 83 percent. The corresponding levels for the
Middle Atlantic states, from New York to the District of Columbia, showed a
decline during that 45 year period from 141 percent to 116 percent.”1 7
Another Times article, “Federal Funds Pour into Sunbelt States,” explained
how the population boom of Sunbelt states resulted from the federal government’s
unprecedented and unfair economic support of this region: “In 1974 alone, Sunbelt
states collected from Washington in excess of 13 billion more than they contributed in
Federal taxes. For the same period, nine Northern states experience a net loss of more
than 20 billion.”1 8 The historically rural and agrarian South and Southwest was now
home for many of the nation’s more prosperous and industrial urban areas. The Times
described Huntsville, Alabama as a case in point for the new urban South. The
government built one of its major arsenals in Huntsville during the war. After the war,
the government built Marshall Space Center in Huntsville. The Times argued that the
new Huntsville was unrecognizable from the old one:
Huntsville, in 1950 a placid cotton and textile town of 16,000 is today
an urban center of 143,000, saturated with corporations like Chrysler,
IMB, Rockwell International, General Electric, Lockhead, GAF,
Burroughs and scores of others.1 9
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The New York Times continued, “It has been estimated that nearly 60% of the $74
billion World War II budget went into the states along the Southern rim, and the
pattern has continued ever since.” Nearly 70 percent of the total employment in
Huntsville was in the defense and space industries by the early 1970s, for example.
The Washington Post also reported heavily on the Sunbelt during the 1970s.
“For the South as a whole,” The Post explained, “the fastest growing industries from
1970 to 1975 were service industries, followed by finance, insurance and real estate,
state and local government and retail trade.” The slowest growing industries in the
Sunbelt, according to The Post were, “agriculture, manufacturing, federal
government, transportation, communication and utilities.”2 0 The Sunbelt industries
represented a different, de-centered and more fragmented mode of production than the
manufacturing industries of the urban North, which had been the backbone of
industrial America.
The rise of the Sunbelt also brought specifically Southern modes of cultural
expression to the forefront of American popular culture. Football surpassed baseball
to become America’s most popular spectator sport. Where baseball was the New York
Yankees and “the American dream,” football was The Sunbelt and the new
Republican majority. Football is aggressive, unsentimental, and “big” like the state of
Texas. In fact, The Dallas Cowboys, owned by the outspoken Christian technocrat
Tom Landry, became “America’s Team” during the 1970s.
The New Country music, a hybrid of rock and roll and traditional country,
also emerged during the 1970s. In her hit from the decade, “The South is Gonna Rise
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Again,” the fourteen year old Tanya Tucker sang, “I see skyscrapers where dirty
shacks stood.” The New Country was a curious mix of populism and Southern pride.
The state’s rights, anti-intellectualism, and “good old boy” mentality of the “old”
South found a popular mode of expression. “Sweet Home Alabama” (1974), a
popular song by Lynard Skynard, a band from Jacksonville, Florida, explicitly shows
the New South’s reaction to the 1960s. The song is literally a response to Neil
Young’s “Alabama” (1972), which critiques the South’s backwardness and pervasive
racism. For Young, Alabama is “where old folks are tied up in ropes.” The song
describes the South from an outsider’s perspective: “Oh Alabama-I’m from a new
land-I come to you and see all this ruin-What are you doing in Alabama-You got the
rest of the union to help you along-What’s going wrong?”
In “Sweet Home Alabama,” the singer is returning to his “sweet home” in the
Deep South. The song directly addresses Young’s song: “Well I heard mister Young
sing about her-Well I heard old Neil put her down-Well I hope Neil Yong will
remember-A southern man don’t need him around anyhow.”
A similar isolationism and hyper-masculinity returns in Hank Williams Jr.’s
hit from the era, “A Country Boy Can Survive,” where the narrator, “a country boy,”
explains how he’d like to “spit some beechnut” in the eye of the man who killed his
city friend during a street mugging. The song says that something like this would
never have happened to a “country boy,” because a country boy, and especially one
who owns a “shot gun rifle,” knows how to survive even if he does not know
business. Implicit here is the South’s history of vigilante “justice.” Like “Sweet
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Home Alabama,” “A Country Boy Can Survive” celebrates the simple but strong
“country boy,” who’s “father taught him to live off the land,” by contrasting him to
an emasculated city boy, “who never called me by my name, just Hillbilly,” and
“who’s father taught him to be a businessman.” New Country songs such as these
reveal the depths of the South’s bitterness towards “city slicks” or “liberals” who’d
spent the previous decades judging the South’s “backwardness.” The final verse of
“Sweet Home Alabama” reveals the latent racism of the New South. Alabama is
where “the skies are blue” and where “the governor’s true,” referring to George
Wallace’s infamous “segregation now, segregation forever” rally cry.
New Country music expressed the sentiment of the New Right. In her
remarkable Suburban Warriors: The Origins of The New American Right, historian
Lisa McGirr explains the New Right. For McGirr, the voters who elected Ronald
Reagan as governor of California in 1964 and then President in 1980, who put
George Bush in the Texas Senate in 1963 before the oval office in 1980 as Vice
President and then finally as President inl988, who built the 1964 Barry Goldwater
campaign from the ground up through local organizations like the John Birch
Society, who supported George Wallace but voted for Richard Nixon in the 1968
Presidential race, these voters, the new Republicans, shared a set of beliefs.
These voters identified as a minority in post-war America. According to
McGirr, the suburban warriors organized against the Welfare state. They were
against collectivism and for the individual. They wanted a smaller federal
government and more states rights. They were pro-business and anti-taxes.
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The New Right was also deeply Christian and moralistic. The New Right was a
backlash social movement. The politicians who came to power during this era
appealed to the “silent” or “moral” majority with a carefully constructed backlash
rhetoric against the Welfare state and the social movements of
the 1960s in general. As a young George Bush explained to a north Texas rally in
1964, just days after President Johnson passed The Civil Rights Act, “The new civil
rights act was passed to protect 14 percent of the people. ..I’m also worried about the
other 86 percent.”2 1
Reagan was especially adept at using this rhetoric of “reverse racism” to
appeal to working and middle class whites. While the nation’s televisions carried
images of urban riots, anti-war demonstrations, even women’s liberation to suburban
living rooms, Reagan was busy framing these images to his benefit. McGirr quotes
Reagan after he won the California governor’s race:
Charges of brutality are being raised by a small but disruptive
segment of society, which is constantly challenging the authority of
the law.. .For the law abiding, the policeman is a friend. For all our
science and sophistication, for all our justified pride in intellectual
accomplishment, the jungle is waiting to take over. The man with the
badge helps to hold it back. Too often the only thanks he gets is a
charge of police brutality.2 2
During the 1968 presidential election, Nixon used the same rhetoric in
Miami, where he won the Republican ticket, and then in America, where Nixon
pushed the buttons of the white working and middle class with phrases like “welfare
chiselers” and “liberal permissiveness.” Following Reagan, Nixon reminded
suburban voters of the encroaching urban jungle.
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Nixon was the new populism that spoke to middle and working class whites,
discontented old South Democrats and suburban voters across the country. The
emerging Republican majority didn’t seem mind its internal differences. The party
was focused on the external, “those people.” The New Right had a totalizing view of
the world that Jameson argues is no longer possible. The new Republicans were
emerging as a major force in American politics because the party was united against
shared albeit imaginary enemies—liberals, big government, blacks, etc. While the
Democratic Party was internally combusting over the war, the New Right, in spite of
its internal differences, was emerging as a unified cultural front against the Left,
which the New Right, from the safe distance of the suburbs, imagined as an urban
jungle.
Films from the time represent the Right’s idea of an “urban jungle.” Don
Siegel’s Dirty Harry (1971) is a New Right film in this way. Ronald Reagan could
have drafted the screenplay from his “the police are your friends” speech. Just the
tribute alone, to “the police officers of San Francisco who gave their lives in the line
of duty,” was a slap in the face of the student and antiwar movements for whom the
police were nothing more than fascist pigs.
In her review of the film, “Saint Cop,” Pauline Kael called Dirty Harry a
fascist film. For The New Yorker, Kael argued that the film “is a right-wing fantasy.
The conceit of this movie is that for one brief, glorious period the police have a
realist in their midst—and drive him out.” 2 3 Another New York Times writer argued
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that the film signaled “a frightening sophistication in at least one area of
politics—the half-world of sadism and authoritarianism which is the breeding ground
of the fascist mentality.” The film “is a simple told story of the Nietzschean
superman and his sado-masochistic pleasures.” 2 4
Critics had a difficult time denying that Dirty Harry was a well-crafted film.
For one reviewer:
What makes Dirty Harry worth watching no matter how dumb the
story, is Siegel’s superb sense of the city, not as a place of moods but
as a theatre for action. There is a certain difficult integrity to his San
Francisco, which is not so beautiful to look at, but is fantastically
intricate and intriguing—a challenging menace of towers and
battlements and improbable walls. It is from the properties of such a
theatre that Dirty Harry creates its own feelings and makes its own
real meaning.2 5
Kael labeled the film fascist for the same reasons. Dirty Harry is so formally
stunning and fun to watch, Kael argued, you barely notice the film’s ugly politics.
On the surface, Dirty Harry has all the markers of a new American film. Dirty
Harry was based on the real “Zodiac” serial killer case, which remains open to this
day. With the exception of the diner scene, which was shot on the WB lot, the film
was shot entirely on location in San Francisco. The film is like a San Francisco
postcard, from the Golden Gate Bridge to the cross on Mt. Davidson, City Hall, Kezar
Stadium, the Mayor’s Office and Ft. Mason Tunnel. The film even contextualizes the
city with a contemporary funk soundtrack that was typical to urban exploitation films
of the time, but before that, The New American Cinema Group used jazz to
contextualize social reality from the counter-culture’s perspective.
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Like Medium Cool, Dirty Harry can be explained as a mainstream
appropriation of the independent cinema’s political style. Like Medium Cool, Dirty
Harry pushes the envelope with nudity and violence to attract the new generation of
audiences. The difference is that Dirty Harry uses these conventions to push a neo
conservative agenda. Where Medium Cool is self-reflexive, and never tries to hide the
fact that it is making an argument about social reality, Dirty Harry obscures its
argument in its depiction of social reality. Harry, the “Nietzschean superman” with
“sado-masochistic pleasures,” comes off as the film’s “realist,” as Kael noticed.
Even Newsweek commented on the film’s conservative politics, arguing,
“Siegel’s simplistic view of things affirms the popular notion that the liberal rulings
of the Supreme Court have delivered the police and the public into the hands of
homicidal maniacs.”2 6 Newsweek was referring to the Miranda ruling, which Dirty
Harry represents as detrimental to citizens’ rights.
After the police release the killer because Harry searched his apartment
without a warrant, the killer kills again, proving Harry’s point, that the law protects
criminals, not citizens. Besides that, the film directly blames a Berkeley Law
professor, who advises the police in the first place, and pokes fun at higher education.
Harry’s partner, “Chico Gonzales,” has a sociology degree. Chico is shot on duty, as
the film argues, that book smarts are useless in the real world. While Harry wears a
pristine three-piece suit, the killer is an effeminate hippie, with long hair and loose
clothes.
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More insidious is the film’s attack on the Welfare State, an attack that the
New Right used as a platform. Despite the chaos of the previous decade, the war, the
assassinations, the urban riots, the student movements, civil rights, etc., Dirty Harry
says that the world is still a simple place. There are good guys and there are bad
guys. Race doesn’t matter. Gender doesn’t matter. Nothing but the content of a
man’s character matters, and character is individual not group based, and so should
be the rewards for good character.
Early on, one of the other cops tells Chico why they call Harry “Dirty Harry.”
He says, “Harry doesn’t play favorites. Harry hates everybody: Limies, Hicks,
Niggers, Honkies, Chicks.” Chico responds, “How does he feel about Mexicans?”
Harry chimes in, ironically: “Especially Spicks.” Of course, Harry doesn’t hate
Chico because he is Mexican.
By the film’s end, Harry and Chico are even good friends. Harry judges
people on an individual bases, the film argues. Just when you think the film is
making a negative statement about race, the next scene undercuts this statement.
Harry’s altercation with a black male criminal is followed by his doctor’s visit with
his black male doctor. In the same way, Harry is a cop, but he is totally individual
from the police force, which is represented as an ineffective liberal bureaucracy.
According to the film, the laws protect the criminals. Harry is worried about the
people.
For all of these reasons, Dirty Harry is a New Right film. The film also
imagines what Soja describes as a “thirdspace,” albeit from a conservative as opposed
to a liberal or leftist perspective. Soja never imagined that the new world of neither
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here nor there mental and physical spaces could and would be the project of a moral
majority.
At every turn, Harry goes to the city’s high points to contemplate his next
action. He sees the city like the killer sees the city, from a safe distance, as a totality,
to return to Soja, as a thirdspace, both “real-and-imagined.” Harry’s city is crawling
with hippies, homosexuals, loose women, and all of these stereotypes are portrayed as
obstacles to justice. A male homosexual tries to cruise Harry in the park and distracts
him from finding the killer. Looking through his binoculars, Harry is later distracted
by a three way sexual encounter when he should be watching the killer who in turn
escapes. All of the group-based identity politics from the 1960s are equally
represented in Dirty Harry. Yet these identities represented as symptoms of a sick
city.
Like any new American film, Dirty Harry, the fifth highest grossing film of
1971, is open ended, and for exactly the same reason. The film feels too close to a
complex reality to give a simple solution. The film ends on a note of ambivalence.
Harry has completed his job, found and killed the city’s killer. Yet he is so
disillusioned by the inadequacies of the law to properly protect its citizens, and so
disgusted with red tape and politics, that he throws his badge in the river. Whereas
most “Hollywood” films end with all answers solved, this one ends on a question:
Where will Harry go? What will he do? Like any new American film, this one invites
the audience to come up with their own conclusion and to ponder the film’s questions
as they relate to their real world existence.
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On the other hand, Dirty Harry isn’t at all close to social reality. Dirty Harry
depicts the city from the suburbs, where Nixon, Reagan, and Bush used the same
imagery to win elections. In this way, Dirty Harry shows that totalities are in fact still
possible even if they no longer belong to the Left. Dirty Harry sees the world as those
“other 86 percent” of the people see the world, as a place where there only two kinds
of people: us and them.
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1 Mike Davis. City o f Quartz. New York: Verso, 1990.
2 Edward Soja. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-And-Imagined
Places. Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1996, pg. 11.
3 Soja. Thirdspace, pg. 70.
4 Fredric Jameson. Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism:
Durham: Duke University Press, 1999, xx.
5 Jameson. Postmodernism, Or The Cultural Logic o f Late Capitalism, xxi.
6 Norman Mailer. Miami and The Siege of Chicago. New York: Signet, 1968.
7 Hilton Kramer. “The New Realists.” Brushes With History: Writing on Art from
The Nation 1865-2001. Peter G. Meyer, Ed. New York: Thunder Books Press, 2001,
pp. 297-299.
8 Kramer. “The New Realists,” pg. 298.
9 Raymond Williams. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Hanover:
Wesleyan University Press, 1992.
1 0 Lynn Spigel. Make Room For TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Post-War
America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
1 1 David Steigerwald. The Sixties and the End o f Modern America. New York: St.
Martin’s Press, 1995, x.
1 2 Steigerwald. The Sixties and the End o f Modern America, xxv.
1 3 William K. Tabb. “Urban Development and Regional Restructuring, an
Overview.” Larry Sawers and William K Tabb. Sunbelt/Snowbelt: Urban
Development and Regional Restructuring. New York: Oxford University Press,
1984, pp. 3-15.
1 4 Steigerwald. The Sixties and the End of Modern America, pg. 156.
1 5 Steigerwald. The Sixties and the End of Modern America, pg. 5.
1 6 “Sunbelt Leads Nation in Population Growth.” The New York Times 8
February 1976.
1 7 “Section’s Cities Top Urban Expansion.” The New York Times 8 February 1976.
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1 8 “Federal Funds Pour into Sunbelt States.” The New York Times 9 February 1976.
1 9 “Federal Funds Pour into Sunbelt States.” The New York Times 9 February 1976.
2 0 “Sunbelt Success Continues; Sunbelt-Snowbelt Gap Leads to Sectionalism.” The
Washington Post 15 January 1978.
2 1 Dan T. Carter. From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative
Counterrevolution: 1963-1994. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1996, xiii.
2 2 Lisa McGirr. Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right. New
Jersey: University of Princeton Press, 2001, pg. 204.
2 3 Pauline Kael. “St. Cop.” The New Yorker 15 January 1972.
2 4 Garrett Epps. “Does Popeye Doyle Teach Us How to Be Fascist?” The New York
Times. 15 May 1972.
2 5 Motion Picture Exhibitor 29 December 1971.
2 6 Newsweek 30 December 1971.
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CONCLUSION
NEW BEGINNNGS FOR NEW CINEMAS
The IFP/West began in 1980 in Los Angeles to initiate a West Coast base for the
new wave. In April of 1981, the first annual IFP/West conference attracted twice as many
people as were tickets available. “The New American Cinema Conference” was popular
because it came at a pivotal time for the new wave. The NEA, NEH, and PBS were facing
50% budget cuts.1 For this reason, the conference focused on the financial aspects of
independent filmmaking. The goal was now to educate independent filmmakers on the ins
and outs of the film business. Considering the circumstances, this goal is appropriate.
However, somewhere along the way, the new wave lost touch with the ideals that fueled
the new American cinema in the first place.2
“How to Finance an Independent Feature: Private Investment vs. The Independent
Deal,” seminar one featured Rob Nilsson, co-director of Northern Lights, Anna Thomas,
writer of El Norte, and Catherine Wyler, the Assistant Director of the NEA’s Media Arts
department, and focused exclusively on deal making. Lynda Myles, the esteemed author
and curator of the Pacific Film Archive in Berkley, and Kevin Thomas, the outspoken LA
Times film critic, led seminar two, “How to Get People to See, Review, and Write about
Your Film.” While studio films come with huge publicity machines, the panel clarified,
independent filmmakers have to learn how to promote their films through favorable
reviews and even controversy. Seminar three, “How to Sell a Film, Part I: Theatrical
Distribution, Domestic and Foreign” and seminar four, “How to Sell a Film, Part II:
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Television Sales, Domestic and Foreign,” copiously covered all aspects of the
international film distribution business. The conference covered all of the pressing
financial issues facing independent cinema, yet it did so at the expense of the larger
picture. The politics of independent filmmaker fell by the wayside.
Yet if you look closely at the transcripts of this conference, buried beneath all of
the money talk, The New American Cinema Group lives and breathes. It was an audience
member during seminar three who reminded the conference of the larger goal of
independent cinema. In the tradition of The New American Cinema Group that imagined
socially conscious films for large audiences, this audience member clarified that whatever
distributor or release pattern the independent filmmaker should choose, the point:
...is to take your statement to the lives of people who are not already
preordained to agree with what you have to say, and in fact to allow
you as a filmmaker to make some change in the lives of the people
who see your films...and maybe change the film world we’re living in
and the society that we’re living in.3
The New American Cinema Group broke from the avant-garde in order to challenge old
guard ideas about art, politics and cinema. What Walter Benjamin understood, The Group
also understood: “The instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic
production, the total function of art is reversed, it begins to be based on another practice:
politics.” The New American Cinema Group believed that it could change the world one
film at a time. Two decades later, an audience member at IFP/West New American
Cinema Conference reminds us of this awesome possibility.
Since the New Deal at least, American arts concerned with social change have
mobilized realism in order to appeal to a popular audience. As this project has shown, the
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independent cinema is no exception to this tradition. Unlike the realism of neo
conservatism, the realism of the American independent cinema does hide its argument
about social reality. The argument is instead part of the story itself. Like the New Deal
public arts, independent or the new American cinema since The Group represents the
world “as it really is” in order to argue that this “reality” is unjust and counter to the ideals
of American democracy. From The Group to the American new wave, the American
independent cinema has told the stories that mainstream cinema has seen as irrelevant or
un-commercial. The fact that the commercial cinema jockeys the independent cinema for
new audiences only testifies to the independent cinema’s power to shape the stories that
count as commercial.
At the same time, American independent cinema pays a heavy price for mingling
with mainstream commercial cinema. Independent cinema brings avant-garde politics and
styles to the mainstream, where they are picked up and played out by conglomerate
industries. The independent cinema is for this reason continually starting anew, and even
calling itself “new” with each start. Independent cinema has had a difficult time
establishing roots in this country. The commercial market, where everything is always
“new,” is too kinetic for roots.
On the other hand, independent cinema is always “new” because its eyes have
always been directed toward a “new” and better future. Like the New Deal public arts, the
new American cinema is idealistic. It is the dream of a new world. Here the independent
cinema is perpetually new because the world could always be a better place. Focusing on
contemporary social issues also keeps the independent cinema in new terrain. New
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American cinema has also traditionally been the project of young people, or the new
generation. As young people are subject to think that their work is groundbreaking, they
are also inclined to think of their work as a radical break from tradition or “new.” This is
the idealism that fuels independent cinema to push for social change. Over the years, and
despite all claims of “newness,” this cinema has forged a tradition in rule breaking, in
daring to imagine a “new” world.
At the time of “The New American Cinema Conference,” the independent cinema
had finally secured a niche for itself within the commercial marketplace. The new wave’s
success overseas even inspired a wave of domestic distribution companies (Island,
Cinecom, New Line, Vestron, New World, Hemdale, FilmDallas and Miramax), all of
whom were looking for low investment, high return non-studio niche films. Around the
same time, several of the majors (Universal and Fox, for instance) also started distribution
subsidiaries for inexpensive special films. Meanwhile, home video companies, desperate
for content, began to produce their own independent films.4
From these opportunities emerged another generation of American independent
filmmakers. Susan Seidelman (Smithereens, 1982, dist. New Line), Jim Jarmusch
(Stranger than Paradise, 1984, Goldwyn), John Sayles (The Brother From Another
Planet, 1984, Cinecom), Wayne Wang (Dim Sum, 1984, Orion), Joyce Chopra (Smooth
Talk, 1986, Spectrafilm), Lizzie Borden (Working Girls, 1986, Miramax) and Spike Lee
(She’s Gotta Have It, 1986, Island) began their careers during this time. Their films were
shot on location with non-professional actors, vernacular and conversational dialogue,
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minimal lighting, sound and set design. Keeping with the tradition in realism and social
change that dates back to the New Deal public art works, the new generation made
regionally specific films that revealed the injustices in American life and culture.
The break through independent film of the decade, sex, lies, and videotape (1989)
is no exception. This film is the Shadows (1959) of its day. It proved once again that small
films can and do sometimes attract large audiences. As one reviewer put it:
At a time when American movies have become either impersonal
exercises in blockbuster technology (Indiana Jones and the Last
Crusade) or slick CAA-powered packages wedding high-paid stars to
inoffensive TV-styled character drama (Rain Man), Steven
Soderbergh has dared to be different.5
Like Shadows, sex, lies, and videotape was received as a long overdue contrast to the
typical Hollywood film. In the late 1980s, as with the late 1950s, or the time of Shadows,
the “typical Hollywood film” meant a lavish spectacle film.
As film scholar Justin Wyatt has chronicled, Hollywood cinema during the 1980s
became a “high concept” cinema. Films like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are “high
concept” films because they were conceived as delivery mechanisms or commercials for
multiple products and cross-markets. Like Jaws (1975) or any of the other action
spectacles from the day, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is multi-million dollar
franchises with famous movie stars, minimal narratives and lavish spectacles so as to
attract global audiences.6 Within this “high concept” context, sex, lies and videotape, the
first film by the 26-year-old Soderberg, was the little film that could. As the
aforementioned reviewer argued, Soderberg’s minimalist, character driven film was
perceived as refreshingly different from high concept Hollywood.
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As with Shadows, nearly all of the reviewers of sex, lies, and videotape praised the
film’s lack of spectacle and deep character study. The film was “an intimate psychological
drama that has no stars, no car chases, and no special effects: it’s just four people talking
about sex.”7 The film was shot in 5 weeks in Soderberg’s hometown of Baton Rouge,
Louisiana. The film uses minimal lighting, sound and set design to comment on
contemporary American like. As Soderberg explained, American had become a place
where “the selling of sex, the telling of lies, and the inundation of video” has rendered us
spiritually numb and sexually impotent.8 The anti-hero of sex, lies, and videotape, James
Spader’s character is lost in every aspect of his life. He is an unemployed loner who lives
out of his car. He hides behind his video camera. Played by Andy MacDowell, the female
counterpart to this antihero hides behind the formalities of polite society. Where he is
impotent, she is frigid. These characters cannot relate because they are obsessed, as she
confesses during her weekly therapy session, “with what to do with all the trash.”9 Like the
characters of Shadows, these characters are equal parts specific and iconographic.
Either way, sex, lies and videotape was received as a break through success. The
Los Angeles Times announced, “C’est Magnifique’ Says the Critics to U.S. Film Maker.”
The film won the Palm d’Or along with the Grand Prize at the U.S. Film Festival (now
Sundance). There, sex, lies, and videotape started the first high publicity bidding war
among domestic film distributors. Typical for today, sex, lies, and videotape was sold in
pieces to ensure a higher return for the producers. Miramax bought the film for $1.2
million up front, an additional $1 million for prints and advertising and 30% of the profits.
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RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video and Virgin Vision, the producers, maintained the
film’s home video sales. Showtime bought the pay-tv rights.
As it turned out, sex, lies, and videotape was a better investment than a “high
concept” film. As one critic commented, sex, lies and videotape, “with its $1.1 million
dollar budget and $24 million plus North American box office—was a better investment
than Batman, which at an investment of $50 million, returned $250 million in domestic
box office.”1 0 In the end, sex, lies and videotape earned Miramax over $100 million at the
international box office (including Germany, England, France, Tokyo, Italy, Norway,
Israel, and even Belgium).1 1 Like Shadows, sex, lies and videotape showed everyone that
inexpensive niche films can turn a greater profit than high concept films like Batman.
Written, directed and produced by Spike Lee for Universal, Do The Right Thing
was the other break through independent film of the decade. The film inspired the largest
public debate over race relations in America since The Birth of A Nation (1915). Although
everyone had a different interpretation of the film’s ending, nobody was lost to the film’s
political edge. For one reviewer, the film was:
The only summer movie that encourages any discussion beyond “oh,
wow”.. .a daring mix of naturalism, agitprop and psychodrama, Do
The Right Thing begins, literally with a Brechtian call to “wake up.”1 2
Shot on location in Bedford Stuyvesant, a predominantly black and Puerto Rican
neighborhood in New York City, the film ends with a call to “go out and vote.”
Continuing the tradition of realism and social change, of the power of social expressionism
in the American arts, Do The Right Thing “combines pop theatricality and social realism”1 3
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to convey the political relevance of the film’s subject matter. As one critic noticed, “Lee’s
brilliant new film is a stinging slap in the face to anyone stumbling through life in a liberal
stupor, thinking racism and social injustice have become moot questions in these United
States.”1 4 Another critic noticed that the film “speaks to today’s racial crisis as a matter of
individual consciousness. The film uses the aggregate boiling tempers of New York to
portray the sate of the nation.”1 5
Lee was outspoken about the film’s larger purpose. “I’m really sick of Hollywood
films,” he argued in one interview. “I think they really don’t respect the intelligence of the
audience. In far too many films, you see in the first five minutes who’s wearing the white
hat and who’s wearing the black hat. In this film we try and stay away from that.”1 6 Like
The New American Cinema Group, Lee wanted his film to counteract the mythmaking of
the dominant media. “One of the biggest lies going is that no matter what race creed or
religion you are,” Lee argued, “it doesn’t matter: we’re all Americans. That’s a lie, always
has been.” Do The Right Thing was Lee’s reaction to mainstream representations of race
relations. He insisted, “I knew at the end I wanted black folks to take a stand.. .None of
this everybody join hands and sing ‘We are the World’ stuff because I don’t think that’s
realistic at this present time in America.”1 7
Do The Right Thing inspired public conversation not so much about the film but
about the universe that the film represents. The New York Times printed a group discussion
on the film between Henry Louis Gates Jr., Paul Schrader, Dr. Alvin F. Poussant, Betty
Shabazz, and Burton B. Roberts, the administrative judge of the State Supreme Court in
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the Bronx. The group discussed everything from race relations to the ethics of
filmmaking.1 8 Later, readers responded with letters to the editor debating the film on
similar grounds. One editorial noticed the film’s critique of the New Right: “From the
onset of Reaganism, we have witnessed the premeditated undermining of civil rights, the
growing economy of misery of vast, largely black populations and the rollback of
opportunity as even a glimmer of a promise in many poor communities.”1 9 The film got
people to talk about race as a complex social issue.
The film even inspired what Lee explained as a wave of “white hysteria” from the
mainstream media. Many feared that the film would provoke people of color to riot. “If
audiences go wild, he’s partly responsible,” one reviewer noted.2 0 Others wanted the film
to wait to open in the fall instead of the summer as it was scheduled. Since the film is set
in the summer, the hottest day of the summer in fact, the reviewer feared that the film
would be less likely to inspire people of color to riot if it were screened in cooler
weather.2 1 Because there is a scene where one character gets angry at another character for
dirtying his sneakers, one reviewer went so far as to blame Lee for any and all future
sneaker murders.2 2 In short, Lee’s film inspired in many the fear of a black planet.
Incidentally, “Fear of a Black Planet” was the title of the Public Enemy album from where
Do The Right Thing took its theme song. “Fight The Power” appears in the film more than
fifteen times.
Like sex, lies and videotape, Do The Right Thing is the work of a talented auteur.
It is also part of an artistic tradition. From the film’s socially expressive style, focus on
contemporary social issues to even the filmmaker’s intentions, Do The Right Thing
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recalls the history of social expressionism in public art works in this country. Do The
Right Thing also recalls the style and politics championed by The New American Cinema
Group. The Group broke from the avant-garde for the same reasons that Monty Ross, one
of Lee’s producers, says that Do The Right Thing was made. For Ross:
We can’t afford art for art’s sake. There’s so much of black life that
needs so much work. (We) will always make movies that are
entertaining and give people something to talk about.2 3
Embedded in this statement are the words of Amos Vogel: “We are not in that sense elite,
or, if we are, I think that can be changed.” For precisely the same reasons as Monty Ross,
The Group wanted to create an art cinema that could entertain and intellectually engaged
large audiences. Like Ross, The Group believed that “art” invites people to see their
everyday lives differently. Art makes daily activities, like going to the movies for
instance, appear anew, politically charged and ripe with possibility. This is the art of Do
The Right Thing and sex, lies and videotape just as it is the art of Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men, The Cool World, Girl Friends, Bush Mama or any of the works in this
project.
In fact, I constructed this project on two ideas. In 1922, T.S. Elliot wrote an essay
entitled “Tradition and the Individual Talent” which insists that artists should be
appreciated not singularly, as individuals, but as members of an artistic tradition. This idea
inspired me to sidestep the auteur approach so central to most studies of independent
cinema for a more historical or “traditional” approach. As Elliot himself argued, tradition
“involves, in the first place, the historical sense.”2 4 Yet when I searched the contemporary
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independent cinema for a history or tradition, I was perplexed to find an absolute void.
Here I was reminded of Fredrick Jameson’s analysis of the present as an era that has
forgotten how to think historically.2 5 As Jameson argues, the problem with this forgetting
is that without a sense of history the past and the future dissolve into a perpetual present,
where everything is always “new.” Curiously, this logic serves our contemporary
consumer culture, where every product is the “newest” must have product, even as it ties
the “new” American cinema to a tradition that dates back to the New Deal arts.
Thinking historically is what we must do precisely because we have forgotten
how. It means thinking within a larger context than self and now. As this project shows, it
also means thinking spatially. In a world obsessed with the “new,” thinking historically
and spatially grounds us in time and place. It does not so much move us backwards, but
instead creates a space within the present for contemplation about the now as a time and
place for social change. This space has historically been the space of the American
independent cinema. My goal is to remind the American independent cinema of its
radical history and tradition so that it might continue to critique and imagine the world as
a better place.
The final seminar of The New American Cinema Conference, “The Independent
and the Industry,” posed an important question: “Can there be a healthy relationship
between the film industry and the independent filmmaker, or must an American New
Wave by its very nature be anti-Hollywood?”2 6 Although the independent cinema might
at its very nature be “anti-Hollywood,” the panel concluded, this nature would have to be
subverted if independent filmmakers wanted to “make it” in the American movie
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business. Then the panel turned a discussion of the film business from which it has never
returned.
I have tried to insert another point of reference into the conversation. As our
audience member at the conference noticed, there cannot be a healthy relationship between
independents and Hollywood if both parties are operating from the same agenda. The
history of independent cinema reminds us of the point of independent cinema, to “change
the film world we’re living in and the society that we’re living in.”
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1 Stephanie Faulkner-Peschke. “Independent Feature Project/West: In Support of the
Independent Film-Maker.” Optic Music February 1987, pp. 22.
2 Many would argue that it is “no coincidence” that it was in Los Angeles that the
independent cinema forgot its history. In The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and
The Erasure of Memory (New York: Verso, 1997), for instance, Norman Klein
persuasively argues that Los Angeles has historically been a city without a memory
of its own past, a city that thrives on the myth of the “new.” For many, this obsession
makes Los Angeles great example of a postmodern city and postmodernism in
general. I do not disagree. In the previous chapter I tried to argue that it is equally
relevant that we understand the mentality of the South or the Sunbelt for the same
reason. Even more than Los Angeles, the South is a region made of myths. Where
Los Angeles is a region contemptuous of the past, the South is a region attached to a
very particular version of the past. To understand the relationship between politics
and popular culture in this country it is important that we understand the psyches of
both regions.
3 Faulkner-Peschke. “Independent Feature Project/West: In Support of the
Independent Film-Maker,” pg. 22.
4 Stephen Prince. A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electronic Rainbow,
1980-1989. University of California Press: Berkeley, 2000, pp. 117-118.
5 David Ehrenstein. “Secrete Weapon of 'sex, lies. ’ Soderbergh’s Simplicity Gives Him an
Edge.” L.A. Herald-Examiner 28 May 1989.
6 Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood. University of
Texas Press: Austin, 1994.
7 The Village View. 18 August 1989.
8 Jack Mathews. “’C ’est Magnifique’ Says the Critics to U.S. Film Maker, 26.” The Los
Angeles Times 15 May 1989.
9 Peter Rainer. “Hot Topic.” The L.A. Herald-Examiner 16 May 1989. Soderberg in this
article commented, “I intend to make some studio films, and some that are not. And I
don’t have to prove my non-commercial status by coming up with aggressively downbeat
endings.”
1 0 Alisa Perren, “Sex, lies and marketing: Miramax and the Development of the
Quality Indie Blockbuster.” Film Quarterly fall 2001.
1 1 Time Out: London’s Weekly Guide 16 August 1989.
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1 2 J. Hoberman. “Pass/Fail.” The Village Voice 11 July 1989.
1 3 Tom O’Brien. “Facts of (Ghetto) Life.” Screen 14 July 1989.
1 4 Sterlinda C. Barrett. “Spike Lee Turns a Brilliant Directing Job in His New
Movie,” Accent July 1989.
1 5 Armond White. “Birth of a Nation: Spike Lee Shows the Limits of Intolerance.”
The LA Weekly 7 July 1989.
1 6 David Sterritt. “Filmmaker Spike Lee Tackles Racism; if People Squirm, ‘Fine.’”
Hartford Courant 2 July 1989.
1 7 Production notes, Do The Right Thing. Universal Press Department, 1989.
1 8 “Do The Right Thing: Issues and Images.” The New York Times 9 July 1989.
1 9 Stuart Ewen. “Letter to the Editor.” The New York Times 14 July 1989.
2 0 David Denby. “He’s Gotta Have It.” The New Yorker 26 June 1989.
2 1 Jack Mathews and Claudia Puig. “What Does it Say About Race Relations.” The
Los Angeles Times 24 June 1989.
2 2 Allen Barra. “Letter to the Editor.” The Village Voice 29 July 1990.
2 3 David Handelman. “Insight to Riot.” Rolling Stone 13 July 1989.
2 4 T.S. Elliot. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on
Poetry and Criticism. New York: Penguin, 1986.
2 5 Fredrick Jameson. Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic o f Late Capitalism.
Duke University Press: Durham, 1991, pg. ix. Jameson’s exact words are “It is safest
to grasp the concept of postmodern as an attempt to think the present historically in
an age that has forgotten how to think historically in the first place.”
2 6 The New American Cinema Conference. Los Angeles: IFP/West Publications,
1981.
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Asset Metadata

Creator Baldwin, Belinda Marie (author)

Core Title A new American cinema

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

School Graduate School

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Critical Studies)

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Cinema,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Advisor [illegible] (committee chair), [illegible] (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-628126

Unique identifier UC11340157

Identifier 3116663.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-628126 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 3116663.pdf

Dmrecord 628126

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Baldwin, Belinda Marie

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA

Linked assets

University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses