The American Film Institute and the Cultural Politics of Experimental and Independent Cinema 1666928070, 9781666928075

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Acronyms
Introduction
Before the American Film Institute
Funding for Film Artists
The American Film Institute Takes Shape
AFI’s Feet of Clay
Conclusion
Appendix
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

The American Film Institute and the Cultural Politics of Experimental and Independent Cinema

The American Film Institute and the Cultural Politics of Experimental and Independent Cinema Gracia Ramirez

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ramirez, Gracia, 1981– author. Title: The American Film Institute and the cultural politics of experimental and independent cinema / Gracia Ramirez. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book examines the role that the American Film Institute had in supporting experimental and independent cinema at a key moment of change in the history of American film. Gracia Ramirez provides a rich contextualization of the institution’s history and offers a grounded assessment of its achievements and shortcomings”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2023053324 (print) | LCCN 2023053325 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666928075 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666928099 (pbk) | ISBN 9781666928082 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: American Film Institute—History. | Motion pictures—Study and teaching (Graduate)—United States—History. | Motion picture industry—Government policy—United States. | Motion picture industry—United States—Finance. | Experimental films—United States—History and criticism. | Independent films— United States—History and criticism. | United States—Cultural policy. Classification: LCC PN1993.8.U5 R36 2024  (print) | LCC PN1993.8.U5  (ebook) | DDC 791.430973—dc23/eng/20240102 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023053324 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023053325 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Acronyms ix Introduction

1

Chapter 1: Before the American Film Institute Chapter 2: Funding for Film Artists





Chapter 3: The American Film Institute Takes Shape Chapter 4: AFI’s Feet of Clay Conclusion



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85 111

137

Appendix: Archival Collections Bibliography Index

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147

149

159

About the Author



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Acknowledgments

This book is the result of many years of study and revision. No words can render the effort behind it, neither can words do justice to the support received from people along the way. First, I would like to thank the supervisors that believed in me when this started as a PhD project: Lynda Dryden, Paul Sellors, and Roberta McGrath. Librarians and archivists opened me the doors to the wealth of their collections: the Rockefeller Archive Center, the Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas, and the British Film Institute. The National Library of Scotland and the British Library have always felt like second homes to me, wherever the first one was. Friends and family have in different ways also been there too. To all, thanks.

vii

Acronyms

ACE: American Council on Education AFI: American Film Institute AIP: American International Pictures CAFS: Centre for Advanced Film Studies CIA: Central Intelligence Agency DWW: Directing Workshop for Women IFP: Independent Filmmaker Program MoMA: Museum of Modern Art MPAA: Motion Picture Association of America NCA: National Council on the Arts NDEA: National Defence Education Act NEA: National Endowment for the Arts OCIAA: Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs RF: Rockefeller Foundation SRI: Stanford Research Institute UCLA: University of California Los Angeles USIA: United States Information Agency

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Introduction

In 1968 the newly founded American Film Institute (AFI) started awarding funds to produce experimental and independent films as part of the Independent Filmmaker Program (IFP). The AFI had just come into being in 1967 under the umbrella of larger arts and cultural policies advanced by the democrats John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. It was the first time that the U.S. federal government widely supported film production with public funds and it reassured that it was neither for propaganda nor for profit. Instead, the IFP aimed to achieve broadly considered educational purposes. The fund was targeted to established and emerging filmmakers, and artists from other disciplines who wanted to try using film as a medium of artistic expression. In 1968, for the first round of IFP grants, thirty-five projects were awarded. Amongst the grantees were recognised experimental filmmakers like Paul Sharits, who used it to complete Razor Blades (1965–1968), a key work of structural film in its breaking down of essential elements of the cinematic experience. Razor Blades consisted of two projectors and a stereo sound installation where geometric forms, figures, colours, texts, and repetitive sounds competed for attention. Another grant went to David Lynch, then a recent art school graduate, who made The Grandmother (1970), a black and white thirty-three-minute surreal story about a traumatised incontinent boy who decides to grow a grandmother to comfort him. Approximately 153 projects, on all sorts of themes, genres, and styles, including documentary and animation, were produced with the help of the IFP scheme between 1967 and 1977.1 Looking at the list of grantees, the name of David Lynch stands out as he then went into studying film direction at AFI’s newly created graduate film school, the Center for Advanced Film Studies (CAFS), and later had an internationally-recognised career in the margins of Hollywood. Some other IFP grantees that come into relief are those of independent filmmakers like left-wing political filmmaker Robert Kramer, TV movie director John Korty, Academy Award winner documentarian Barbara Kopple and key African American independent director Larry Clark. Renowned photographers such 1

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Introduction

as Robert Frank and Bruce Davidson also produced films with IFP support. Importantly too, there was a significant number of American experimental filmmakers working with a variety of themes and techniques. Alongside Paul Sharits, there were people such as Chick Strand, Will Hindle, Jordan Belson, Richard Myers, Tony Conrad, Ed Emshwiller, Storm de Hirsch, Standish Lawder, Bruce Baillie, Stan Vanderbeek, and Scott Bartlett in the long list of IFP projects. Even if not all the grantees had long-lasting and recognised filmmaking careers, or some projects were never completed, the IFP offered production opportunities for many individuals. Production programmes like the IFP are based on ideas of compensation and seeding, which justify the likely lack of return from public investment. They operate on the principle of protecting or ensuring the future of practices that would otherwise not survive given the strictures of capitalist markets. Such funding for film production is usually based on the idea that those films have (1) recognised cultural worth and there is a need to protect them, and/ or (2) training value based on the expectation that the film will enable the filmmaker to progress into a professional career. Such soft-culture grants have been typically put into place through European nation-states to protect film industries from the dominance of the American film industry with its distinctive Hollywood branding, although they can also be used to protect and promote recognised social, cultural, and linguistic minorities.2 The case of the IFP is relevant because of it being the first federally-funded production programme in a country whose powerful commercial film industry is typically seen as a major economic player and cultural reference across the world. From this perspective, this book starts from asking about the specific reasons for the U.S. federal government putting money into experimental and independent film practices. This involves situating film within the wider U.S. arts and cultural policies established in the 1960s. It goes on enquiring into the economic and political consequences of such support. But first, the meanings of American experimental and independent cinema in the context of the 1960s need to be accounted for. EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA AND THE INDEPENDENT MODE OF PRODUCTION By the time that the IFP came into place, naming films as experimental and independent was a short cut or conflation of other terms such as film poetry, avant-garde, alternative, underground, and personal films. In the mid-1960s these varied set film practices sat off-centre of the dominant theatrical film industry aesthetics and modes of production. Experimental and independent cinema had significantly flourished after World War II in a context of

Introduction

3

interdisciplinary creativity, wider availability of film equipment, and changes in the theatrical film industry. While the conflation of terms did occur, experimental usually referred to innovative or unusual aesthetics, while independent designated a mode of production different to the heavily invested Hollywood studio films. The institutionalisation of cinema as an entertainment business in the early 1910s was centred around the production, distribution, and exhibition of long-length narrative films for paying theatre audiences. Theatrical film practices entailed substantial capitalisation and strictly regulated professionalisation through the actions of different guilds, unions, and trade associations. A significant player in this regard is the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) which emerged through different incarnations as a self-regulatory body uniting the major U.S. film companies to control competition and lobby for their interests. In this context, educational, industrial, animation, documentary, and experimental film practices not conforming to the parameters of theatrical entertainment grew peripherally to it. Nonetheless, these practices participated of a wider understanding of cinema as a deployment of technology, what Haidee Wasson and Charles Acland have called “useful cinema,” which is significant in number and impact and needs to be seen in dialogue with the more visibly glamorous theatrical cinema.3 In this light, it is worth questioning what was the U.S. government take on the “useful” aspects of experimental and independent cinema. As opposed to the large investments and division of labour of theatrical cinema, experimental and independent films typically involve less budget and less people, which set them closer to other art practices such as painting, sculpture, or poetry. The 1920s and 1930s saw the first upsurge of avantgarde artists using film as a medium of artistic expression, alongside the establishment of independent theatres and not-for-profit film societies or film clubs, offering alternative circuits for exhibition and discussion of these works where they mixed with documentary and political films. Artists and critics frequented these venues and early theorising on the nature and status of film as an art form emerged from them. Writings engaged with distinctions between high and low culture, debated the educational value of mechanical reproduction of art and played up the differentiating aspects of the new medium in relation to other media, often ascribing transformative or revelatory potential to these aspects.4 These were the origins of the theories on film’s unique capacity to transcend boundaries and reach new ways of seeing the world. Medium-specific ideas took hold of the discourse on experimental and independent cinema as these practices sought artistic recognition while differentiating themselves from the entertainment and profit-driven aims of the mainstream film industry.

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Introduction

Experimental filmmakers often self-financed their films or had support from private patrons. Their independent, even if meagre, conditions of production allowed them to take more aesthetic risks as well as the expression of moral, religious, or political views which would find it more difficult to appear in theatrical films because of the latter’s pressure to comply with larger audiences’ tastes and/or effective censorship. The rise of experimental and independent filmmaking in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s saw filmmakers such as Maya Deren disrupting narrative expectations and focusing on neglected topics such as female subjective experiences. Stan Brakhage abstracted the material qualities of film and explored their relation to vision. The animations of Harry Smith represented esoteric mysticism and psychedelic experiences in a way which was obscure to many. Kenneth Anger’s and Gregory Markopoulos’ films openly dealt with gay eroticism when homosexuality was not generally accepted, while psychological deviance was a driving force in Sidney Peterson’s films. Even though the 16 mm format allowed for cheaper access to film equipment, there were still issues with distributing and exhibiting these films and recouping costs. The films were often shown in influential non-theatrical outlets and film societies such as the short-lived Art in Cinema in San Francisco and the more established Cinema 16 in New York. They programmed experimental films along with American and European film classics, inter-war avant-garde works, educational and industrial films, and documentaries, thus offering a rich take on film culture but limited in their reach to larger audiences. During the 1950s, new hybrid and documentary formats also emerged as independent productions. Some were driven by an interest in visual ethnography and an approach to drama inflicted by social consciousness, as in the work of Lionel Rogosin, or a concern with how documentary film could seek proximity to subjects, as in the Direct Cinema productions of Robert Drew and Donn Pennebaker. By the start of the 1960s, some independentlyproduced features also came to prominence, as in the case of Shadows (John Cassavetes, 1959) which approached interracial love and identity with naturalistic performances, and The Connection (Shirley Clarke, 1961) dealing with drug use and cinematic representation in a self-reflexive manner. These features aimed to meet theatrical outlets’ conventional expectations of length and gauge but still found problems with distribution and censorship. Nevertheless, during the late 1950s and early 1960s, independent did not always imply small budgets, limited distribution and returns, or being apart from Hollywood. There were movies aimed at filling film theatres’ programmes independently produced at the lesser quality or B-studios of the major companies. Other times, renowned Hollywood directors such as Frank Capra, George Stevens, and William Wyler embarked upon independent

Introduction

5

productions to retain more creative control over the projects and then sell the films to major companies for distribution. Notions of independence and experimentation also overlapped with the category of art cinema, which referred to foreign productions often shown in independent theatres and included the work of directors Ingmar Bergman, Jacques Tati, and Federico Fellini. Their films’ artistic connotations resulted from their self-reflective engagement with modernist aesthetics and typical post-war dealings with existentialist themes such as freedom, authenticity, and alienation. These productions had varying degrees of innovation and independence, and they were marketed to audiences under the recognisable name of the director and references to their national cultures. Such films were often discussed in specialised magazines like Film Culture, where one of the founders, filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas, first scorned American experimental films, and preferred to attend to European cinema, but changed his mind as he saw American experimental and independent filmmakers expanding their breadth and honing their technical abilities. Other popular terms of the time, such as underground, were also used in a variety of contexts. Critic Manny Farber first used underground in 1957 to praise the male-centred adventures of directors such as Raoul Walsh and Howard Hawks that stood against the grain of Hollywood mainstream.5 But in the early 1960s, the underground became a wider term associated with experimental and independent films, invoking marginality, lo-fi aesthetics and subcultural connotations.6 At this point, a heterogeneous formation of independent and experimental filmmakers and producers spearheaded by Mekas became known under the name of the New American Cinema Group and used the pages of Film Culture to voice their ideas. Mekas saw that the films of Cassavetes, Clarke, Rogosin, Drew, and others, had the potential to renew American cinema. Hollywood was then going through a period of instability that had started in the mid-1940s, with the breakdown of the studios’ vertical integration after the Paramount Decision. Moreover, the moral standards of the Production Code Administration were obsolete, but no new system came into place until 1968.7 This was a moment of search for new aesthetic and production formulae and some filmmakers saw there could be opportunities for them. Drawing from the romantic tradition, Mekas defended the New American films’ engagement with spontaneous, imaginative, and playful forms of expression, seeing in them the potential to transcend the limitations of the American film industry and its dominant ideology.8 He envisioned a reform of theatrical film practice where experimental and independent films would have a relevant place.9 Mekas, along with other filmmakers, producers, and exhibitors, strived to better organise exhibition spaces and distribution arms to make independent and experimental films reach further.

6

Introduction

The hopes for renewing American film culture in the first half of the 1960s had much to do with the feeling that American society and politics were changing. The strength of the civil rights movement to end segregation, and the liberal momentum that drove Kennedy to the presidency, which anticipated a nationwide arts and education legislation, signalled a chance to make things differently, something that enthused longtime defenders of liberal arts and culture and the baby boom generation then coming of age. When filmmakers, exhibitors, and educators started debating plans for an American film institute in the early 1960s, experimental and independent films had a significant place in them. They appeared as vehicles for diversity, freedom of expression, and public education, enabling better opportunities to access the means of production, and widening American film culture beyond Hollywood films. The Ford Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the Ford Motor Company, announced twelve grants for “creative filmmakers” in 1963. Another important philanthropy whose revenue came mostly from the oil business, the Rockefeller Foundation, also cast its attention on individual experimental filmmakers in 1965 after the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Film Department devoted a series of screenings and discussions to the New American Cinema. This created expectation for more sustained support from the anticipated American film institute but there was also reticence since, one, as a public institution the film institute would need to engage with an art that had been previously considered only a private enterprise, and two, for how it would consider the diversity of American filmmaking and not just Hollywood. IN THE BEST INTERESTS OF THE COUNTRY At its launch in 1967, the AFI expressed its mission was to enrich and nurture the art of film in America, thus presupposing that film is a matter of public interest and that the federal government should protect its past and secure its future. As evidenced throughout this book, the AFI’s foundation was propelled by George Stevens Jr., a prominent figure with one foot in Hollywood and another in Washington. Stevens’ liberal idea of the filmmaker as an artist is fundamental to understand the IFP and its focus on experimentation and independence. But behind Stevens’ personal realisation of the AFI project there is another significant force, the cultural politics of the Cold War. Stevens was a New Frontier person, animated by the hopes of Kennedy’s presidency and the latter’s aim to defrost some of the monolithic attitudes of the previous decade. Kennedy wanted to advance the idea of economic, military, and cultural leadership in the international front, but he also had to focus on domestic issues such as implementing the civil rights legislation.

Introduction

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The arts and education policies that eventually materialised in the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) were the culmination of a series of advances in arts and education programmes that had gathered force in the context of the Cold War. Shortly after the end World War II, the two winning powers of Russia and the United States sought the political and economic alignment of different nation-states across the globe along the two sides of the spectrum represented by Communism and Capitalism. The United States aimed to signal its leadership not just on scientific and military matters but also on the cultural front. On the cultural cold war, the United States pushed towards positioning liberal and socialist intellectuals close to an idea of progress and freedom removed from Communism. One way to achieve this involved the U.S. government addressing large sums of money to support culture and the arts through conferences, organisations, publications, and exhibitions, but much of this support was in covert form.10 This is the context that saw the rise of American abstract expressionist painting as a post-war avantgarde movement.11 The works of painters like Jackson Pollock, Wilhelm de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and William Baziotes amongst others were selected for Biennales, international exhibitions and were heavily promoted through MoMA’s International Program. It is worth noting that it was not only abstract expressionism that was promoted through covert ventures. There was also American folk art, jazz music, classical composers and others. These variety of artists and styles were chosen to signify American cultural leadership and creative diversity in the international arts scene. What is significant of abstract expressionism is that in the period’s narratives of the development of modernist art, this movement is presented as artists working in isolation to achieve a progressive synthesis of the European avant-garde forms of surrealism and abstraction. Critics praised the paintings through notions of freedom and autonomy, highlighting the liberatory aspect of uncontrolled gestural brushwork and how moving away from figurative representation via painterly abstraction achieved the medium’s self-regulation. Abstract expressionist aesthetics stood against the contemporaneous Soviet socialist realism, the anti-intellectualist figurative aesthetic enforced by the Soviet regime since the days of Stalin. The result was that abstract expressionism had overcome the European avant-garde and stood against the Soviets with their connotations of free and forward-thinking stances. For the United States, rebellious-looking art was an instrument of liberal ideology. Since the United States lacked national arts and cultural institutions, many of these cultural initiatives were assumed by various government agencies or appeared in covert form, up until the moment that the NEA was officially established in 1967. AFI’s initial funding was possible with a $1,300,000 grant from the NEA and matched with the same amount by each the MPAA and the Ford Foundation. Despite the initial hopes for the AFI, during the first decade

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Introduction

skepticism turned into criticism for its narrow focus and mismanagement. The institute was accused of being biased towards Hollywood and lack of achievement of its wider educational objectives. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, some critics looked back at the prolific days of experimental and independent film and they identified its decline with the appearance of federal and philanthropic grants, and with the affiliation of filmmakers as teaching staff in universities and colleges during the 1970s. This stance was exemplified by Film Culture critic Andrew Sarris who provocatively declared in 1976 “avant-garde films are more boring than ever” since “the age of foundation film is upon us.”12 Fred Camper’s writings of the 1980s dismissed a younger generation of experimental filmmakers and rallied against the loss of authenticity and serious commitment which he saw in the earlier generation of male filmmakers or “giants.”13 Camper presented a romantic, idealised, view of the avant-garde and blamed it on institutional affiliations for its demise. Camper, nevertheless, lacked historiographical evidence to sustain his claims. Importantly too, Camper’s view resonated with contemporary art critics’ concerns regarding the U.S. federal government and philanthropies such as the Rockefeller Foundation’s use of avant-garde and minority arts during the Cold War. Regarding the covert funding for these activities and publications, it is worth noting that American art had been used in cultural diplomacy before the Cold War, but Republicans tended to lean against it. Additionally, the United States lacked an established arts and culture department, which left politicians defenders of liberal arts like Nelson Rockefeller partially assuming the role of such department through his family’s philanthropies.14 While these might partly account for the concealed nature of these activities, one issue that remains is that people taking part on these activities might not have known who was funding them and what were the ulterior interests behind their selection and promotion. The opaqueness of this situation is different from writing a grant application knowing that the funder is a government or philanthropy to whose criteria artists are trying to match their applications. Film critics like Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney had typically presented American experimental and independent filmmakers with the romantic aura of working against all odds and hyped up their radical and anti-system stances without never fully explaining all their sources of funding. Sitney in particular also endorsed film’s medium-specific rhetoric to praise the work of structural filmmakers. It is not surprising that 1980s’ critics such as Camper used institutionalisation to account for the demise of American avant-garde film, even if Camper was rather referring to an idealised and very specific formation of filmmakers. But the vision of art co-opted by political interests during that time still endures. More recently, in the mid-2000s, experimental

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filmmaker Bruce Conner invoked the vision of government control when he was asked to look back on those years. Conner stated that: Ultimately, the experimental film movement became so successful that government and nonprofit entities were attracted to the power and felt the need to “help” the artists by controlling their activity. The artists appear, in retrospect, to have retained their independence and freedom throughout the 1960s, before the institution of arts grants, funding and jobs created a new dependence on the establishment.15

Conner’s is an intentionally controversial statement, even more so knowing that he received a Ford grant without strings attached in 1964. He also enjoyed significant freedom when making the entrancingly terrifying Crossroads (1976) using archival footage of the U.S. government nuclear detonations in the Bikini Atoll with an IFP grant. Still, his assumptions can be examined more closely to identify key points of discussion around the questions of dependence and political co-optation. First, Conner’s view invokes notable but isolated examples of independence. Organisations like Canyon Cinema, with which Conner was closely acquainted, initially ran independently, but they had liaisons with art museums which often operated with philanthropic or government funding. It is also necessary to examine if the many film societies, non-theatrical distributors, film libraries, and exhibitors that also contributed to the rich experimental and independent film culture of the early 1960s were completely independent from government and philanthropic support. Second, Conner’s references to power and control quickly summon up notions of the ideological state apparatus, a single umbrella under which different government agencies, cultural and educational institutions represent perfectly aligned ideological interests which they set out to reproduce.16 Whether and how inclusion in grant systems like the IFP necessarily neutralise the potentially critical voice of artists in society needs to be examined. Totalising views of the state apparatus during the Cold War have already been challenged by scholarship in other areas of philanthropic arts and cultural policy.17 This scholarship has used an evidence-based historiographical approach that considers the assumptions and specificity of each of the government and foundations’ programmes and recognises the agency of the people involved in them, as well as their inner contradictions, and unintended consequences. Along these lines, the work of Brian Real has looked at the specifics of AFI’s role in preservation, providing a historiographical account and more nuanced assessment of the organisation’s achievements in the realm of film heritage.18 AFI’s involvement with experimental and independent cinema deserves a similar treatment that examines the IFP’s

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Introduction

specifications within the larger context of other arts and film policies and trends in film production. Assessing AFI’s intervention in experimental and independent film production needs to first trace previous involvement of large philanthropic institutions with film and then locate the IFP within other measures of support established at the time, this being the measures by the National Council of the Arts’ Public Media Program, the Rockefeller Foundation, and MoMA, the latter having a long-established relationship with the non-theatrical uses of film in the United States. The present examination will hence engage with debates on the use of avant-garde arts by U.S. institutions to promote liberal ideas during the Cold War and other questions such as political co-optation of minority practices during the 1960s. A grounded analysis of these grants needs to discern not just their conditions and relationship to other measures of support but also the degree to which freedom of expression and creative control was granted during production of the films and if they could be used to promote a liberal image of the funding institutions. While recent scholarship of experimental cinema has shifted attention from authorial and textual analysis of films to questions of funding, infrastructures and sustainability of these practices during the period, no one has examined the role of AFI’s experimental and independent film production. Most of the existing attention has gone to examine the effects of academic affiliations. Michael Zryd has evaluated the importance of universities and colleges in nurturing experimental film by the end of the 1960s and through the 1970s, analysing the common ethos of liberal education and avant-garde practices of the time.19 Zryd has demonstrated how the affiliation of filmmakers and academia had a threefold effect: it first allowed a viable work career and public recognition for experimental filmmakers as teachers, second, it permitted a nationwide decentralisation and sustainability of a variety of practices related to experimental cinema, and third, such decentralisation took experimental filmmaking beyond elite film schools, permeating into secondary schools and other forms of formal education. Zryd has pushed the discussion on the academic institutionalisation of experimental cinema culture by looking at some of the negotiations and contradictions resulting from its convergence with the discipline of film studies.20 He identifies the emergence of a distinctive object of study associated with youth culture and minority identities which challenged the consensus of the previous generation and aimed to achieve a more personal and collective engagement with film production. Zryd sees in this a confluence between the modernist discourse on film’s medium specificity and ontological and pedagogical questions that concerned film scholarship and liberal education.21 In the context of production grants, it is pertinent to examine AFI’s definition of the filmmaker as an artist and the notion of creative

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freedom instituted through the IFP, paying attention to the tension between enabling and controlling experimental and independent film practices. Since AFI’s inception, its relationship with Hollywood has often been a source of criticism. Janna Jones notes this in her argument about the priorities of the AFI regarding film preservation.22 Peter Decherney has also argued that the AFI embodied a special relationship between state and commercial film industry whose main concern was nurturing talent for a transitional Hollywood through CAFS’ graduate film school.23 While this claim echoes the concerns that were raised from the early days of the AFI, it is necessary to substantiate it with evidence and appraise AFI’s work more fully within the paradigmatic changes experienced by the theatrical film industry in this period. Hollywood was then moving towards independent modes of production and saw a shift in the role of studios. It was also grappling with the emergence of commercial television and changes in lifestyle and media consumption patterns. Thomas Elsaesser noted that in the new economy that characterises Hollywood from the 1970s onwards, auteur cinema has become a fundamental piece in a complex puzzle.24 Auteur cinema is a mode of production and reception that focuses on the figure of the director as a source of creativity and valorises personal expression, often seen as a struggle within restrictive forces. For Elsaesser, the success of auteur cinema results from significant crossovers, exchanges, and interactions that erased established boundaries between studios and independents, mainstream, and avant-garde film practices, Europe and America, and different generations in the 1960s. David James also identified a significant crossover between artistic notions of personal expression and commercial imperatives when he introduced the heterogeneous category “the American art film” in his seminal book on American experimental and independent cinema in the 1960s.25 For James, these films’ duration and gauge made them suitable for the standard format of commercial exhibition and, remarkably, they engaged with political, social, and sexual concerns in more open ways than it was customary in Hollywood at that time. James counted amongst these New American Cinema features such as Pull my Daisy, Shadows, The Flower Thief, and The Connection. James also noted canonical New Hollywood films like Easy Rider, Medium Cool, and The Last Movie, and many of Roger Corman’s productions for American International Pictures (AIP). Notably, he included works such as Stanton Kaye’s Georg (1964) and Brandy in the Wilderness (1969), Robert Kramer’s Ice (1969), and Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary (1967). Interestingly, this latter group of people were associated with the AFI at some point during this period and occasionally received funding from it, sometimes through the IFP, other times through CAFS. The oddity yet specificity of the American art film category over this period raises questions about AFI’s involvement with these crossover dynamics through its approach to experimentation, personal

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Introduction

expression, and independent production in American films. In this way, we can reach a better understanding of the specificity of AFI’s different ventures, the IFP and CAFS, and its impact on the crossovers of aesthetics and ideas, practices, and production modes those years. In trying to remedy the many lacks in understanding the complex history of the AFI and elaborate on the key points of discussion mentioned above, this book will bring into play different causes, which are not only institutional but also sociodemographic and industrial. In this sense, the resulting explanation is multi-causal, as it considers previous philanthropic engagement with film, the key role of Cold War cultural policy for advancing the AFI, the drive of key figures such as George Stevens Jr., as well as the concomitant changes in American film industry, film culture, and audiences. The main methodological approach is archival research into the records of the institutions involved in devising the AFI and the establishment of the IFP production fund.26 As a result, the narrative of AFI’s formation is shaped mostly by the records available from its overseeing agency, the National Council on the Arts, and other institutions like Rockefeller Foundation and MoMA, which maintained a relationship with the AFI while having their own film policies. The present narrative accounts for the emergence of the AFI and the first decade of the IFP by identifying four chronological segments which inform the book chapters. The first chapter works as a preamble that explains an earlier attempt at establishing an American film institute with support from the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1930s. This accounts for the philanthropy’s position in relation to theatrical and non-theatrical cinema and its subsequent role in supporting film culture through MoMA’s Film Library. The chapter also delves on the growth of experimental and independent film practices in the 1940s and 1950s and their institutional affiliations with reference to both the contexts of theatrical and non-theatrical film, thus exploring the infrastructural dependencies of experimental and independent film culture before the appearance of the AFI. This chapter also explains the expectations around an American film institute in the early 1960s while accounting for major advances in philanthropic arts programmes and cultural diplomacy throughout the previous decades that were closely intertwined with American liberal politics and the Cold War. The second chapter, comprising the period between 1963 and 1965, delves into substantial debates about the establishment of an American film institute and the needs of experimental and independent cinema. Chapter 2 explains the rationale behind federal government and large philanthropic support for the arts and presents instances of interim support for recognised experimental and independent cinema figures, like the 1964 Ford Foundation grants, and 1966 Rockefeller Foundation grants. These cases provide insight into

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how sponsors saw the cultural value and impact of supporting individual film artists. The third period, between 1965 and 1967, focuses on the planning and early days of the AFI. Accordingly, chapter 3 deals with the place of film within federal arts and humanities policies and analyses the commissioning and information contained in the Stanford Research Institute Report that validated the creation of the AFI in 1967. This analysis brings to the fore the report’s vision of the filmmaker as an artist, considerations around the future of theatrical and non-theatrical filmmaking, and the problems with the institute’s financial organisation. It also examines the conditions of the IFP scheme and how it was first received by the experimental and independent film community. It contains examples of the grants’ outcomes with instances of emergent and established filmmakers, referring to their distribution plans and locating the grant opportunity within the rest of their careers. Chapter 4 covers the period between 1969 and 1974, starting when the AFI opened its film school and criticism of its management first emerged, until 1974 when the institution sought to become an independent agency and separate itself from the overseeing National Council on the Arts (NCA). I consider the activities and projects of the AFI’s CAFS, its training programme and links to Hollywood through these years, alongside the problems that rose from the conditions of distribution of the IFP films and the exclusivity of the AFI in supporting film. The book concludes with a summary and reflection on the role of the AFI in the institutionalisation of American experimental and independent cinema. It addresses the questions set out regarding dependence, creative control, and political co-optation. It also provides a short overview of some developments in American experimental and independent cinema that followed from 1974. It notes the endurance of the IFP until the funding cuts of the Reagan era, alongside the wider recognition of American experimental cinema in the film and art world and developments in other moving image practices such as video art. It points to the role of independent production in Hollywood filmmaking after the 1960s and considers the categorisation of American film directors emerging from CAFS such as David Lynch and Terrence Malick during this period as American film auteurs. The book finishes making a note on the questions still to be answered about the AFI and suggestions for further research.

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NOTES 1. The American Film Institute, Independent Filmmaker Program Annual Report, May 1977, p. 3, Jan Haag Materials at the Library of The Woman’s Collection at Texas Woman’s University, Denton, Texas (hereafter, IFP Report 1977). 2. Angus Finney, “Support Mechanism across Europe,” in The European Cinema Reader, ed. Catherine Fowler (London: Routledge, 2002), 212–222. 3. Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson, ed., “Introduction: Utility and Cinema,” Useful Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 1. 4. Noel Carroll, Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 5. Manny Farber “‘Underground Films’ A Bit of Male Truth,” Commentary, November 1957. 6. Stan Vanderbeek, “The Cinema Delimina: Films from the Underground,” Film Quarterly 14, no. 4, (1961), 5–15. 7. Thomas Schatz, “The New Hollywood,” in Film Theory Goes to the Movies, ed. J. Collins, H. Radner, A. Preacher Collins, 8–36 (London: Routledge, 1993). 8. Paul Arthur, “Routines of Emancipation: Alternative Cinema in the Ideology and Politics of the Sixties,” in To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground, 17–48, ed. David James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 9. David E. James, introduction to, To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground, 3–16, ed. David James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 10. Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999). 11. See the collection of essays collected in Pollock and After. The Critical Debate, ed. by Francis Frascina, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2000). 12. Andrew Sarris, “Avant-Garde Films Are More Boring than Ever,” in Politics and Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 197. 13. Fred Camper, “The End of Avant-Garde Film,” Millennium Film Journal no. 16/17/18 (Fall/Winter 1986–1987), 99–124. 14. Donna Binkiewicz, Federalizing the Muse. United States Arts Policy and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1965–1980 (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2004). 15. Bruce Conner, “How I Invented Electricity,” in Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945–2000, ed. Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz, and Steve Seid (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 92–93. 16. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus,” in Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1984), 1–60. 17. William J. Buxton, “Civil Society and its Discontents,” in Patronizing the Public: American Philanthropy’s Transformation of Culture, Communication, and the Humanities, ed. William J. Buxton (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2009), 1–21. 18. Brian Real, “The Hidden History of the American Film Institute: The Cold War, Arts Policy, and American Film Preservation,” The Moving Image 18, no. 1 (2018): 25–47.

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19. Michael Zryd, “The Academy and the Avant-Garde: A Relationship of Dependence and Resistance,” Cinema Journal 45, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 17–45. Zryd departed from some of the analysis of Todd Bayma in “Art World Culture and Institutional Choice: The Case of Experimental Film,” The Sociological Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1995): 79–95. 20. Michael Zryd, “Experimental Film and the Development of Film Study in America,” in Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 182–216. 21. Michael Zryd, “Experimental Cinema as Useless Cinema,” in Charles R. Acland and Haidee Wasson, ed., Useful Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011): 315–336. 22. Janna Jones, The Past Is a Moving Picture: Preserving the Twentieth Century on Film (Gainsville: University of Florida Press, 2012). 23. Peter Decherney, Hollywood and the Cultural Elite: How the Movies Became American (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005). 24. Thomas Elsaesser, “Auteur Cinema and the New Economy Hollywood,” in The Persistence of Hollywood, 237–255 (London: Routledge, 2012). 25. David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 26. The records kept by the AFI about itself were not available for this project. Telephone Interview, Caroline Sisneros, AFI Librarian, June 5, 2008.

Chapter 1

Before the American Film Institute

SETTING PRECEDENT In summer 1961 the magazine Film Quarterly sketched a proposal for an American film institute where experimental and independent cinema had a prominent place.1 Colin Young, the author, argued that the link between these practices and a national film institution was film education, which implied both the development of knowledge of film, its history, theory, and criticism, and the use of film as means of formal and informal education. Significantly, there had been two other proposals for an American film institute in the 1930s which also considered the educational aspects of films in a wide sense. Examining these earlier proposals helps in understanding the involvement of philanthropic and U.S. government enterprises with not-for-profit film culture, and how this very involvement enabled the flourishing of experimental and independent cinema in the 1940s and 1950s, their shared ecologies of practice and discourse, as well as their differences. By establishing this early precedent, the potential and limitations of an American film institute in the 1960s become clear. It is worth noting that the earliest proposal for an American film institute was written by one of the New York Film and Photo League members, the critic Harry Alan Potamkin, in October 1932.2 The New York Film and Photo League was a left-wing group which used film exhibition and its own filmmaking to raise awareness of social justice and working-class issues in the interwar period. In this vein, Potamkin proposed creating a film school and a library-archive independent from the film industry and counted Iris Barry, one of the London Film Society founders by then living in New York, as its librarian. It is not known if this project was presented to any institution, but it entailed a philosophy of national creativity where knowledge of film, cultural heritage, and training in filmmaking came together.3 In the 1930s, debates 17

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on the educational advantages of film technology had appeared in several contexts, evidencing the growing importance of non-theatrical film in public life.4 Non-theatrical film exhibition had become more systematic with outlets such as the first New York Film Forum showing political films and the New York Film Society, which mostly concentrated on foreign films.5 With the increase of non-theatrical exhibition spaces through film societies, schools, colleges, and other civic associations, the demand for films for not-for-profit purposes also augmented.6 The use of Hollywood films in these venues was something that theatrical film companies were reluctant to concede because they considered it unfair competition which devalued their products, but there were also more general concerns about the inadequacy of these films for educational purposes. In this context, institutions across different countries joined together to address the uses of non-theatrical films, gathering a mix of educational, political, and economic interests in the 1934 International Educational Cinematograph Institute conference.7 At the conference, one of the U.S. representatives, George F. Zook, commissioner on education for F. D. Roosevelt and president of the American Council on Education (ACE), started to consider the advantages of establishing an American film institute. After the event, Zook travelled to London and visited the recently established British Film Institute. On his return to the United States, he formed the ACE Motion Picture Committee and sketched a plan for the institute which they presented to the Payne Fund, then involved in research on the effects of mass communication technologies, but the Fund rejected the proposal.8 Zook then took it to the Rockefeller Foundation (RF), one of the philanthropic arms of the Rockefeller family. The RF was then elaborating its Communications Program, which attended to radio and film and intended to convince commercial broadcasters of the economic potential of educational and artistic content.9 The RF’s trustees met in April 1935 to discuss the place of a film institute within the Communications Program. The discussion presupposed an ample definition of film as both a commodity and tool for education and propaganda.10 They identified the need for two interrelated areas of action: (1) to influence public appreciation of films, by promoting specific models of production and reception, and (2) to improve the material resources involving educational uses of film by promoting investment in film technology and the systematisation of non-theatrical film assets. Zook had informed the RF of the type of structure and functions adopted by the British Film Institute, which had an advisory council representing industry, educational organisations, and opinion leaders. In their discussion of the institute project, the RF officers referred positively to the National Board of Review and its offshoot, the Better Films

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Council.11 These institutions had brought respectability to the theatrical film industry by appeasing pressure groups and helped with keeping competition at bay by favouring films of member film companies. The officers also mentioned influential discussion groups, such as the London Film Society, which was formed in 1925, drawing together a variety of British artistic and cultural figures to show esteemed and unusual films, some of them censored in theatrical circuits like the Soviets. The RF officers thought that by replicating the society’s approach to film discussion, they could reach specific audiences like university students and opinion-makers. Such an organisation could establish standards for future film production and reception, as the board observed that many of the present leaders of the British film industry and film culture, people like John Grierson, Thorold Dickinson, Len Lye, and Basil Wright, had been part of the London Film Society. They mentioned that, despite film societies already existing in the United States, these were isolated initiatives, “not real examples of what is possible through a national organisation.”12 The idea of systematising discussion groups fitted in the plan to promote specialised non-theatrical exhibition through MoMA’s Library, a plan that MoMA’s librarian John Abbott and his then wife Iris Barry had already presented to the board. Barry and Abbott proposed that “the methods used by the [London Film] Society for securing foreign films would be adopted, and through assured co-operation from representatives of the industry in the United States, the Museum would be able to obtain a sufficient supply of films of American manufacture.”13 Thus, a selection of both American and foreign films would reach many museums and colleges. The establishment of such an organisation as the main representative of the United States in the field of non-theatrical film could also present the United States as an actor in the context of newly formed film institutions and archives. The RF officers felt that implementation of the film policy was complex, given the novelty of the field and the different interest groups they had to deal with. The establishment of a central agency for educational film resources followed the lines of the RF General Education Board, one of the philanthropy’s ventures dedicated to the promotion of science and technology at schools. The plan for the film society required a direct collaboration with the film companies and foreign diplomats, more in line with the objectives and international orientation of the RF’s Humanities Division, which was MoMA’s main supporter. Zook’s plan for an American film institute did not materialise as such. While the ACE Motion Pictures Committee was waiting to hear from the RF Board, they presented another document entitled “Proposed Studies Relating to the Use of Motion Pictures in Education,” on June 3, 1935, from which four interim projects were approved. The following October, Zook submitted again “A Proposal for the Establishment of an American Film Institute,” but

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in the minutes of the next board of trustees meeting in December 1935 plans for an institute are not mentioned. Instead, the Board stated that the use of the motion picture as a medium of improving public appreciation must develop, as in the case of radio, through cooperative relations with the industry. Production of films or of broadcasting programs is beyond the reach of philanthropic and educational organizations, but with the aid of the industry both radio and motion picture are open to non-profit use for cultural purposes.14

This evidences that the RF would not enter educational film production or promote the use of film in education in any way which was not subordinated to the interests of the theatrical film industry.15 This explains why the plans for the institute as such were not completely enacted. Instead, some research projects and educational activities developed through the interim projects, and others were assumed by MoMA’s Library. The museum’s board then included industry-minded members such as the Rockefeller Brothers and John Hay Whitney, who had investments in film production and film manufacturing companies and meant that they could provide contacts and oversee the activities of MoMA’s newly established Film Library. By December 1935 the organisation of the Film Library was well underway.16 Haidee Wasson provides a full account of the Film Library’s beginnings and notes that Iris Barry effectively struggled with Hollywood studio executives to persuade them of the value of a non-profit film culture.17 According to Wasson, Barry’s strategy was to appeal to cultural history and nostalgia, and refer to film as a legitimate form of artistic expression and a vehicle for mass education, echoing the discourse already spread through film societies. Additionally, in Barry’s pitch to MoMA, film appeared as a modern art in which Americans excelled, underscoring the possibility to compensate for their sense of inferiority in comparison with European arts and culture. Barry set the guidelines for film appreciation through programme notes which presented film history as advances in technical innovation. In MoMA’s conception of films as educational vehicles, they should be preserved and studied for the cultural enrichening of society, while its conception of film as an art form dwelled on style and themes in a similar manner to literary criticism. Apart from notable exceptions of technical innovators, like David Griffith and Edwin S. Porter, in Barry’s view American films were products of the institutional context of studios. MoMA’s film programme opened with a screening of French avant-garde painter and filmmaker Fernand Leger’s films introduced by him, which valorised the European artists’ engagement with film, but did not pay attention to their American counterparts. Eventually, MoMA’s Film Library, with its combination of preservation, screenings, and touring films became one of the most important resources for film scholarship

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in the United States and its conception of film as an art form became the dominant discourse in the not-for-profit uses of theatrical films in museums, colleges, and film societies. These institutions were supported by other RF’s projects of the 1930s Communications Program and grew considerably in the following years. Some of the RF projects spilling from Zook’s film institute proposal seeded the ground for expanding educational uses of film and widening film culture. A project excerpted entertainment films to illustrate personal and social relationships to school children.18 The first experimental film production unit was founded at the University of Minnesota, a pioneering attempt to link education, research, and film production in higher education institutions. The RF also supported various key publications by ACE’s Edgar Dale which promoted the use of film as an educational resource. Some of these projects sought to understand the psychological effects of films, linking to the wider RF research projects on persuasion, influence, and media effects.19 Importantly too, the RF pushed for the integration of the non-theatrical film distribution network. The ACE lead a survey of audio-visual resources at schools in 1936 and identified the problems they faced purchasing film materials such as projectors and films.20 After the publication of this survey film, manufacturers and school representatives gathered to agree to a price decrease for projection equipment. As a result, many schools acquired 16mm film projectors, expanding and upgrading the number of non-theatrical exhibition sites in the late part of the 1930s. The RF also supported the creation of the Association of School Film Libraries, with the mission to “inform schools about what films were available and would also evaluate them,” thus working as a hub for nontheatrical educational distributors.21 The association, therefore, covered some of the tasks initially devised for the ACE’s American film institute by setting standards and helping to disseminate educational films. While the association failed to become economically independent, the project illustrates the significant expansion and integration of non-theatrical film resources during this time. This growth not only enlarged the market for film manufacturers, but also facilitated propaganda film exhibition when the war called for the mobilisation of civilian resources, then to be coordinated through the federal government’s Office of War Information. Similarly, MoMA’s Film Library switched quickly to help the war effort by analysing confiscated films from Nazi Germany to gather intelligence about the enemy.22 It is worth mentioning that MoMA’s Film Library had already been involved in diplomacy, propaganda, and intelligence-related services before the start of World War II. Under the grace of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbour policies, Nelson Rockefeller led the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) which treated Latin America as a special area of financial and cultural relationships at a time of fascist growth

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and discovery of oil in the region. From his position, the oil magnate and politician promoted the exchange of artworks from MoMA, of which he had become president in 1936. He established the OCIAA Motion Picture Division, under the management of John Hay Whitney, then president of the Film Library. Using the Library as operative base, the OCIAA facilitated the exchange of films with Latin America and produced films on various subjects. Rockefeller and Whitney simultaneously created the Motion Picture Society for the Americas in 1940 as a liaison between studio executives, agents, and industry guilds.23 Under the Office’s and the latter’s supervision, Latin American film industries developed quickly through the 1940s, being the Mexican industry a remarkable case. While the Motion Picture Society for the Americas was behind the production of exploitative vehicles such as Carmen Miranda’s films, the actual OCIAA film production focused on newsreels, documentaries and educational films. These were done in collaboration with major film companies and producers such as The March of Time, thus maintaining staff and productions levels that may have been otherwise curtailed by Europe’s closure. While it would be beyond the scope of this book to examine the manifold implications of the OCIAA’s involvement in film, it is worth noting that the OCIAA offered the model for postwar foreign diplomacy, mixing trade links with cultural relations, exchanges, and propaganda. During the postwar years MoMA will play a key role in the promotion of American modern art in diplomatic missions. Nevertheless, it would take more time until MoMA fully engaged with American experimental and independent film culture. AN EVER-GROWING EXPERIMENTAL FILM CULTURE As noted by filmmaker and critic Lewis Jacobs in 1948, American experimental film culture developed significantly through the screenings and distribution of European avant-garde films, documentaries, old European and American movies by MoMA’s Film Library and San Francisco’s Art in Cinema in the 1940s.24 But this was far from the recognition and support that some American experimental filmmakers wanted. Tirelessly advocating for more supportive film infrastructures in the United States, Maya Deren toured with her films and arranged special screenings and lectures. She received a grant from the John Simon Memorial Foundation to undertake an ethnographic film project in Haiti in 1947 from which Divine Horsemen (1947– 1951) resulted. Renowned animators, the Whitney Brothers, also received a grant from the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation that year and another from the John Simon Memorial Foundation the following one. This type of support

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meant a tentative recognition of film as an area of artistic and intellectual practice, but these were isolated cases more than enduring programmes. Deren’s drive inspired Austrian émigré Amos Vogel to establish Cinema 16 in 1947, first as a specialised commercial exhibitor, but financial and censorship problems led to its incorporation as a film society.25 The not-for-profit model of the film society could not stretch much in its range of films and produced limited economic return. Deren also insisted on calling at the doors of MoMA’s Film Library, but this was for more interest in showing animations—like those of Mary Ellen Bute and Jim Davis or pre-war European artists like Hans Richter—a position that did not change until the mid-1960s. In order to facilitate distribution, Deren propelled the formation of the Independent Filmmakers Association in New York in 1947.26 The sustenance of these institutions was rather precarious and depended on traditional private patronage, receiving funds from the poet James Merrill, son of one of the owners of the investment company Merrill Lynch. The Independent Filmmakers Association kept in contact with the Film Council of America, which evolved from the Office of War Information’s distribution of 16 mm films. During the 1940s and 1950s, the number of film libraries significantly expanded as a result of the G.I. Bill, which allowed colleges to purchase film projection equipment and introduced new study subjects such as film appreciation, thus driving up film rentals.27 The Film Council of America acted as a clearing house for educational film and had staff in common with the Educational Film Library Association (EFLA) like the influential film critic Cecile Starr, who had a sustained interest in animation.28 Charles Acland has examined the Film Council of America’s programme “Experimental Adult Education,” funded by the Ford Foundation, and identifies the ideas of “screen mediated democracy” that drove it and permeated later media literacy programmes, thus signalling a distinctive line of development in American film education seeded by the RF programmes of the mid-1930s and followed through by other philanthropies.29 While there were some crossovers between institutions like the Independent Filmmakers Association and the American Film Council through common interests like experimental animation, the tastes of educational film libraries tended to be rather conservative.30 The Independent Filmmakers Association, nevertheless, acted as a reference and meeting point for artists and filmmakers such as photographer Rudy Burckhardt, animator Douglas Crockwell, and documentarians Hilary Harris and Lewis Jacobs. Amongst the association’s key figures was poet Ian Hugo, whose first foray into film, Bells of Atlantis (1952), condensed some of the artistic and intellectual waves propelling American experimental cinema culture at that time. The film soundtrack was a collaboration with pioneering electronic musicians Bebe and Louis Barron. Hugo’s wife, writer Anaïs

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Nin, recited one of her psychoanalysis-inspired texts which evoked primal images of birth under the water. The film’s superimpositions of images and sounds created changing compositions and textures, thus representing the tenuous experience of the unconscious through elusive words and sensual forms. Hugo’s films influenced another of the association’s members, Stan Brakhage, who moved on from making symbolic psychodramas or “trance” films in the 1940s to explore ideas on consciousness and unmediated perception in the following decades.31 Brakhage’s films were instilled with a strong visual lyricism which suggested closed-eye vision and daydreaming. He pared domesticity and nature with transcendental themes such as life and death, as in Anticipation of the Night (1958). Significantly, Brakhage’s aesthetics often resembled the colour explosions and line dynamism of the paintings of Jackson Pollock and other contemporary abstract expressionists. Yet the temporal dimension of Brakhage’s films emphasised the sometimes sudden, sometimes fluid, movement of attention between the figurative and the abstract and between the human and the cosmic scales. Making his films with limited funds and using his immediate surroundings, Brakhage came to epitomise the idea of personal filmmaking and creative control during these years. Like Deren, he toured with his films and showed them at film societies and universities’ film clubs. He was a prolific writer and lecturer too, advocating a view of experimental filmmaking that, in line with Deren’s position, was not integrated with theatrical filmmaking infrastructures.32 In her attempts to better organise the experimental film community, Deren spearheaded the Creative Film Foundation in 1954 and included, at least nominally, relevant New York arts community figures such as Clement Greenberg, art historian Meyer Schapiro, and gestalt psychologist and film theorist Rudolf Arnheim. In collaboration with Cinema 16, the foundation awarded fellowships to filmmakers such as Brakhage, and animators Stan Vanderbeek, Robert Breer, and Carmen D’Avino, who were often referred to as “personal,” “creative,” or “poetic” but were notably heterogeneous. Following Deren’s lead, in 1957 Brakhage founded the Experimental Film Group at the University of Colorado along with artist Bruce Conner, who also became a prominent figure in experimental film during this time. Conner was working in a variety of media by the mid-1950s, having gained recognition for his meticulously assembled sculptures of found objects, as well as for his drawings, installations, and performances. In line with the concerns driving the nascent pop art, Conner dealt with the visual and narrative saturation of capitalist societies, invoking the compulsive rituals of consumption and the fears of atomic annihilation of the Cold War. Conner often noted that the encounter with experimental cinema deserved the type of intimate and repeated viewing experiences enabled by private and small-scale screenings. Indeed, his work engaged with a material sensuality and energy that touches

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upon the more private and changeable aspects of experiencing art.33 The ambivalence of aesthetic experience was apparent in his seminal A Movie (1958), a film made by splicing together 180 shots extracted from B-movies, soft-porn, and newsreels acquired from the sale bin of a film store. The result, a fast-paced twelve-minute film, is dense with inter-edited sequences of chases, races, explosions, and female nudity, accompanied with a soundtrack paired in intensity. The film is rich in striking yet ephemeral associations, both humorous and tragic. Conner’s practice aligned him with art world’s institutions such as museums and galleries, even if he often resisted them, but he crossed over into what was becoming a vibrant experimental film community in San Francisco’s Bay Area. Meanwhile, places like Cinema 16 were offering New York audiences the chance to get acquainted with and discuss a wider variety of films. These film societies screened more than the European avant-garde film cannon available at MoMA and the general offer of theatrical venues. Cinema 16‘s programmes ranged from the experimental animations of Carmen D’Avino to the presentation of anti-Jewish Nazi propaganda to be critically analysed. Cinema 16 also introduced New York audiences to samples of international art cinema like Yazujiro Ozu, Alan Resnais, and Roman Polanski, which were well received by critics and then made their way into independent theatres. Other films shown were classic comedies by Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, or the recent works of Fred Zinnemann and Adolf Hitchcock, who also attended the introduction and discussion of their films. Cinema 16 also ventured into distribution, publishing a Catalogue of Experimental Film which included current American practitioners. Comparing Cinema 16 with MoMA’s Film Library, the former had a wider and more transgressive conception of film culture, an ample and riskier take on film programming due to the independence of its operations, mostly funded by membership fees, and the vision of its organisers. Simultaneously, what is significant of organisations such as the Independent Filmmakers Association, the Creative Film Foundation, and the Experimental Film Group is that they were more focused on American experimental films and created spaces to encourage production, exposure, and recognition, even if they occupied a niche and rather precarious space within the non-theatrical film and arts circuits themselves. Nevertheless, audiences of these different spaces often overlapped, reaching a tipping point in the early 1960s. But before that, American experimental cinema was finding recognition beyond the more specialised circuits of film societies and art venues and within U.S. cultural diplomacy missions.

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FROM THE CULTURAL COLD WAR TO THE ARTS LEGISLATION As result of the growing political antagonism between the United States and Russia after 1948, cultural influence and technological development became ways of measuring forces between the two international powers. U.S. authorities were concerned that America’s cultural impact was limited to Hollywood movies, jeans, and chewing gum.34 They realised the need to tap into European liberal intellectuals to align them to U.S. liberalism. Cultural diplomacy offered a solution for this. Over the coming years, the federal government embarked on general cultural diplomacy missions such as the Fulbright educational exchange programme, the cultural programmes of the Marshall Plan and the United States Information Agency (USIA), the latter being an important case for its use of film which I address in the next chapter. At the same time, there were other initiatives carried out covertly or under the guise of independent organisations which circumvented public scrutiny or the mere inexistence of a nationwide culture department. One reason for this disguising is that some attempts at influencing opinion could be more effective if not revealing the ultimate source. In addition to this, previous instances of federal sponsorship of modern arts and culture had already proved divisive. In 1946 the State Department purchased a series of modernist paintings directly from the artists and aimed to send them on the touring exhibition Advancing American Art.35 Conservative opinion leaders denigrated modernist aesthetics as weird and thought that they presented a disfigured image of the United States. Some congressmen, often republicans, also saw that this expenditure implied going beyond the duties of the federal government as it implied some form of centralisation and went against the idea of the free market. However, there were liberals such as Nelson Rockefeller for whom arts were a way of mediating in businesses and raising the cache of the U.S. cultural prestige. Thereby, to bypass criticism or the lack of governmental departments devoted to arts and culture, most of the ensuing cultural diplomacy operations were launched as independent initiatives, mainly through the operations of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which was staffed by many liberals belonging to the Harvard and Yale graduate elites, mainly industrialists amongst whom there were several art collectors and trustees of the main American museums.36 Taking the lead, MoMA selected abstract expressionist works to represent the United States at the 1948 Venice’s Arts Biennale. The CIA established its International Organisation Division in 1950 and, amongst other things, channelled state and philanthropic funds to university research centres, grant programmes and cultural organisations that promoted cultural activities abroad.37 Such activities comprised opera recitals

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which exhibited the sophisticated status of U.S. culture, and jazz tours to counteract Soviet propaganda on racism in the United States. The CIA also funded the Congress for Cultural Freedom which had offices in thirty-five countries, published more than twenty prestige magazines, amongst them the influential Encounter in London which commented on current politics and included art and literary criticism. Encounter sought to gather debates around a non-communist left, foregrounding ideas of liberty and progress. It published stories of resistance from Russian authors and drew attention to selected literary figures and poets, amongst whom American artists and authors featured prominently. The Congress for Cultural Freedom also organised exhibitions, and conferences, and awarded prizes to musicians and artists. They often discussed ideas of freedom of expression and contested conservative critics of modern art. Simultaneously, Nelson Rockefeller, carried on making MoMA responsible for selecting American art works to represent the United States abroad. This became more systematic when MoMA established its International Program in 1952, funded by a Rockefeller Brothers Fund Grant. MoMA supplied works for exhibitions organised by the Congress for Cultural Freedom during the 1950s that underlined the work of abstract expressionism, which Rockefeller had dubbed “free enterprise painting” in Time magazine regardless of what the artists said about it themselves.38 Key in their presentation, and within the context of Cold War competition, were notions of the autonomy of abstract art and personal freedom proclaimed by critics such as Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. For Greenberg, abstraction freed painting from the burden of figurative representation.39 For Rosenberg the gestural brushworks of abstract expressionists, or action painters, as he called them, suggested liberated forms of personal expression.40 Rosenberg, however, set himself apart from Greenberg’s position when he defended that the exclusion of figurative objects was not a reinstatement of the medium’s purity, but the author’s statement of his rejection of value.41 From both perspectives, however, abstraction stood against Soviet socialist realism not only aesthetically but also ideologically. This discursive framework served the purposes of the U.S. government’s political interests in the cultural Cold War in that it equated the freedom of American avant-garde arts to U.S. liberties and could be used to extol the nation’s cultural achievements. While there was some progress in advancing official arts policy through the 1950s, like the commitment of Eisenhower to establish a national cultural centre in 1958, there was still reluctance to acquire more official responsibilities in the cultural sector, even if that meant lagging behind the Soviets in the number of touring exhibitions and participation in fairs. Furthermore, the McCarthy era attacks on communist sympathisers in the art and film worlds were still fresh so it was better for the government to avoid a direct enmeshment in these matters.

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Nevertheless, this interest in avant-garde art and their representativeness of modern America seeded the ground for the later support for experimental and independent film practices. Parallel to these inroads into cultural diplomacy, the Cold War also manifested in the contention for leadership in modern sciences, which drove the federal government to recognise film as a technology for mass education and consolidated the advances in the educational uses happening since the 1930s, which set the legislative groundwork for the film policies of the 1960s. In the aftermath of the Sputnik launch by the Soviets in 1958, Eisenhower signed into law the National Defense Education Act (NDEA). The NDEA advanced federal funding for schools, integrated science into school curricula across the country, and sought to improve the quality of academic research and publications.42 Audio-visual technologies were given a relevant place in this law. Title III encouraged schools to obtain audio-visual equipment, and Title VII supported “research and experimentation in more effective utilisation of television, radio, motion pictures and related media for educational purposes.”43 The NDEA advanced curricular decisions on these uses that were still debated by educators, suggesting that political and economic interests had significant weight in its formulation.44 The NDEA was extended in the 1960s in the arts and humanities legislation that gave birth to the AFI. By then, culture and education were given priority as concerns on national defence shifted to issues of equality and well-being when the civil rights movement gathered force. Another important step towards the 1960s legislation was a series of studies commissioned by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund shortly after the passing of the NDEA. These studies, later compiled in Prospect for America, proposed consistent and mutually reinforcing policies in the areas of political, education, social, and economic affairs.45 The reports influenced not only the actions of the Rockefeller philanthropies, but also the federal government’s and the Ford Foundation’s in the following years. The report on education, The Pursuit of Excellence, focused on improving academic and social standards, a goal that resonated with the egalitarian aspirations of the civil rights movement.46 Overall, these reports made equality and educational quality interdependent, an idea that the arts and education policies during the Kennedy and Johnson years aimed to enact. Before that, American experimental films presented in the context of cultural diplomatic missions had already started to be used as examples of America’s cultural status and diversity. After the victory of the communists over the French in Indochina, the Suez Crisis, and the desegregation incidents at Little Rock, Arkansas, there were fears of American capitalism losing its appeal to Soviet adversaries in Western Europe. Keeping up with the growing role of arts in diplomacy during the Eisenhower years, the U.S. State Department increased the amount

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of money devoted to participation in international cultural events such as the Brussels World Fair.47 At the Brussels Fair and its parallel activities there was a strong representation of American experimental films. Their creative freedom and diversity could be associated with American values, just like abstract expressionism and jazz in other cultural events. At Brussels, the intersection between design and scientific ingenuity was on display, with the Eames Brothers presenting a film at the IBM pavilion which introduced different methods for computational problem-solving before the advent of the computer. Representing American society was a special selection of films displayed inside the American pavilion, an innovative installation which had twenty-five screens integrated into the walls where the films were projected in loops. Veteran documentary filmmaker and producer Willard Van Dyke, who photographed New Deal films and had been part of Nykino and the OCIAA Motion Picture Division, hired Shirley Clarke and Donn A. Pennebaker, both members of the Independent Filmmakers Association, to photograph and edit many of these films. Clarke had trained as a choreographer but moved into film after studying under Hans Richter. She had achieved recognition for short films experimenting with movement and editing such as A Dance in the Sun (1953) and A Moment in Love (1957). In the Brussels commission, she was solely responsible for three of the loops which used rhythmical editing, abstraction and graphic matches. Her idea was to create patterns that emphasised unity within the diversity of America’s population and landscape. Her Melting Pot was remarkably the only film on display that included images from African Americans and other non-white ethnic groups living in the United States. Parallel to the Brussels Fair, Jacques Ledoux, curator of the Cinémathèque de Belgique, organised an international experimental film festival where half of the submissions were American.48 There was a prize for Francis Thompson’s kaleidoscopic city symphony N.Y., N.Y. (1957), a film commissioned by the not-for-profit International Film Foundation, which was made applying mirrors and prisms to distort images of New York’s built environment. Brakhage’s Anticipation of the Night, also received an award, as well as Kenneth Anger’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954). This latter film drew from various forms of occultism and mythology to represent a ritual orgy attended by fantastic characters. Rich in superimpositions, colour saturation and distortions, the film moved far away from the realistic, story-driven approach of Hollywood films and presented censored topics like drug use and homoeroticism. Critics praised these films by making comparisons with poetry and painting and their appraisals engaged with modernist concerns on the specificity of film as an artistic medium. Animator Jordan Belson also performed the landmark show Vortex as part of a programme on experimental music.49 The Vortex concerts, initially performed at San Francisco’s

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Morrison Planetarium, were a collaboration with electronic musician Henry Jacobs.50 Belson and Jacobs created an immersive audio-visual experience taking advantage of the Planetarium’s dome structure to project images and sound. They freed the image from the frame and manipulated the directionality of sound, synchronising it to stroboscopic, kaleidoscopic and filter effects, thus anticipating the experimentation with projection and performance spaces that Gene Youngblood would later call Expanded Cinema.51 Again in a context of official diplomacy, the next year, the USIA commission of Eames Brothers’ extravaganza Glimpses USA (1959) represented the United States at Moscow’s World Fair.52 This was a multi-screen projection of a twelve-minute film consisting of a montage of close to 2,200 images accompanied with music by Elmer Bernstein. It was housed at an impressive Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome and along with other displays including Edward Steichen’s Family of Man and a model kitchen, an installation which somewhat prompted what has been called the Nixon-Khrushchev “Kitchen Debates” on the fruits of labour in the differing capitalist and communist systems. The use of experimental films in cultural diplomacy contexts was becoming more extensive and their power more acknowledged. After the success of N.Y., N.Y. in Brussels and being awarded the Short Film Palme D’Or in Cannes, Francis Thompson made Atom (1960), commissioned by the Atomic Energy Commission for the “Atoms for Peace” exhibition in Geneva. Atom dramatized the exhaustion of oil resources and presented nuclear power as an alternative energy.53 The film was shot using Cineramaland, a wide vista technology devised for projecting on three separated screens, creating an involving viewing experience. It toured large cities in Latin America in 1960 and later went to Pakistan, where it was exhibited inside a geodesic dome which also contained a display of an atomic reactor. The impact of this kind of immersive installation, alongside the communicative power of compelling visuals was already noticed by reviewers such as Roger Sandall who pointed out that “with this system used for documentary purposes, words will have to be used with far more restraint than hitherto.”54 These events signalled the entrance of experimental filmmaking as representative of American culture abroad, sometimes through official channels like in the Brussels and Moscow’s fairs, sometimes extra-officially, in response to existing local interests on American experimental film as in Ledoux’s organisation of the Experimental Film Festival in 1958. With increasingly original outputs such as these and encouraged by international recognition, by the end of the 1950s experimental filmmakers and critics felt that people’s general perceptions on American cinema needed to change. This drive for change was shared with independent filmmakers, coinciding with the return of discussions about a national film institute in specialised

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educational and independent film circles. However, the situation of independent filmmakers was closely determined by the conditions of Hollywood during the 1950s. THE FILM INDUSTRY AND THE PLACE OF INDEPENDENTS The 1948 Paramount Decision signalled the end of the U.S. Supreme Court long-running anti-trust case against major Hollywood companies. The decision obliged major companies to disinvest themselves of theatre ownership and completely stop block-booking practices, leading to the breakdown of the film industry’s vertical integration. While it could have opened the market for smaller exhibitors to bid for major individual films, smaller and independent exhibitors could not rent these films without rising admission prices.55 In the following years, these exhibitors often banked on young audiences’ taste for B-movies: low budget productions that relied on the lurid formulae of horror, science-fiction, and crime genres, such as William Castle’s and Roger Corman’s movies.56 These films were popular for their exploitation of sexual and violent content within the margins widened by the loosening of censorship. By the 1950s the MPAA’s Production Code Administration (PCA) had relaxed the enforcement of its moral standards for film production for various reasons. It was out of step with the tastes and values of the time, plus, the strength of local censorship boards had weakened. Independent theatres were also turning to cheaply imported films, the so-called art films, which made their way into the United States due to the postwar trade agreements with other countries. These films had different moral standards than the ones produced in the United States, which was also exploited by marketers and attracted audiences. The situation reached a breaking point in 1952 when the New York State Board of Censors accused The Miracle (Roberto Rossellini, 1948) of blasphemy.57 The defence claimed film was a medium of artistic expression and therefore protected under the First Amendment. From then onwards, only obscenity was considered reportable. This judicial decision had economic implications for the film trade, especially for exhibitors who solely bore the burden of censors and boycotts, but it also affected the morals represented in U.S. productions. Some Hollywood filmmakers working with a considerable degree of autonomy within the system intentionally challenged the authority of the PCA. Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1955) told the story of an unredeemable heroin addict to a blustering jazz soundtrack. With backing from producers and distributors United Artists, the film was successfully released without the PCA approval. The case demonstrated once again that there was an interest

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in seeing life represented with more realism than the PCA standards allowed for. Certainly, some of the European films seen in the United States and dealing with the atrocious aftermath of the war and the existential crisis haunting the Western psyche, seemed to be doing so with more flair and nuance than Hollywood. By the early 1960s, the obsolescence of the code for both foreign and domestically produced films was evident. Nevertheless, the relaxation of censorship boards did not affect all American films in the same way. Some small American independent films, those without the influential trademark of Hollywood directors, producers, and stars, encountered problems with local censorship boards as the case of Shirley Clarke later demonstrates. Importantly too, independent filmmakers faced difficulties in distributing their work in theatrical venues. Notorious cases amongst these were Morris Engel, Lionel Rogosin, and John Cassavetes. Engel, a member of the New York Film and Photo League in the 1930s, had built a portable 35 mm film camera with which he shot Little Fugitive (1953) in the streets of New York. This film attended to the everyday details of a boy’s life with charming naturalism in a way that echoed Italian neorealism. This and Engel’s subsequent films, Lovers and Lollipops (1955) and Weddings and Babies (1958), earned positive reviews and prizes at festivals. Despite the critical acclaim, Engel struggled to secure a base for his productions given the limited options for distributing his films more widely. Lionel Rogosin found similar difficulties. After making a documentary for the United Nations on the plight of Hungarian refugees, he made On the Bowery (1956), which followed a series of real-life characters down on their luck in one of New York’s most deprived areas. It was made with $60,000 of Rogosin’s own money, and mixed documentary observation with scripted parts. Its realistic portrayal of flawed characters encountering an ambiguous ending garnered many prizes at international festivals and was nominated for an Academy Award, but still found difficulties being distributed in the United States. Engel’s and Rogosin’s difficulties resonated with other independents. Enthused by Engel’s self-made lightweight equipment and the collaborative approach of the 1930s documentary groups like the New York Film and Photo League and Nykino, Donn Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles, Fred Wiseman, and Shirley Clarke formed Filmmakers Inc. in 1958. The aim of this organisation was to provide offices, equipment, and post-production facilities for independent film projects. It was in these facilities that Cassavetes finished the landmark film Shadows.58 Shadows’ production and distribution became a notorious example of American independent films’ difficulties in reaching theatrical exhibition at the turn of the decade. Cassavetes was a Hollywood actor and wanted to experiment with different approaches to performance. He set up an acting workshop in New York from which Shadows resulted, with Cassavetes as director and some of the workshop participants as performers.59 The project

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departed from a tense dramatic scene where a white man discovers that the young woman he has been courting is black when he meets her two darkerskin brothers. Shot in 16 mm film stock, its rough, documentary style had many exterior shots of New York, capturing the buzz, lights and rhythms of the city, all accompanied by a jazz score written by Charlie Mingus. The resulting film abounded in exercises in performance and improvisation captured through long takes which gel together as a loose portrayal of the lives of the three siblings.60 The first version of Shadows (1958) was screened privately to friends. Its seeming spontaneity and freestyle approach to scripting, staging, and acting fascinated critic Jonas Mekas and in January 1959 it became the recipient of Film Culture’s first Independent Film Award. Founded in New York in 1955, Film Culture had an eclectic editorial board including European exiles like Jonas and Adolfas Mekas, Edouard de Laurot, Louis Brigante, and George Fenin. Soon, others like Arlenee Croce, Andrew Sarris, and Eugene Archer joined in. By the early 1960s, Film Culture had forged a distinctive readership around international cinema and art, publishing a mixture of interviews, historical articles, manifestos, film analysis, artists’ writings, poetry, photographic essays, and letters, thus circumscribing a wide area of interest and practice which was then called “personal filmmaking.” Moving away from his initial dismissiveness, by the end of the 1950s, Mekas had become an ardent defender of American experimental and independent films as he hoped for a reform of theatrical film practice through an “anarchic outbreak” where their freedom and transgressions would have a relevant place.61 In this context, Cassavetes’ Shadows became an excellent representative of the aspirations and struggles of American independent cinema. After the recognition of the Independent Film Award, Cassavetes wanted to develop his experiment into a more polished piece. He made several public appeals for funds, convinced private investors to get involved and got into personal debt, raising the budget to $40,000. He re-edited and shot additional footage for what became the second version of Shadows (1959) which followed a more elaborate script with a tighter focus on the female character, and resulting into a timely exploration of feelings, prejudice, and freedom of young Americans. The second version of Shadows was blown up to 35 mm and shown at Cinema 16 in November 1959, along with Pull My Daisy (Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, 1959), another film engaging with the period’s beat sensibility. Robert Frank had just published The Americans (1958), a series of uncompromising photographs of American society, when he joined painter Alfred Leslie to make Pull My Daisy for $12,000. Mockingly narrated by the voice-over of poet Jack Kerouac, it followed the encounters between an array of personalities at a New York apartment. Despite the initial successful screenings in New York, nationwide distribution proved challenging. Consequently, Emile de Antonio set up an ad-hoc company to distribute both films together.62 Pull

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My Daisy received Film Culture’s second Independent Film Award in 1960, with which Mekas wanted to praise feature works emerging from beyond Hollywood and ripe for commercial success. The debate on the commercial possibilities of these independently produced films was gaining traction. As an actor, Cassavetes was familiar with the ins and outs of Hollywood productions and addressed its lack of innovation in a Film Culture 1959 article shortly after receiving the prize for the first Shadows. He argued that Hollywood’s current failings were due to its lack of consideration for individual artistic expression.63 This was something that, if allowed for, could push for new forms of thought and aesthetics into the art of filmmaking. Despite some exceptions, like the terse explorations of fame in The Goddess (John Cromwell, 1958), and moral ambiguity in Twelve Angry Men (Sidney Lumet, 1957), for Cassavetes, innovation was curtailed by risk-averse departmental heads. He decried the difficulties that frontrunners such as Orson Welles faced in Hollywood, and the pigeon-holing of experimentation on the genre of “experimental film.” He praised independently produced dramatic features such as The Sand Castle (Jerome Hill, 1961), Sunday Junction, an unfinished film by Edouard de Laurot, and Engel’s Weddings and Babies. Making comparisons with Free Cinema in Britain and the Nouvelle Vague in France, Cassavetes hoped for the advent of what could be considered a new wave of cinema in the United States. Similar arguments on conservative production mindsets leading to stagnation had been previously drawn by the French critics writing in Cahiers de Cinema. These ideas were fundamental to coin the idea of the auteur in film criticism, a way of understanding creativity in film based on the director’s control. Significantly too, the French critics used their writings to demand that the French state support riskier approaches to cinema instead of only safe and formulaic, commercially-driven productions.64 In 1953 the French state created a fund oriented towards young and emerging filmmakers and audiences.65 This fund nurtured the success of the French Nouvelle Vague, where some Cahiers’ critics such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard became prominent filmmakers. But when the ideas of the French critics passed on to American film criticism, a different industrial framework and labour hierarchies prevailed. Nevertheless, the focus on the director’s vision was to become part of the critical discourse in Film Culture. It appeared in Mekas’ late 1950s take on experimental and independent cinema, as these were territories where the director’s creative control and autonomy from studio producers seemed germane. Notably, Andrew Sarris moved away from Mekas’ emphasis on purity of expression, claiming this “is a myth of the textbooks.”66 Sarris instead applied the French’s ideas on the director’s vision to discuss the individual agency of filmmakers working within the constraints

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of Hollywood. Sarris evaluated some Hollywood’s directors in light of the themes and style that could be identified in their oeuvre and established his own pantheon of Hollywood directors worth paying attention to. In Sarris’ influential, even if flawed, articulation of the auteur theory, a key evaluative component of a director’s work was the capacity to advance their vision against the constraints of material conditions of Hollywood’s industry. Film Culture’s increased championing of experimental and independent cinema, and the re-evaluation of some of Hollywood’s films from an auteuristic perspective presented a strong argument for considering the filmmaker as an artist in control of creative expression, and film as an art form worth of study. Similar arguments were also voiced in another specialised journal, Film Quarterly, which soon became an important platform for articulating ideas on the academic study of film, and crucially too, for discussions on the establishment of an American film institute. Like Film Culture, Film Quarterly advanced a theoretical view of film where European and American elements mixed. The magazine was established in 1958 in association with the University of California, Los Angeles’ (UCLA) film department. Initially, the publication did not have a defined editorial line but aimed to be an arena to debate several social and theoretical issues.67 Editor Colin Young, who taught film at UCLA, hailed the forms of personal expression found in European art cinema while he valued the skilful storytelling of American films.68 Film Quarterly gradually engaged with American experimental and independent films as they became more prominent by the early 1960s. In its pages, Ernest Callenbach evaluated the encounter with reality prompted by the documentary style known as Direct Cinema, which presented another departure from the tenets of traditional documentary, as Cinema Verité and Free Cinema were doing in France and the United Kingdom in their own ways.69 Direct Cinema style began to take shape when Richard Leacock and Donn Pennebaker, two members of Filmmakers Inc., started to assist Robert Drew in Time-Life commissioned documentaries. Drew aimed to reproduce in film the intimate style of some of Life magazine’s photographic reporting. He encouraged the use of lightweight equipment and tried to efface the presence of the filmmakers. This approach became popular with the success of Primary (1960), which followed the primary runs of democrat candidates Kennedy and Humphrey, with the documentary more focused on Kennedy. Hand-held cameras looked for relevant events and captured ordinary and extraordinary moments, thus conveying the idea of an immediate, access all areas portrait. Shortly after, Drew Associates became a production unit for ABC network television, having marketed their documentaries as revealing reality through close observation in order to distinguish themselves from the stilted and static approaches of their television predecessors.70 Concurring with the liberal shift of the early

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1960s, Drew Associates gained a reputation for dealing with current affairs from a liberal stance, as in, for example, Yanki No! (1960), a film that went into Latin Americans’ homes to represent their opposition to Good Neighbor policies. Film Quarterly’s discussions on Direct Cinema raised questions on point of view, transparency, and authorial presence, noting this form of filmmaking as worthy of serious analysis by academics and critics. Despite this critical attention, the production of these documentaries was expensive compared to other television programmes and their reach was limited by the Time-Life/ABC affiliation, which restricted their wider distribution to other television networks and theatrical screens. In summary, American independent productions found themselves facing several limitations, from lack of producers’ support which saw them as risky investments, to being almost impossible to distribute beyond non-theatrical outlets into more profitable theatres due to lack of infrastructure and venturing buyers. Even if independent theatres showed international art films, they were reluctant to buy what could be considered their American counterparts. Nevertheless, as the case of The Connection (1961) and the initial formation of the New American Cinema Group demonstrate, there was a strong drive to overcome these difficulties and find different approaches to financing and distributing films that could tune in with the sensibilities left out by Hollywood. THE CONNECTION: AN AMERICAN ART FILM Shirley Clarke, a member of Filmmakers Inc., like Cassavetes and Pennebaker, moved fluidly across modes of filmmaking in the late 1950s and early 1960s. After her work for the Brussels Fair, she made the commissioned documentary Skyscraper (1959) in collaboration with Willard Van Dyke and Irving Jacoby, and the more experimental short Bridges-Go-Round! (1958), which transformed the daily experience of the urban environment into a fascinating movement of lines and colours, very much like an animated version of abstract expressionism. Clarke, however, was interested in exploring new avenues in storytelling and embarked on independent feature production. The first of these ventures was The Connection (1961), for which she combined self-funding with other investments and adopted a professional approach by being managed by an independent producer, hence illustrating the originality with which she tried to break through into commercial theatres with an art film. The Connection was based on a play by Jack Gelber, which had been staged by The Living Theatre to great success, but not without controversy, due to its open portrayal of heroin addiction and use of profanity. Gelber also wrote the script for the film, introducing in the scenario a filmmaker who is

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shooting a Direct Cinema–style documentary about addicts waiting for their dealer at a flat. The documentary filmmaker, hungry to understand the subjects he wants to portray, ends up trying heroin as well, and becomes a subject of the documentary itself. Clarke had bought the rights to The Connection in January 1960. Shortly after, she met producer Lewis Allen, who had been working in legitimate Broadway theatre until that time. Allen had set up the production company Allen-Hogdon with investment broker Dana Hogdon to create limited partnerships for each of the projects they took on. This was a method that had been working well in off-Broadway productions and Allen thought could be applied to films, benefitting both investors and filmmakers. Subsequently, Clarke and Allen signed an agreement where the latter committed to fund the production at $177,400.71 He would make a public offering and furnish the funds himself if he failed to gather them. The key to Allen’s approach was that the director keep artistic control over creative and production matters. Clarke did not have to account to investors for her photographing, editing, and directing decisions. Nevertheless, if after three years the funds had not been returned to the investors, Allen would oversee all decisions about distribution and exhibition, as long as these did not imply contracts with companies related to him. Accordingly, Allen acted as the co-producer and his name appeared next to Clarke’s in the same size in the production credit title. Another ingredient of Allen’s management of finances was to keep producer, director, and director of photography salaries low, something that stood in contrast with Hollywood’s high salaries. Still, the film was made employing union and guild staff. This increased the budget while assuring levels of technical quality, and importantly, it prevented opposition from unionised labour who might have deemed the production intrusive. Arthur J. Ornitz was hired as director of photography. Ornitz had contributed to key documentary films such as The Power and the Land (Joris Ivens, 1940), The March of Time newsreel series, and had been part of Frank Capra’s Corps Signal crew during WWII. More recently, he photographed fiction films such as The Goddess with very rich black and white gradations. Keeping up with the idea of creative autonomy, Ornitz was considered a “General Partner,” just like Clarke, and his split of the benefits—5 percent of the net accrual—was arranged.72 When seeking funds for the project, Allen edited a prospectus asserting that there was a market for “unique and different motion pictures with an individual point of view made on very low budgets.”73 Allen equated these films to those of the French Nouvelle Vague and Ingmar Bergman, yet he stated that films like the European ones “cannot be made in America under studio conditions and supervision.”74 He also invoked Clarke’s achievements with Skyscraper and Bullfight at international festivals and drew attention to other members of the creative team, highlighting the careers of Ornitz

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and production supervisor James Di Gangi. The prospectus anticipated the release of a tie-in product: the publication of a book which included the original screenplay, a history of the film’s production, and a series of film stills taken by Gideon Bachman. This marketing device was linked with the success of the publication of Marguerite Duras’ scenario for Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) by Grove Press in 1961, which had also published a book on Pull My Daisy upon its release. The potential of The Connection was reiterated by referring to the play’s critical acclaim in New York and Los Angeles, and its future opening in London. Eventually, over two hundred investors put money into it, with quantities ranging from $50 to $23,288.75 They would get a percentage of the 50 percent net profits proportionate to their corresponding investment. Shooting started in November 1960. Ornitz and Clarke worked together to create a combination of polished black and white cinematography, theatrical staging, and Direct Cinema–style camera movements that introduced a level of cinematic reflexivity absent in the original play. Clarke also had Freddie Redd appear and diegetically perform the jazz score composed for the original play. Variety reported on the production of the film, noting its innovative funding method against the background of current Hollywood practices.76 The New York Times also covered the production in interviews with Allen and Clarke. Referring to the state of independents in America, Allen said that “we’d be pleased if our picture, a small unorthodox one, would spearhead a much-needed art movement for American-made films in this country.”77 Despite the film not sparing the language and rawness that had made the play controversial, Allen was optimistic about a possible encounter with censors, remarking that they were already endorsed by authorities who saw the work as a “strong indictment on the use of narcotics,” thus using the same argument that Otto Preminger had used to defend The Man with the Golden Arm before.78 Allen envisioned that distribution deals would be arranged once the film was finished, as the film had already raised interest. At that point, Allen even considered the possibility of setting up a distribution company to handle this and other independent films in the United States and Europe. Allen reported the ideas on establishing an independent filmmakers’ organisation to his friend George Pepper, who produced Luís Buñuel’s films in Mexico. In summer 1960 Allen told Pepper that the organisation had a committee “investigating financing possibilities of obtaining concessions from various unions here.”79 Allen was aware that the difficulties resided less in financing films than in finding distribution for them. To surpass this, the organisation was considering making a collective deal with an established art cinema distributor, or preferably, setting up their own cooperative distribution company. To distribute The Connection, Allen was thinking of hiring Donald

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T. Gillin to work as producer’s representative. Gillin had worked for Lionel Rogosin before and was versed in legal matters, being able to negotiate deals that would benefit every particular film. As noted by Allen, this would avert “the harmful practice of handing over worldwide distribution rights to local distributors here.”80 In May 1961 an agreement was made with Gillin, who was to inform Allen and Clarke on every offer for distribution, and any decision would remain with them, thus following a model that involved the director and producers beyond creative decisions.81 Gillin’s share of the profits would be 3 percent of the gross benefits accrued in the United States and Canada, and 5 percent of the international revenue. Under this agreement, Gillin was assigned to go to Cannes and seek distribution for the film there. Earlier that February, Clarke had corresponded with Variety critic Gene Moskowitz, who often selected entrants to Cannes.82 Clarke told him that Favre Le Bret, Cannes general counsel, had attended a private screening of The Connection and was very impressed. Le Bret seemed interested in having the film officially shown in Cannes and even suggested to cut ten minutes out of the film to improve its flow.83 Clarke was excited by the opportunity and told Moskowitz that any kind of positive writing and reviewing from him would help Le Bret to see the film favourably. Le Bret had noted that the submission could be pursued through two different avenues, either as an official nomination of the MPAA or as an entry of the Fédération des Auteurs de Film, who had already praised the film. In her response to Le Bret, Clarke noted that, despite having written to the MPAA, she and Allen “do not expect to be invited as we are fully aware that the industry does not select small, independently produced films” but she was still encouraged by the suggested alternative.84 Effectively, the MPAA vice president, G. Griffith-Johnson replied to Allen informing him of their decision to select a film other than The Connection.85 Still, Griffith-Johnson did not discourage them from submitting directly to the festival authorities, which director and producer did. Eventually, Clarke travelled to Cannes with the beat poets Gregory Corso, Allan Ginsberg, and Peter Orlovsky, garnering considerable media attention, and left having earned the International Critics Jury Prize. THE 1961 PROPOSAL FOR AN AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE The conversations on the state of independent distribution in America that Allen described to Pepper were part of the larger debate that occupied The Antioch Symposium in summer 1960. The symposium was sponsored by one of the main art cinema chains, the Art Cinema Guild, and was attended by filmmakers, critics, educators, and distributors.86 This patronage is not

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coincidental, given that independent exhibitors and distributors where attempting to consolidate art cinema as an independent alternative to Hollywood in the theatrical market. In the following years, some independent art house cinema impresarios such as Don Rugoff, Walter Reade, and Don Talbot branched into independent distribution, following from the successful exhibition of foreign films oriented towards adult audiences.87 They knew they would benefit from improving the filmic literacy of audiences and thus engaged in the early conversations on the American film institute. Ernest Callenbach’s report on the symposium explicitly connected the future of independent and experimental cinema to the expansion of film appreciation and the use of film in formal education. Attendees identified independent distribution as the key link between diversification in film production and film education. American independent production could not be strengthened if it was unable to compete with cheaply imported European productions that side-stepped the obstacles of guilds and censors. Furthermore, distributors found they could not choose between films, thus limiting the offer brought to audiences beyond the better-organised outfits in metropolitan areas such as New York and San Francisco. Amos Vogel, Cinema 16’s organiser, made clear that, if art cinema distributors wanted to build their positions in the large and demographically diverse U.S. theatrical sector, they would have to provide competitive services. These involved striking copies, nationwide transportation, publicity, and minimising risk by producing films that would return investments. These measures would have an impact on exhibition policies, hence diminishing the more open approach to programming of non-theatrical organisations. Additionally, Vogel contended that the taste of film society renters tended to be conservative, mostly requesting Hollywood classics rather than experimental films. However, the arrival of the baby boomers to university campuses created the feeling that this was changing. They concluded that if they wanted to change the demand, they had to address opinion leaders and widen the scope of audiences’ tastes, something for which an ample take on film education was necessary. In September 1960, shortly after the symposium, a group of filmmakers, critics, and producers including Shirley Clarke, Lionel Rogosin, Jonas Mekas, and Robert Frank came together at Lewis Allen’s New York office and signed the “Statement of the New American Cinema Group.”88 There were several reasons behind this gathering. One was a reaction against Cinema 16’s refusal to screen Brakhage’s Anticipation of the Night because of Vogel’s thinking that it would not fit with the rest of the programme. But also importantly, the gathering was the occasion to formalise their needs and priorities, and seek strategies to materialise them. The statement asserted the cultural legitimacy of independent filmmaking and compared its splendour to the other booming American arts: painting and poetry. It also echoed the issues noted by Allen

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during the production of The Connection. The signatories decried censorship and licensing laws and denounced the situation whereby low budget movies paid the same fees to the guilds as films with greater budgets expecting higher revenues. Following from this and the Antioch discussions, Colin Young and Robert Hughes, the New York editor of Film Quarterly with whom Clarke had made A Scary Time, redacted a proposal for an American film institute which was published in summer 1961.89 The proposal sketched some of the ideas and activities typically associated with a national film institution: an archive, a catalogue, educational programmes and publications. The institute would assume preservation and scholarship, the roles most neglected by the theatrical film industry. The selection of films to preserve, nevertheless, would include past and recent art films, which were deemed fundamental for the comprehensive education of future filmmakers and audiences. It also included a fund to support experimental film production and engaged with Vogel’s contentions, defending that a strong independent film sector could only be achieved through the education of audiences and future filmmakers. James Kreul argues that the resulting plan envisaged the integration of film societies into the art cinema circuit.90 Such a model attempted to consolidate art cinema as an independent and competitive theatrical alternative to Hollywood. This plan intended to advance with support from the Film Council of America, the American Federation of Film Societies, and the Educational Film Library, but a combination of non-theatrical film libraries and film societies and independent theatrical film enterprises was improbable despite the growth of both.91 Mixing independent films, newsreels, educational, experimental, and Hollywood classics was something that non-theatrical exhibitors like Art in Cinema and Cinema 16 successfully did in the 1940s and 1950s, but the chances of this model of exhibition crossing over onto theatrical screens and bearing the expenses to sustain independent and experimental film production were small. What is more, it was unlikely that this happened with support from a large philanthropic foundation, as evidenced in the 1935 RF decision of promoting non-theatrical film culture and infrastructures while not interfering with the interests of the main theatrical film industry. THE UNDERGROUND GOES OVERGROUND After presenting The Connection in Cannes, Allen and Clarke received signs of interests from the Vancouver International Film Festival, who had successfully shown Rogosin’s documentary on apartheid, Come Back Africa (1959), two years before.92 Nevertheless, Clarke and Allen preferred

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to concentrate on European film festivals for that year and declined the offer.93 They accepted Richard Roud’s offer to play at the National Film Theatre in London.94 They continued rejecting invitations from other festivals, such as Melbourne, Sydney, and Montreal, thus prioritising the accrual of support from European film critics and festivals first.95 Eventually, the distributor Films of the World arranged to open the film in the newly-completed D.W. Griffith Theater in New York in August 1962.96 The theatre owners were aware of the controversy that the film could cause but still wanted to go ahead with the deal and paid $20,000 in advance. Due to delays in licensing the venue, the date for the film opening was not set until October. Two days after the opening the exhibitors received a temporary injunction issued by the New York State Supreme Court which resulted in closing the theatre. The New York Board of Regents, which was in charge of licensing commercially exhibited films, claimed the film was obscene for its use of the word shit to refer to heroin and the appearance of a pornographic magazine in one scene. Ephraim London, the constitutional attorney who had won The Miracle suit in 1952, pleaded for the case. The hearing took place on October 23 and the Court unanimously decided in favour of The Connection. Meantime, the film had opened in other places in the country, and reviews in Cue, the Saturday Review of Literature, Newsweek, and the New York Post had been positive.97 The influential critic of the New York Times, Bosley Crowther, however, had biting words for it, as for him the film’s controversial language “scarcely seems out of place, or indeed, any more offensive than anything else in this drab film.”98 A year later, in February 1963, Allen communicated to the investors the state of distribution matters. The film had been playing in New York and Los Angeles in different engagements.99 He noted that some advances had been made to the producers, but these could not be considered benefits yet, as they were to pay for deferred costs, which included publicity and legal bills. In the long term The Connection failed to recoup expenses but proved a critical success and signposted a path for American producers to make smaller and less mainstream film productions with a flexible distribution approach. This model aimed to find a place in the changing American film industry, as the recognition of Clarke and Cassavetes sustained the idea that their films offered an alternative to Hollywood’s dominance. Like The Connection, Shadows had a slow and not straightforward start. It had been shown in festivals, where it was picked up by a British distributor and two years later bought for distribution in the United States. Following this recognition, Cassavetes made Too Late Blues (1961) for Paramount. The film portrayed a jazz band striving to survive, presenting a conflict between artistic freedom and commercial success, which somehow created parallelisms with Cassavetes’ life at that time. Working for Paramount made Cassavetes face the imperatives of an overseeing major producer which curtailed his

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creative freedom. Paramount enforced the choice of the lead actors, as well as a tight shooting schedule, conditions which put pressure on him. The film passed mostly unnoticed at the box office and earned mixed reviews. Cassavetes still signed a five-film contract with Paramount. Stanley Kramer, reputed for maintaining some autonomy within Hollywood by working with United Artists, approached him to make A Child is Waiting (1963). This was the story of a teacher taking on a job at a special needs school. It starred Judy Garland and Burt Lancaster but Cassavetes disagreed with the terms of the studio, and after several problems, he was fired from the production. While credited as director, he disowned the film, becoming disengaged from both Hollywood and the New York independent film community during this time. Meantime, the ideas behind the New American Cinema statement began to materialise when Jonas Mekas started the New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative as a distribution centre in January 1962. The cooperative was to work under nondiscriminatory and nonexclusive principles, by which any filmmakers could submit films to the co-op and they could have their film distributed by others. It also gave a 75 percent share of the rental fees to filmmakers, keeping the rest to cover costs and pay salaried staff. Around 1961 Mekas also started organising weekend night screenings at various New York venues, something that would find a titular yet itinerant location as The Film-Makers’ Cinematheque. The cooperative circulated and the Cinematheque showed the works of some of the filmmakers signing the statement, as well as other films that came to be known as the underground during that time. Stan Vanderbeek had used the term in 1961 to refer to filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Hilary Harris, Robert Breer, and Robert Frank that, despite their artistic merits, were not yet recognised.100 These were notably heterogeneous filmmakers, so the category referred to how these filmmakers operated in relation to the mainstream more than to a specific style or set of aesthetics. Nevertheless, the label gradually became more identified with an appeal to youth culture and marginal values, epitomised by a film like The Flower Thief (Ron Rice, 1960), which connected with that mood in exploring absurdity and beauty in the peripheries of society. The film, starring the beat personality Taylor Mead, followed the whimsical adventures of the eponymous thief around the detritus of San Francisco. The New York Times described it as “overdeveloped and underexposed,” as well as “plotless, ultrasymbolic and determinedly obscure.”101 During this time, Jonas Mekas, who had failed to get Hollywood’s attention to his documentary footage on Lithuanian émigrés, embarked into making features engaging with the beat sensibility and aimed at commercial release. A significant instance of this is the 35 mm art film Guns of Trees (1961), which portrayed two couples against the background of a derelict New York City. This was a poetic story where dreams and fantasies were interpolated with straightforward narrative

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action, underscored by a soundtrack mixing jazz music, news reports and Allen Ginsberg reading his poetry. It premiered at Cinema 16 and won the first prize at the International Free Cinema Festival in Porreta Terme, Italy, in 1962. Nevertheless, the production process proved painful for Mekas, as he had difficulties with funding, the police, and the co-director, Edouard de Laurot, something which led Mekas to think about the only way of retaining creative control was to work within the structures of cooperative filmmaking.102 The general press was taking notice of some of these films and observed that the New America Cinema had transcended the trance and surreal aesthetics of the 1940s and 1950s and now delved into “techniques that are hyper-naturalistic and subjects that tend to be the most public troubles of contemporary America.”103 This characterisation only applied to some films that could be included in the specific lineage of addressing everyday life with naturalism as in Engel’s films or engaging with prevailing taboos such as war trauma, racial discrimination, and Cold War tension, as in Peter Kass’s Time of the Heathen (1962). It rather left aside the films of Ron Rice, Ken Jacobs or Jack Smith, which were considered sexually extravagant films in the eyes of the general press. In retrospect, Cassavetes talked about the underground as an ad-hoc label for filmmakers who wanted to express themselves but had very limited means to make and show their films.104 But beyond Cassavetes’ disillusioned vision, by the early 1960s, the categories of experimental and independent filmmaking intersected in various ways. Experimentation was seen in the exploration of cinematic forms such as performance, movement, editing, framing and focus, the materiality of the film, and the disruption of established cinematic conventions, such as continuity and dramatic resolution. While the notion of experimentation implied that such explorations could open new avenues for artistic expression and influence more mainstream forms, the experimental approach could be seen as a form of artistic practice in its own right, and hence closer to the aims and institutions and modes of not-for-profit funding, which protects and promotes other art forms. Meanwhile, the category of independence could refer to productions separated from the studios’ networks of funding and distribution, but it was not exclusive to such a mode of production, as it could signify ideas related to creative autonomy as in the director having an equal footing with producers and being above other positions so as to decide on issues such as a film’s final cut, marketing, and distribution. Such attention to film aesthetics and notions of creative autonomy were increasingly relevant as to define film as an art form and the filmmaker as an artist, thus shaping ideas around film as an object of study in the nascent discipline of film studies. Importantly too, these ideas were fundamental for defining the cultural value of film that would legitimise the ensuing philanthropic and federal government policies.

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NOTES 1. Colin Young, “An American Film Institute: A Proposal,” Film Quarterly 14, no. 4 (Summer 1961): 37–50. 2. Harry Potamkin, “A Proposal for a School of the Motion Picture,” in The Compound Cinema, ed. Lewis Jacobs (New York: Teachers College Press, 1977), 587–592. 3. Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of U.S. Study of Film (Los Angeles: California University Press, 2007). 4. Dan Streibe, Martina Roepke, and Anke Mebold, “Non-Theatrical Film,” Film History 19, no. 4 (2007): 339–343. 5. David E. James, introduction, in To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground, 3–16, ed. David E. James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 6. William Alexander, Films on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). See also Thomas Brandon, “The Advance-Guard of a New Motion Picture Art: Experimental Cinema 1930–1933,” Journal of University Film Association 30, no. 1 (Winter 1978), 27–35. 7. Richard Maltby, “The Cinema and the League of Nations,” in Film Europe and Film America: Cinema, Commerce and Cultural Exchange, 1920–1939, ed. Andrew Higson and Richard Maltby (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), 82–116. 8. Paul Saettler, The Evolution of American Educational Technology (Charlotte: Information Age Publishing, 2004). 9. William J. Buxton, “The Political Economy of Communications Research,” in Information and Communication in Economics, ed. Robert E. Babe (Boston: Kluver, 1994), 147–175. 10. Board of Trustees Meeting, April 10, 1935, p. 15, folder 50, box 5, series 911, Record Group (RG) 3.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York (hereafter designated RAC). 11. Board of Trustees Meeting, April 10, 1935, p. 15, folder 50, box 5, series 911, RG 3.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 12. Board of Trustees Meeting, April 10, 1935, p. 18, folder 50, box 5, series 911, RG 3.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 13. Board of Trustees Meeting, April 10, 1935, p. 18–19, folder 50, box 5, series 911, RG 3.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 14. Board of Trustees Meeting, December 11, 1935, p. 32–33, folder 50, box 5, series 911, RG 3.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 15. A similar view on this matter is stated by Saettler’s and Buxton’s corresponding works. See Saettler, The Evolution of American Educational Technology, 233, William J. Buxton, “Rockefeller Support for Projects on the Use of Motion Pictures for Educational and Public Purposes,” Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports, 2001. 16. Board of Trustees Meeting, December 11, 1935, p. 33, folder 50, box 5, series 911, RG 3.1, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.

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17. Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies. The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Los Angeles: California University Press, 2005). 18. Joan Ogden, “The Rockefeller Foundation and the Film” 1964, p. 18, folder 52, box 5, series 911, RG 3, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 19. William J. Buxton, “From Radio Research to Communications Intelligence: Rockefeller Philanthropy, Communications Specialists, and the American Policy Community,” in Communication Researchers and Policy-Making, ed. Sara Braman (Cambridge, Mass.,: MIT, 2003), 295–346. See also Brett Gary, The Nervous Liberals: Propaganda Anxieties for World War I to the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 20. Saettler, The Evolution of American Educational Technology, 234. 21. Joan Ogden, “The Rockefeller Foundation and the Film,”1964, p. 19, folder 52, box 5, series 911, RG 3, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 22. Nathaniel Brennan, “The Cinema Intelligence Apparatus: Gregory Bateson, the Museum of Modern Art Film Library, and the Intelligence Work of Film Studies during World War II,” in Cinema’s Military Industrial Complex, eds. Haidee Wasson and Lee Grieveson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 137–156. 23. Philip Swanson, “Going Down on Good Neighbours: Imagining América in Hollywood Movies of the 1930s and 1940s (Flying Down to Rio and Down Argentine Way),” Bulletin of Latin American Research 29, no. 1 (2010): 71–84. 24. Lewis Jacobs, “Experimental Film in America. Part Two: 1921–1941,” Hollywood Quarterly 3, no. 3 (Spring 1948), 278–292. See also Scott MacDonald, Art in Cinema: Documents Towards the History of the Film Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006). 25. Amos Vogel, “Cinema 16: A Showcase for the Nonfiction Film,” Hollywood Quarterly 4, no. 4 (Summer 1950): 421; Scott MacDonald, Cinema 16: Documents Towards a History of the Film Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). 26. P. Adams Sitney, Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 27. Lauren Rabinovitz, “Experimental and Avant-Garde Cinema in the 1940s,” in Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, ed. Thomas Schatz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 445–460. 28. James Kreul, “New York, New Cinema: The Independent Film Community and the Underground Crossover, 1950–1970,” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 2004). 29. Charles R. Acland “Screen Technology, Mobilization and Adult Education in the 1950s,” in Patronizing the Public: American Philanthropy’s Transformation of Culture, Communication, and the Humanities, ed. William J. Buxton (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books), 274. 30. Elena Rossi-Snook, “Persistence of Vision: Public Library 16mm Film Collection in America,” The Moving Image 5, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 1–27. 31. Bruce Elder, The Films of Stan Brakhage in the American Tradition of Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Charles Olson (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998).

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32. Stan Brakhage, “Make Place for the Artist,” in Essential Brakhage: Selected Writings on Filmmaking, ed. Bruce R. McPherson (Kingston, NY: MacPherson and Company, 2001), 74–76. 33. Kevin Hatch, Looking for Bruce Conner (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 34. David W. Ellwood and Rob Kroes, eds. Hollywood in Europe: Experiences of a Cultural Hegemony (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1994). 35. Taylor Littleton and Maltby Sykes, Advancing American Art: Painting, Politics, and Cultural Confrontation at Mid-Century, 2nd Edition (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2005). 36. Donna Binkiewicz, Federalizing the Muse: United States Arts Policy and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1965–1980 (Chapel Hill: North Carolina University Press, 2004). 37. Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999). 38. Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999). 39. Clement Greenberg, “Abstract, Representational and So Forth,” in Art and Culture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 133–138. 40. Harold Rosenberg, “Revolution and the Idea of Beauty,” Encounter (December 1953) vol.1, no. 3, 65–68. 41. Harold Rosenberg, “American Action Painters,” in The Tradition of the New (London: Thames and Hudson, 1962), 23–39. 42. Thomas Bender, “Politics, Intellect and the American University, 1945–1995,” in American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines, ed. Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 43. In Paul Saettler, The Evolution of American Educational Technology (Charlotte: Information Age Publishing, 2004), 421. See also D. Orgeron, M. Orgeron, and D. Streible, “A History of Learning with the Lights Off,” in Learning with the Lights Off, Educational Film in the United States, ed. Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Streible (London: Oxford University Press, 2012), 15–66. 44. John A. Douglass, “A Certain Future: Sputnik, American Higher Education and the Survival of the Nation,” in Reconsidering Sputnik: Forty Years since the Soviet Satellite, ed. John M. Logsdon, Roger D. Launius, and Robert William Smith (London: Routledge, 2000), 327–363. 45. The Rockefeller Panel Reports, Prospect for America (New York: Double Day, 1961); John H. Dodley, The Power of Scale (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2002). 46. William H. Jeynes, American Educational History: School, Society and the Common Good (London: Sage, 2007). 47. Sarah Nilsen, Projecting America, 1958: Film and Cultural Diplomacy at the Brussels World’s Fair (Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishers, 2011). 48. Miguel Fernández Labayen and John Sundholm, “Promoting and Curating US Experimental Cinema in Europe: ‘The Western American Experimental Film’ Tour in 1963 and the New American Cinema,” Framework 63, no. 1&2, Spring/Fall 2022, pp. 183–195. 49. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (London: Studio Vista, 1970).

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50. Harriet R. Polt, “Outside the Frame: Vortex,” Film Quarterly 14, no. 3 (Spring 1961), 35–37. 51. Youngblood, Gene. Expanded Cinema. London: Studio Vista, 1970. 52. Eames Demetrios, An Eames Primer (New York: Universe Publishing, 2002). 53. Loren D. Cocking, “Francis Thompson: An Analysis of an American Filmmaker,” Master of Arts Dissertation, Ohio State University, 1969. 54. Roger Sandall, “Outside the Frame: ‘Atom’” Film Quarterly 14, no. 3 (Spring 1961): 37. 55. Barbara Wilinsky, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2001). 56. Jim Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Midnight Movies (New York: Da Capo Press, 1991). 57. Richard R. Randall, “Censorship: From The Miracle to Deep Throat,” in The American Film Industry, ed. Tino Balio, 432–457 (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 1985). 58. Ray Carney, Shadows (London: British Film Institute, 2001). 59. Carney, Shadows. 60. Tom Charity, “Open Ear Open Eye,” Sight and Sound, March 2004. http:​//​old​ .bfi​.org​.uk​/sightandsound​/feature​/75 (accessed 03/01/2022). 61. David E. James, introduction to, To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground, ed. David James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 8. 62. Douglas Kellner and Dan Streible, “Emile de Antonio: Documenting the Life of a Radical Filmmaker,” introduction to Emile de Antonio: A Reader (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2000), 1–83. 63. John Cassavetes, “What’s Wrong with Hollywood,” Film Culture no. 19 (April 1959): 4–5. 64. Frederic Gimello-Mesplomb, “The Economy of 1950s Popular French Cinema,” Studies in French Cinema Journal 6, no. 2 (2006): 141–150. See also Michel Marie, The French New Wave: An Artistic School (New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2003). 65. Angus Finney, “Support Mechanism across Europe,” in The European Cinema Reader, ed. Catherine Fowler (London: Routledge, 2002), 212–222. 66. Andrew Sarris, “Toward a Theory of Film History,” in The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968 (New York: Da Capo Press 1996), 37. 67. Ernest Callenbach, “Da Capo,” Film Quarterly 62, no. 1 (Autumm 2008): 58–65. 68. Duncan Petrie, “British Film Education and the Career of Colin Young,” Journal of British Cinema and Television 7, no. 2 (May 2004): 78–92. 69. Ernest Callenbach, “Going Out to the Subject: II,” Film Quarterly 14, no. 3 (Spring 1961): 38–40. 70. David Resha, “Selling Direct Cinema: Robert Drew and the Rhetoric of Reality,” Film History 30, no. 3 (2018): 32–50. 71. Agreement between Shirley Clarke and Lewis M. Allen, September 29, 1960. The Lewis Allen Collection, 405.5 Agreements. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin (hereafter HRHRC).

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72. Correspondence Lewis M. Allen to Arthur J. Ornitz, October 7, 1960. Lewis Allen Collection, 405.5 Agreements, HRHRC. 73. A Prospectus for a Motion Picture Production, page 1. Lewis Allen Collection 405.6, The Connection Company: Financial Reports and Correspondence 1968–1978, HRHRC. 74. A Prospectus for a Motion Picture Production, page 1. Lewis Allen Collection 405.6, The Connection Company: Financial Reports and Correspondence 1968–1978, HRHRC. 75. Limited Partnership Agreement of The Connection Company, 1960. Lewis Allen Collection, 405.5 Agreements, HRHRC. 76. “Legit Investors Eye Films,” Variety, November 2, 1960. 77. “On Making a Movie ‘Connection’,” New York Times, November 6, 1960. 78. “On Making a Movie ‘Connection’.” 79. Lewis Allen to George Pepper, July 20, 1960. Fahrenheit 415, George Pepper 1958–1964, Lewis Allen Collection, 4.7, HRHRC. 80. Lewis Allen to George Pepper, July 20, 1960. Fahrenheit 415, George Pepper 1958–1964, Lewis Allen Collection, 4.7, HRHRC. 81. Agreement Donald T. Gillin, May 1961. Lewis Allen Collection, 405.5 Agreements, HRHRC. 82. Shirley Clarke to Gene Moskowitz, February 7, 1961. The Connection, Correspondence, Conditions of Entry Re: Film Festivals. Lewis Allen Collection, 366.7, HRHRC. 83. Correspondence Favre Le Bret to Shirley Clarke, February 13, 1961. The Connection, Correspondence, Conditions of Entry Re: Film Festivals. Lewis Allen Collection, 366.7, HRHRC. 84. Correspondence Shirley Clarke to Favre Le Bret, February 28, 1961. The Connection, Correspondence, Conditions of Entry Re: Film Festivals. Lewis Allen Collection, 366.7, HRHRC. 85. Correspondence G. Griffith-Johnson to Lewis Allen, March 28, 1961. The Connection, Correspondence, Conditions of Entry Re: Film Festivals. Lewis Allen Collection, 366.7, HRHRC. 86. Ernest Callenbach, “The Expensive Art: A Discussion of Distribution and Exhibition in the U.S.” Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (Summer 1960): 19–34. 87. Justyn Wyatt, “From Roadshowing to Saturation Release: Majors, Independents, and Marketing/Distribution Innovations,” in The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 64–86. 88. Jonas Mekas et al., “The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group,” in Film Culture: An Anthology, ed. P. Adams Sitney (London: Secker and Warburg, 1971), 79–83. 89. Colin Young, “An American Film Institute: A Proposal,” Film Quarterly 14, no. 4 (Summer 1961): 37–50. 90. James Kreul, “New York, New Cinema: The Independent Film Community and the Underground Crossover, 1950–1970,” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 2004).

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91. Elaine M. Bapis, Camera and Action: American Film as Agent of Social Change, 1965–1975 (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland and Company, 2008). 92. Correspondence M. G. Talbot to Shirley Clarke, June 6, 1961. Lewis Allen Collection, 366.7 The Connection, Correspondence, Conditions of Entry Re: Film Festivals Lewis Allen Collection, 366.7, HRHRC. 93. Correspondence Ed Wilson to M. G. Talbot, June 12, 1961. Lewis Allen Collection, 366.7 The Connection, Correspondence, Conditions of Entry Re: Film Festivals. Lewis Allen Collection, 366.7, HRHRC. 94. Correspondence Lewis Allen to Richard Roud, April 11, 1961. Lewis Allen Collection, 366.7 The Connection, Correspondence, Conditions of Entry Re: Film Festivals. Lewis Allen Collection, 366.7, HRHRC. 95. M. G. Talbot to Shirley Clarke, June 6, 1961. The Connection, Correspondence, Conditions of Entry Re: Film Festivals. Lewis Allen Collection, 366.7. Lewis Allen Collection, 366.7, HRHRC. 96. Correspondence Lewis M. Allen to Investors, November 3, 1962, p. 1. The Connection Company: Financial Reports and Correspondence 1968–1978. Lewis Allen Collection, HRHRC. 97. Correspondence Lewis M. Allen to Investors, November 3, 1962, p. 1. The Connection Company: Financial Reports and Correspondence 1968–1978. Lewis Allen Collection, 405.6, HRHRC. 98. Bosley Crowther “Connection: Here and Gone. Adaptation of Gelber’s Play at the Griffith Theater Is Shown Only Twice” New York Times, October 4, 1962. 99. Correspondence Lewis M. Allen to the Investors, February 15, 1963. Lewis Allen Collection, 405.5 Agreements, HRHRC. 100. Stan Vanderbeek, “The Cinema Delimina: Films from the Underground,” Film Quarterly 14, no. 4 (Summer 1961): 5–15. 101. “‘Flower Thief’: Avant-Garde Movie at the Charles Theatre,” New York Times, July 14, 1962. 102. Paul Arthur, “Routines of Emancipation: Alternative Cinema in the Ideology and Politics of the Sixties,” To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground, ed. David James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 17–48. 103. Harry Dientsfry, “The New American Cinema,” Commentary, June 1962. 104. George Kouvaros, Where Does It Happen? John Cassavetes and Cinema at the Breaking Point (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2004).

Chapter 2

Funding for Film Artists

GEORGE STEVENS JR.’S INDEPENDENT MODE OF PRODUCTION Talks about the mission and objectives of an American film institute in the early 1960s were concerned with widening film culture as well as preserving American film heritage. These aims involved considering a selection of films worth protecting and promoting given their cultural value and representativeness according to the prevalent views of the time. These considerations inevitably influenced the institutionalisation of film studies and the recognition of a canon of American films. In the background of these discussions also played a concern with the future of the theatrical film industry since this was a moment of economic insecurity due to the restructuring of the majors’ business model and anxieties about Hollywood films not keeping pace with audiences. Studios were over-investing in feature productions which, even if successful at the box office, such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Cleopatra (1963), they did not provide a reliable formula to recoup costs and brought economic uncertainty.1 Young audiences were seeking more variety and often resorted to European films and B-movies. Meanwhile, producers and filmmakers tried more innovative formulae and sought ways to retain creative control. These concerns with film culture and heritage, innovation and creative control coalesced in the figure of George Stevens Jr., who was a leading force behind the establishment of the AFI. Before that, it is worth looking at his career and his previous acquaintance with experimental and independent modes of production. George Stevens Jr., was the son of George Stevens, the renowned Hollywood director and producer of films such as Giant (1956) and The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). Stevens’ father had a history of government service as a member of the Office of War Information film crews during 51

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World War II where he took images of the liberated Nazi camps that served as evidence in the Nuremberg Trials. His son, the young Stevens, had also served in the U.S. Army Photographic Squadron and worked as assistant producer in Hollywood, which placed him in an advantageous position in terms of knowledge and contacts both within the film industry and government. In November 1961 he was recommended by Samuel Goldwyn to Ed Murrow, legendary broadcaster and the new director of the USIA, when the latter was looking for producers that could bring a new approach to USIA propaganda.2 Murrow was inspired by the success of the CBS documentary A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy (Franklin J. Schnaffer, 1962), which showed the newly refurbished areas of the presidential house and was distributed by the USIA overseas. The film offered an intimate portrait of the Kennedys, presenting them as modern art connoisseurs, something that created public awareness of the forthcoming arts legislation. After some persuasion, Stevens agreed on producing a documentary on Jackie Kennedy’s travels in Asia, which resulted in two films: Invitation to Pakistan and Invitation to India (both Leo Seltzer, 1962).3 The films stroke a balance between the topical presentation of the host countries as exotic locations and conveying the First Lady’s personality, style, and education through details and reaction shots which created the appeal of a star persona. With no explicit reference to the Cold War, it emphasised the reciprocity of relations between the American guest and her Pakistani and Indian hosts respectively.4 The film was well received, and Stevens eventually agreed on taking the job ashead of the Motion Picture Service at USIA. In this position, Stevens was responsible for selecting American entries to international film festivals such as Cannes, Moscow, Berlin, Venice, and later Karlovy Vary, all places where the cultural Cold War was being fought.5 Director Fred Zinnemann, producer Arnold Picker, and Motion Pictures Exporters Association Ralph Hetzel were members of the selection committee too, along with others such as actor Gene Kelly and screenwriter Ernest Lehman representing their corresponding trades. By bringing artists’ and producers’ criteria, Stevens was committed to bringing “excellence” to the selections, but he also favoured more controversial choices than his predecessor.6 Even if A-rating festivals like Cannes and Venice would declare themselves politically neutral, Stevens would choose films that resonated with ideas on liberty. His choice of films to show at the 1963 Moscow International Film Festival was even questioned by the State Department. Stevens wanted Stanley Kramer to introduce The Defiant Ones (1958), which Stevens knew “would confirm the Soviet line that the United States is a racist country” and Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), which “would undercut our ally West Germany by reminding viewers of Nazi atrocities.”7 Despite the opposition, he defended the choice of films because it would demonstrate in front of the Soviets that Americans had the freedom to

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address controversial issues. Participation on film festivals also gave Stevens the opportunity to see what was being produced in film schools from places like Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Brazil, and Argentina, which gave him perspective on film developments in other parts of the world. Regarding his own productions at the agency, Stevens’ USIA films were characteristically longer and subtler. They walked away from the cold propagandistic line of the agency in the 1950s, focusing instead on the human side of foreign policy issues.8 There were two interconnected aspects to Stevens’ approach to production that account for its overhaul and, significantly too, for him taking them on to his management of the AFI. One was his approach to recruiting filmmakers, which resulted in better value for money, and two, his embracing of diversity of styles and perspectives, which resulted in innovative works that underlined the value of freedom of expression in a liberal way. To achieve both, he removed the agency’s requirement to accept the lowest bid for contracts by arguing that it was better value for taxpayer’s money if the agency was able to produce better movies. This allowed him to sometimes hire better documentary filmmakers more focused on visual impact, while he would economise reducing the amount of narration in the films and hence spending less of the agency’s budget in translation.9 After having selected a filmmaker, usually by recommendation or after seeing a sample of his previous work, he let the filmmaker choose a subject, so the individual’s take when dealing with a topic was brought to the fore. Recalling Kennedy’s famous 1961 address: “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,” Stevens stated: It is not the primary purpose of the filmmakers, or any artist for that matter, to create an image of their country; it is their job to express their perception to the best of their ability.10

Production followed from USIA’s authorisation of the preliminary script treatment, and it finished with its approval of the edited film. This method left the early stages of production relatively open to the filmmaker’s own ideas about the USIA’s themes. Films were shown to the USIA area directors when they were almost complete. Even if Stevens expected reservations towards some of the treatments, he was backed by Murrow. Stevens upheld an auteuristic notion of creative autonomy, a wholeness of vision that accorded to the filmmaker’s individual perception. Such stress on the individual’s perspective was a strategic move when it came to preserving the decisions of the director and interpreting these films’ diverse views. USIA films could effectively exhibit differing ideological stances, which reinforced the idea of freedom of expression in the United States.

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This is exemplified by two films produced around the same time, Five Cities of June (Bruce Herschenshon, 1963), and The March (James Blue, 1964).11 For Five Cities of June Herschenshon approached his subject in an epic and ideologically conservative way, portraying simultaneous world events, such as the Vietnam War, the death of Pope John XXIII, and the end of racial segregation in American universities, all encompassed by the authoritative voiceover narration of Charlton Heston. The second film, The March, was overly liberal in comparison and made use of a Direct Cinema style, documenting the Civil Rights March for Jobs and Freedom to Washington D.C. and included Martin Luther King’s famous speech “I Have a Dream.” Some politicians in government were reluctant to support The March for it drew attention to the problem of racial segregation in America, but Murrow defended it in terms of how the problem of racism discredited U.S. attempts of presenting itself as a guarantor of freedom to the world.12 The March’s young director, James Blue is also a good example of relationships established by Stevens at USIA that carried on to the AFI. Blue had trained as a filmmaker in France and received critical acclaim for his first feature The Olive Trees of Justice (1961), a film commissioned by the French government adapting a novel on a French farming family and shot against the real backdrop of the Algerian Revolution. The film successfully mixed Direct Cinema style and dramatized segments with non-professional actors while addressing political and generational conflicts. It received the Critics Prize at Cannes in 1962, the same honour that had gone to Shirley Clarke the year before. At Cannes, Stevens met Blue and so invited him to make films for the USIA, his first commissions being short films on Latin America made for Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. From these followed The March, which received very good criticism in festivals across the world, even if this and the other USIA films could not be seen in the United States due to the Smith-Mundt Act that prevented U.S.-made propaganda to be shown at home for fears it could interfere with the public agenda. Stevens’ regard for personal expression attracted veteran and new talent to the USIA. There were people well trained in sponsored documentary production like Herschensohn, and others like Leo Seltzer, who had been affiliated with the New York Workers Film and Photo League in the 1930s, and later made films for the United Nations and the National Film Board of Canada. Others had been trained in television like Charles Guggenheim, who made for the USIA Nine from Little Rock (1964), a film that dealt with the desegregation incidents in Arkansas by suggesting that non-violent dissent was a basic tenet of American democracy. Stevens also established contacts with Hollywood figures like Terry Sanders, who had been involved in productions like The Night of the Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955) and The Naked and the Dead (Raoul Walsh, 1958). Like James Blue, other independent filmmakers such as Kent Mackenzie were directly invited to present a project.

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MacKenzie was a University of Southern California graduate who had made a documentary-inspired account of urban-dwelling Native Americans, The Exiles (1961), which offered a non-romanticised view of their struggle and alienation. As other independent productions of the time, the film had premiered at the Venice Film Festival to excellent reviews but did not find theatrical distribution. For the USIA, MacKenzie undertook a project on vocational training, A Skill for Molina (1964), which told through first-person narration the opportunities for professional improvement and social mobility for latinos given by the California State Department. Cinematographer Haskell Wexler and director William Hale made Grand Central Market (1963). The film placed a camera in an urban market in Los Angeles, capturing different people, produce, prices, and weights. The editing cut had mixed images with sounds such as cash machines, paper bags, and a playful jazz score, thus conjuring up the idea of the United States as a melting pot of cultures and a dynamic place of economic exchange. USIA also distributed abroad Shirley Clarke’s public television documentary on Kennedy’s poet laureate Robert Frost: A Lover’s Quarrel with the World (1963). Following Clarke’s recommendation, African American actor William Greaves approached Stevens and became the first African American to direct a government-sponsored film, The Wealth of a Nation (1963), which celebrated freedom of expression across American culture.13 Over the coming years Stevens also invited other experimental filmmakers associated with the Film-Makers’ Cooperative like Ed Emshwiller to take on USIA projects. Emshwiller, who had been a cameraman for James Blue’s The March, reflected on America’s social and cultural diversity, its dynamism and technological advancement in Faces of America (1965), a kaleidoscopic montage of people in different locations undertaking various activities. Emshwiller also made Art Scene USA (1966), which portrayed several pop artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, and Claes Oldenburg, along with the previous generation of abstract expressionists and contemporary dancers like Marta Graham and Merce Cunningham. Interestingly, Emshwiller had shot a similar project for Show Magazine some years before with Jonas Mekas, which resulted into Film Magazine of the Arts (1963). Emshwiller was also renowned for his science-fiction illustrations and years later undertook a USIA project for the space programme: Project Apollo (1968), a visually-driven film that told the story of Armstrong’s moon landing in 1967. Around the same time, Stevens was landing the job of directing the nascent AFI. Filmmakers working for Stevens during his years at the USIA engaged with the agency on a single project basis and enjoyed a degree of independence and creative autonomy while working within the liberal ideological framework of the agency. Stevens enabled a platform where diversity of

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viewpoints and minorities’ representation started to appear. He nurtured new official propaganda aesthetics with productions which introduced the poetry of everyday details of neorealism, the tension between observation and relevance of Direct Cinema, and the possibility to communicate through visual metaphors of intellectual montage. Stevens often encouraged collaborations between young and older filmmakers through mentoring systems. USIA films were thus varied, some instilled with authority and gravitas, while others with youthfulness and originality. Even with restricted economic and technical means, young filmmakers had the opportunity to produce a first film. Stevens started a project in collaboration with universities by which six graduates received $5,000 each to produce a short film on a subject of their choice using the technical facilities of the universities. USIA staff reviewed applications and, if successful, they would offer the filmmakers a project for the Young America series. After that, they would consider offering them an internship, and from then on, graduates could progress onto bigger projects. The inexpensiveness of students’ productions proved useful when Stevens had to defend the films before the USIA’s head of divisions and the appropriations committee. Since the USIA was also in charge of distribution, many of the guidelines on how to interpret and target audiences for the films were overseen by Stevens too. He also requested feedback and viewing figures from the consular posts in order to assess how USIA films were received. In this way, Stevens attracted talent, minimised expenses, and monitored the reception of the films. Despite the differences between the propaganda aims of the USIA and wider educational aims of the AFI, it is significant that in 1963 Stevens was already thinking about the tasks of a national film institute. Being a representative of the United States in international film festivals have drawn to his attention the problems of preservation, circulation, and appreciation of American film heritage when programmers reproached him about the difficulties of accessing old American films. In November 1963, shortly before Kennedy’s assassination, Stevens was preparing a dinner with the president and Hollywood guests where he wanted to present some plans that had been already endorsed by the president.14 Stevens told Fred Zinnemann that these plans would address: (1) the problem of film preservation, (2) preparing a selection of significant films for touring exhibitions, (3) bringing foreign film students to study in America, and (4) making use of leading film figures overseas. In his letter to Zinnemann, Stevens expressed concerns about the exact relationship between government and industry in such a type of organisation, and how to find the right mix of Hollywood people and “institutional types.” While Stevens had initially saw his time at the USIA as temporary and wanted to go back to Hollywood, he became increasingly involved with discussions on how federal art policy could best support American cinema, making his ideas on film

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heritage, creative autonomy, and opportunities for innovation the pillar points of the AFI project. In the meantime, other large philanthropies like the Ford Foundation and the RF advanced one-off awards to experimental and independent filmmakers, thus signalling a moment of recognition and anticipation for larger and more sustained forms of support. WINDS OF CHANGE In 1963 the Ford Foundation announced it would award twelve grants for “Creative Film Makers” for the next year.15 These were conceived as “fellowships to enable filmmakers to produce short creative films or to study the cinematic art.”16 The foundation’s choice was presented in 1964. The total grant amounted to $118,500 and there were 117 candidates from which twelve were awarded with $10,000 each. All of them were already well-known names in contemporary experimental and independent film culture.17 Time magazine reported on the awards, extolling some of them for their lyrical and crafted approaches, while others were presented as desultory pieces. The reviewer expressed not grasping why the foundation had “begun pouring tons of gold on the happy heads of the people who made them.”18 The scorn was evident when it concerned films dealing with politics in a satirical way, such as Stan Vanderbeek’s Breath Death (1963), which included cut-out images of Khrushchev sneezing and Hitler saying “Gesundheit,” or sex, as Bruce Conner’s A Movie, which was described as containing a puerile, if not dangerous, death impulse. But Time saw the choices eventually balanced by attention to works with a less subversive and more artistic appeal, such as Jordan Belson’s abstract animations, which were praised for their formal qualities and mystical aspirations. Time’s highest honour went to filmmakers that had already received attention in festivals and on the independent circuit. Amongst these were Carmen D’Avino for his accomplished frame by frame colourful animations of inert objects in Pianissimo (1963), which had been nominated for Best Short category at that year’s Academy Awards, and Kent MacKenzie’s The Exiles. The most revered entry was James Blue, of whom Time praised The Olive Trees of Justice, for it “is propaganda, or was once, but it is so well done that it is chiefly propaganda for the human race.”19 It is difficult to track what were the outcomes of the Ford grants for every filmmaker, as they could be used for filmmaking projects, for travelling and/or studying. Blue used the grant for a film project interviewing international filmmakers including Jean-Luc Godard, Roberto Rossellini, Shirley Clarke, and Satyajit Ray. He was interested in these filmmakers’ use of documentary aesthetics and non-professional actors and planned to write a book on it. Kenneth Anger worked on the lush Kustom Kar Kommandos

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(1965), a dabble into car fetishism of which only three minutes of the film survive. Jordan Belson made Re-Entry (1964), an orchestration of forms and colours playing with the illusion of depth through hypnotic transformations. John R. MacDermott, which was known for his battles’ illustrations used the money to film re-enacted World War I battles, which shows the various uses that the grants could be applied to. The Ford grants appeared at a transitional moment for independent and experimental filmmakers, as well as for the theatrical film industry. These grants, however, were a unique event with no continuity within the philanthropy’s programmes, in contrast with the federal policies that followed. While there was anticipation for the latter amongst filmmakers, the question of how to best serve independent and experimental filmmakers remained difficult, as in the traditional arts granting model an individual could receive a one-off sum to produce an artwork, cover living expenses or undertake periods of research and experimentation. While protective of the artist’s creative autonomy such model was neither concerned with definite project outcomes nor with the dissemination of these, which in the complex ecology of independent and experimental cinema missed supporting distribution and exhibition as well. Meantime, following from Colin Young’s 1961 proposal for an American film institute, a group of critics, academics, and associations like the American Federation of Film Societies, had been convening at the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts to discuss how to renew filmmaking training and further film scholarship.20 This concern was evident when Young presented a report entitled “The American Experimental Film in the Last Decade” at UNESCO’s Paris headquarters in 1964.21 First, Young called attention to the falling international status of American cinema. He argued that the riskier approaches and formal developments of European films were not matched by Hollywood, which was still dominated by the narrative conventions and moral standards of the 1930s. Young pointed out that the industry’s entrenchment was concomitant with other important factors limiting film scholarship. There was a lack of interest in animation and documentary forms, lack of systematic thinking about cinema aesthetics, and lack of dialogue between critics and filmmakers, which could benefit from concentrating on multimedia experimentations, such as the Whitney Brothers’ works on music and images. Young contended that experimental and independent films interrogated common assumptions on film form. To support this, he examined films which adopted the distant and omniscient point of view of documentaries to subvert that position. His examples were The Connection, and another feature film then garnering considerable acclaim, Georg (Stanton Kaye, 1964), a fable about a German pacifist who ventures into the American desert in order to realise his Arcadia in a nuclear missiles site. For Young, a strong intertwining of practice and reflection could only be developed under the umbrella

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of a national film institution, which unlike France, Britain, and Canada, the United States still lacked. From this perspective, the absence of systematic and updated film education in the United States caused the country to fall behind in cultural leadership. Young’s statements on innovative ways to engage with current social and political concerns reflected the ongoing discussions that joined the independent film and educational communities under the idea that film was an agent of social change.22 Figures associated with the Film-Makers’ Cooperative were then producing independent features addressing concerns on power, gender, and race within a commercially-oriented mode of production, films that could be included within what David James names the rarity of American art film in the 1960s.23 After the success of Jonas Mekas’ Guns of Trees, and Adolfas Mekas’ Hallellujah The Hills (1963) the brothers made The Brig (1964), which was based on The Living Theatre’s production of Kenneth Brown’s play on the brutal training of the U.S. Navy. Produced by David C. Stone, who had been involved in Adolfas’ Hallelujah The Hills, the brothers clandestinely shot a performance of the play after the FBI had it closed down to the public. The film thus became a document of the theatrical performance but added a cinematic lens to it.24 While Adolfas looked after the editing, Jonas cared for the shooting, having one hand-held and two stationary cameras assisted by Film-Makers’ Cooperative members Ed Emshwiller, Storm de Hirsch, and Louis Brigante. The cameras sometimes moved searching for relevant drama and other times remained static to present the claustrophobic stage framed through the bars and barbed wired that enclosed the protagonists into the space. They captured the choreographed movements of the marines obeying like automatons, their sight lost on an invisible horizon of blind compliance to the ruthless discipline imposed by their superiors. The film was edited into approximately sixty minutes and won the Grand Prize at the Venice Documentary Festival. The feature work of another founding member of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, poet and filmmaker Storm de Hirsch, Good Bye in the Mirror (1964), also received international attention for its mixing of storytelling and experimental forms. Shot in 16 mm black and white film, it was blown up to 35 mm and post-dubbed. It followed three young American women navigating through their independence while living in Rome. The story dealt with female sexuality in a more open way than other films of the time, an approach that was well received when the film opened in Cannes in 1964. The film synthesized many of the styles and concerns of the moments: its hand-held camerawork gave it the technical roughness of the underground and beat films, while frequent reframing echoed the Direct Cinema style. Yet, its documentary and narrative qualities were often thwarted by extreme close-ups and

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masking, which focused attention on the image as such and on movement within the frame, reminding viewers of its cinematic specificity. After the critical success of The Connection, Shirley Clarke made The Cool World (1964) for theatrical release. Produced by one of Filmmakers Inc.’s members, Fred Wiseman, the film introduced the lives of small-time gangs in Harlem with probing camera and gritty cinematography. Despite Clarke’s efforts in highlighting the problematic of race in a way that would engage with the civil rights’ concerns, The Cool World’s promotion concentrated mainly on Clarke as a female auteur and her personal approach to filmmaking. Meanwhile, Lewis Allen’s continued producing independent movies, following a similar approach to the creative development he tried out first with Clarke. For his next production, Allen liaised with Peter Brook, a reputed British experimental theatre director. They adapted the well-known novel The Lord of the Flies by William Golding, which explored the descent into violence and corruption of a group of children left on an island. As it happened earlier with Allen’s production of The Connection and later with his involvement in Fahrenheit 451 (François Truffaut, 1966), Allen held the auteuristic idea that these directors could bring their own interpretation and cinematic emphasis to the original literary materials. Allen’s ideal was that directors and screenwriters kept artistic control over creative and production matters. However, as Cassavetes experienced too with his films after Shadows, this arrangement was not always easy to maintain when the project attracted the attention of large production companies. When Brook and Allen where trying to secure funds for The Lord of the Flies, Columbia showed interest.25 But working with the company implied accepting its conditions regarding the script and distribution. Eventually, producer and director dismissed such involvement as it could jeopardise what they had envisioned for the film. Significantly, Brook chose non-professional actors to interpret the children and allowed them to improvise and develop their own understanding of the situation they were put into during the shooting, an approach that brought risk and delays to the project but eventually enabled the results sought by the director and became critically successful. As with The Connection, Allen pursued an original distribution deal to benefit the individual character of the film. After the opening of Lord of the Flies in major U.S. cities, Allen saw good prospects in college towns and smaller cities as the book was often compulsory reading in formal education.26 Allen managed to negotiate with the distributors that they discontinue their habitual second-run flat fee policy. He believed that the film would profit from a re-release sale on a percentage basis. This was against the common practice of the time because it diminished immediate rewards for the distributors. Nevertheless, Allen persuaded them to sign the percentage deal as he thought it could accrue more benefits in the

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medium-long term and thus reach out to the college population which was its main target audience. Also, during this time, two experimental films attracted attention from the censors, for they were seen as following a particular set of subversive or “underground” morals. One of them was Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1963), which portrayed the subculture of biker gangs. As with others of Anger’s movies, the film made various references to homosexuality, violence, and drug use. Images of popular culture icons such as Marlon Brando and James Dean appeared next to Jesus Christ, and a rock ’n’ roll soundtrack gave an ironic counterpoint to the images. Censors denounced that the film created a parallelism between the gangs’ activities and religious characters and rituals. Police raided the opening screening in Los Angeles and confiscated the print. Anger’s defence challenged the California Supreme Court and the copy was released shortly after. The case was different for Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith, 1963). The film portrayed a gathering evolving into a languid orgy of men, women, and transvestites. Music, costumes, and performances drew from and satirized a wide range of stereotypes and film genres, presented with both seriousness and a self-mocking attitude. Flaming Creatures was programmed at the 1963 Knokke-Le-Zoute Experimental Film Festival in Belgium, but it was denied public screening on the grounds of pornography for including a shot of a flaccid penis. The ensuing attention added publicity, evidenced when the film was to open in New York in spring 1964, where Mekas had programmed it alongside another homoerotic film, Jean Genet’s Chant d’Amour (1950), and the district attorney was ready to seize the copy.27 The event provoked a strong response from artists, filmmakers, and intellectuals in New York, with Mekas spearheading a campaign to defend the film and against censorship in general. Susan Sontag lamented the immaturity of the arts community in America. Engaging with Herbert Marcuse’s view of art and liberation, she stressed the subversive potential of the film’s polymorphous sexuality.28 Flaming Creatures, however, was not released until many years after, perhaps because its transgressions were not that easy to assimilate across normative sexual categories.29 The debate triggered by these films’ censoring evidenced that American experimental and independent filmmakers wanted their films to be considered artworks and to enjoy freedom of expression as in other arts. Significantly, the need for subversive elements in art in liberal societies was something that large philanthropies such as the Rockefeller Foundation were already considering when sketching their upcoming policies.

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AVANT-GARDE ART WITHIN ARTS POLICIES The Rockefeller philanthropies’ continued interest in art policies was fundamental in pushing for the wider legislation of the mid-1960s. In 1963, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund commissioned The Performing Arts report to gain support for the arts legislation that Kennedy’s team was preparing.30 The report stated the aim to develop the arts’ sector by attracting private funding and pushing for the systematisation of arts’ management by integrating business-like practices, such as efficient administration of resources, leadership in the field, and development of audiences. This form of management could impact arts and cultural production by establishing degrees of professionalism, rationalised management and increased competition. It echoed Charles P. Snow’s contemporary concerns on the lack of integration between arts and sciences in Western countries.31 Snow advocated government intervention in cultural matters “not so much as a controlling force but as an impresario.”32 Snow’s vision counterpoised the idea of the centralised totalitarian state with the “free” regulation of liberal economies. Such an understanding of cultural production allowed the contradiction of supporting critical and subversive art and culture provided it dynamized cultural production and there being a market for them, even if small. Accordingly, The Performing Arts report presented arts’ management as something that would work towards the benefit of society and satisfaction of higher human motivations. This quelled criticism of the superficiality and self-complacency of U.S. material progress, something that people like Kennedy’s advisor John Kenneth Galbraith, who would be later involved in the AFI, pointed out in his seminal book The Affluent Society.33 Additionally, the report linked artistic achievement to the Cold War debate on political freedom, which American institutions safeguarded by defending art’s universal aims. In this way, promotion of the arts not only responded to economic interests, but also fulfilled the moral and spiritual aspirations of individuals. The benefit of achieving better social cohesion and international status helped to include art as part of the government’s policies. This argument, nevertheless, could be reversed at any point to defuse possible accusations of using the arts solely for economic or political interests, and it was given an appearance of disinterest by appealing to scientific and humanistic values. The Report’s vision of intervention into cultural production materialised when the RF established its dedicated Arts Program in 1963, which followed from the federal government’s and RF’s sponsorship of international art exhibitions, publications, and cultural events in the 1950s. The goal of supporting challenging art, such as experimental and minority arts, was explicitly

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articulated by Boyd R. Compton, one of the Arts Program’s assistant directors. Compton noted that: to enhance the aesthetic values of our civilisation; this is done by facilitating the creation of art which is significant enough to disturb and change the lives of Americans who can respond to it.34

For Compton, the political and social relevance of the programme involved not only the lives and values of Americans, but also of the people abroad. He stated that “with our new momentum and focus overseas, it is all more imperative that our arts program here be concerned primarily with creative work of unusual value, and with the conditions that nurture it.”35 As well as noting the importance of international leadership, he also identified the need to establish mainstream references, as well as to foster unique and original art, as this was crucial to make the art world more dynamic. He advocated that when such an establishment exists or can be brought into being—as in American painting and poetry—and presents art of relative merit, we would probably save our own virtue and humor by devoting at least five per cent of our art money for its subversion through experimental work.36

RF’s stance towards arts’ management and promoting competition implied channelling efforts towards experimental arts which are characterised by exploration, enquiry, and critique. In this light, experimental works offer a counterpoint to mainstream trends, acting as a source of comparison and influence, as well as presenting an alternative for audiences not engaging with mainstream trends. This vision of arts management had an explicit rationale, which the RF officers identified in the foundation’s need to support three distinctive but interrelated elements: (1) style, consisting of forms and values that can be readily identified, (2) infrastructures, the material means used by artists and audiences, which ensure some form of continuity, and (3) critical apparatuses, understood as discursive means that provide terms for interpretation and assessment, thus guiding public reception.37 The RF tried to apply these three cornerstones in its support for experimental cinema in 1965, while discussions on federal government’s arts legislation and film policy were taking place.

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BALANCING ACT: THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES ENDOWMENTS After Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, President Lyndon B. Johnson continued with some of the former’s enterprises, but elaborated his own programme, the Great Society. The Great Society’s was a complex set of measures designed to deal with the instability caused by the economic and political polarisation of race, class, and gender during the first half of the 1960s, especially in urban areas.38 These wide measures were directed to address unemployment, prevent youth delinquency, offer health services, and support community programmes. Nevertheless, in the background of these advances raged the escalating war in Vietnam. Shortly after gaining congressional approval for expanding the armed intervention, Johnson signed the Cultural Development Act in September 1964, at the same time as the Civil Rights Act. The Cultural Development Act was an extension of the 1958 NDEA, and became the basis of the 1965 National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act. The latter raised the status of arts and humanities to that of the sciences and created the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), which were the two awarding bodies.39 The 1965 pronouncement affirmed that artists should be given the material possibilities to develop their individual capacities. The act legitimised government backing of artistic enterprises on the basis that they defined America’s world leadership. It followed the premise that if the state had supported industrial and scientific projects before, now it would support the material conditions for nurturing creative talent. The act attempted to attract private funding to develop the arts’ sector, following the directives of The Performing Arts report. This was achieved using the Ford Foundation’s system of matching grants, thus assuring that the government would not be the only and permanent source of funding.40 Congress resolved how to implement federal support while preserving the principle of freedom of expression by not allowing government officials to be involved in the direct selection of grantees. Independent review panels were established for each endowment, and they would apply the criteria specific to each subject area. Nevertheless, the selection of review panels and final approval of their choices passed through the National Council on Arts (NCA) which was closer to the executive government. The NCA was appointed before the formation of the NEA as an advisory council formed by individual committees for each art and continued its existence in an overseeing position, falling under the umbrella of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities, whose ultimate authority was the U.S. president. Thus, executive government maintained control over initial and final decisions, and reviewed entire

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programmes every five years. This system allowed a degree of internal regulation for each programme or area but still be overseen by the NCA, an arrangement that tensed the relationship between the NCA and the AFI in the early 1970s. The same as the NDEA encouraged the use of audio-visual technology in science education, the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act placed great emphasis on using audio-visual resources for arts and humanities education. The Performing Arts report stated that “the importance of the electronic media cannot be overstressed in increasing the availability of the performing arts of high quality and in creating new audiences and even new works for them.”41 The non-theatrical film sector had expanded significantly since the 1930s to now include television and video, the latter having been launched commercially in 1963. It is significant that from the mid-1960s onwards innovation in information and communication technologies for commercial use would be a significant driver of the U.S. economy, marking also a point of departure from the more centralised, state-bound developments of the military-industrial complex of the previous decade. While widespread use of communication technologies was more of vision for the future than a material reality in 1963, the report evidences the premise that the new legislation should enable educational programming as part of an expected growth of non-theatrical film production and audiences in various theatrical and non-theatrical settings. As much as to produce new audio-visual materials, the growth of the non-theatrical sector would have consequences for the circulation of American film heritage, another of the projects that Stevens was already thinking about as he had informed Kennedy. Before the signing of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act in September 1965, the NCA had some preliminary discussions with each of the art-specific committees. The discussions of the Committee on Film echoed the egalitarian and educational directives of the Great Society by emphasising the need to engage with minorities and to establish standards in the use of film in education. Significantly, the debates were led by Kathryn Bloom, special advisor for arts and humanities at the U.S. Office of Education and the person at the front of the arts in education movement that aimed to bring the arts to mainstream America.42 In her position at the Office of Education, Bloom sketched a project in step with The Performing Arts report, advocating rationalised professionalisation and efficiency. Much in line with Marshall McLuhan’s contemporary ideas about medium specificity, she contended that each art was intrinsically different, citing this as a reason why every professional and teacher should be specifically trained to do their job and use specific tools to be more useful.43 She argued for bringing the arts into comprehensive education as a forerunner to professional careers by pushing for the inclusion of art-related questions at College Entrance Boards.

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These measures intended to balance the teaching of sciences with arts and humanities and prepared the path for the subsequent expansion of the study of film in higher education. When it was turn to discuss the plans for the film institute, George Stevens Jr., led the Committee on Film, and drew from his experience as film producer at the USIA to emphasise the value of personal expression and the educational advantages of experimental and independent film production. EXPERIMENTAL FILM PRODUCTION AS A NATIONAL ENTERPRISE During a Special Meeting of the NCA in June 1965, various arguments were used to interconnect the economic, political, and cultural objectives of the federal government film policies. The discussion privileged experimental and independent production methods, thus converging at least in the use of terms with what some film scholars and educators had used in the plans for an American film institute in 1961. At this meeting, Stevens and Hollywood actor Gregory Peck spoke on behalf of the Committee on Film, a subsection of the Public Media Panel, the latter representing a wider caucus at the NCA that included educational television. First of all, the NCA Chairman, Roger Stevens, questioned the Public Media Panel’s authority to use film for educational purposes. In particular, the chairman enquired whether producing films on arts and artists might have some preservation value, such as the recording of dance performances. While the NCA members agreed on using films for such purposes, Kathryn Bloom reminded the council of the possibilities and constrictions of the legislation, referring specifically to Title VII of the NDEA, which authorised the office to undertake research and experimentation in the effective use of educational media such as film, television, and radio.44 Accordingly, Bloom insisted that this title “included a provision for using all kinds of educational media and this includes films, tape and programmed learning.”45 The first provision authorised the Office of Education to commission films with educational purposes, and the second authorised the Office of Education to promote and disseminate research on these technologies. In other words, it enabled the production and distribution of any content as long as it could be argued to have educational value, something that would have implications for the AFI in its production activities. Another NCA member, Paul Engle, saw this as allowing the NCA to send films “out to the schools and colleges as just instructive films, and inspirational films.”46 Nevertheless, the NCA members remarked that they should be cautious. First, they noted the recurring concern that in producing films they would be competing with the professional film business. Second, they

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recognised their direct involvement in film production could be seen as an overt attempt at propaganda. These concerns recall the constraints found by the RF when its trustees first debated their involvement with film in the 1930s Communications Program. To answer this, Bloom responded that they would proceed with care and reiterated the premise of working within the enabling legislation that defined the educational objectives of the programmes. Film production, in association with non-theatrical institutions, such as universities, schools, educational television, and museums, provided a solution. Bloom illustrated this with an example: a film project on the anthropology of African dance that the black female dancer Pearl Primus was preparing as a part of her doctoral dissertation at New York University. This film was “made specifically for grade school children to help them to understand African culture through dance and through sculpture [. . .] this is Pearl [sic] Premus on film, but it is not Pearl Premus on film just because she is Pearl Premus, you see.”47 The film was produced by a minority artist and scholar within an educational institution, and only shown in non-theatrical networks. Such an application of audio-visual technology in educational environments was presented as a way to use film in education and not competing with theatrical film production. Increasing the number of independently-produced educational films invoked the need to incorporate new aesthetics and more experimental approaches. The chairman noted the little availability and poor standards of films that would feed into educational television programming and engage young audiences. He highlighted the collection of Encyclopaedia Britannica Films as an example of educational films, but Stevens argued that these were insufficient, noting also that the educational standards of the theatrical companies were not adequate. Stevens then insisted that the NCA needed not only to preserve dance in film but also train people “to learn the methods to film those dances.”48 Most likely, Stevens was aware of experimental films using different methods to explore dance and movement, as he had worked with filmmakers such as Shirley Clarke and Ed Emshwiller at the USIA. From the point of promoting innovative aesthetics for educational films, Stevens led the discussion towards renewing film training, framing this by the need to keep international leadership. Training was an issue he had already been involved in at the USIA when facilitating mentoring programmes. He had also mentioned to Kennedy a project about potential exchanges with foreign students. Furthermore, in June 1964 Stevens wrote a paper titled “A Festival for All Seasons” arguing for the role of film festivals in public diplomacy and it was quoted in the congressional debates before the passing of the National Cultural Development Act.49 These different elements came together when he articulated his vision for innovation, education, and international leadership to the NCA. Stevens started expressing concerns about both the American

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mainstream film industry and film training being disconnected from what was happening in the rest of the world. He then conjured the vision of making more innovative films in order to increase America’s cultural status. He explained this with an anecdote: “I met a man the other day that came from Iran. He was studying at University. He came here to learn films, because America is the place to learn films.”50 But, Stevens continued, this reputation was fading, lagging behind the younger European cinemas because when the young people would come to this country to learn about films, [they] are coming because of something that was passed on from the past, not from the present. They certainly can learn more about having to do with the cinematic art of [sic] Czecho-Slovakia than they can in America, and certainly in France, and in England.51

This statement made the case for innovating in American film production and furthering film training by comparing contemporary Hollywood and European film culture. From Stevens’ perspective, the United States risked losing its cultural influence now that the international youth and film criticism were attending to European cinemas. Stevens singled out Czechoslovakia, which was going through a process of de-Stalinization during the first half of the 1960s. While at the USIA, Stevens had been fundamental in organising the U.S. delegation to attend the Karlovy Vary film festival in 1962 and 1964. Presumably, there he would have been able to witness how film schools and production units allowed wider margins for formal experimentation and social commentary, giving way to the Czech New Wave with filmmakers such as Milos Forman, Vera Chytilova, and Jan Kadar coming to the fore. With this comparison, he invoked to the NCA the fear of losing cultural appeal to the Cold War adversaries. Stevens’ argument had moved the discussion from the production of better educational films to the revitalisation of theatrical cinema through education to maintain the U.S. cultural influence and with it, its political status. This led him to explain the advantages of a single independent agency such as a film institute. In his vision, an institute could resolve the needs of the educational and theatrical film sectors by setting up standards for both and thus lead the path to the future. He included a film school in the institute’s plan which would act as a landmark for other university film courses. The council continued discussing other important issues that day: first, the lack of integration of film education with other liberal arts, and second, the need for curricular reform to balance the teaching of sciences and arts, both important aspects linking the film institute project with wider education policy. At the end of this Special Meeting in June, Peck and Stevens suggested commissioning a study from the Stanford Research Institute (SRI). The study

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was to examine possible arrangements and locations for the film institute. It had to consider the optimal administration of the NCA’s money and decide where the Office of Education would fit into the institute’s plan. When Johnson signed into law the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act that September, he publicly announced that “we will create an American Film Institute, bringing together leading artists of the film industry, outstanding educators, and young men and women who wish to pursue the twentieth century art form as their life’s work.”52 While still promising, Johnson’s focus on the leaders of “the film industry” already sounded like a capitulation for those not firmly positioned in the theatrical realm. Johnson also promised the establishment of national institutions to support American ballet, opera, and theatre. Eventually, only the film institute saw the light two years after the announcement, and even then, the actual arrangements for the AFI were far from specified. Stevens had personally contacted Johnson’s press aide, Jack Valenti, to persuade him to include a reference to the film institute in the signing speech.53 The president’s public commitment to create the institute evidences the force of Stevens’ own drive and influence. MOMA OPENS THE DOOR While the SRI report was in preparation, MoMA’s direction took a significant turn in how the institution had engaged with American experimental and independent film so far. Through the 1950s MoMA’s Film Library had organised programmes such as the 1952 Why Experimental Film?, which explored the realm of abstract design in motion, and the more recent one in 1961, The Art of Assemblage, devoted to collage film. Nevertheless, some filmmakers like Maya Deren, who had been campaigning for greater and more sustained recognition, considered MoMA’s attention rather restricted.54 Unfortunately, Deren did not live to see the turn in the institution’s approach in the mid-1960s, when veteran documentary filmmaker Willard Van Dyke became head of the now upgraded MoMA’s film department. In this position, Van Dyke and his secretary Adrienne Mancia endeavoured to bring experimental and independent cinema to a general audience and create more regular screenings of old and new films which eventually would widen these films’ public acceptance and recognition. It is also important to note that the collaboration between MoMA and U.S. diplomatic enterprises expanded during this period to include experimental and independent films. In March 1965, when Van Dyke had just taken his new role, the film department cooperated with the USIA organisation of the Montreal Expo’ 67 which was then looking to commission a three-screen film to be included inside the U.S. pavilion.55 The building was to be a Buckminster Fuller dome housing the film triptych

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alongside pop art paintings, Hollywood movies’ stills and memorabilia, and objects from the space missions, all brought together with the aim to represent the theme of Creative America. To help find a filmmaker for the triptych project, MoMA arranged a private screening of independent and experimental films so the USIA commissioners got acquainted with the work of people such as Richard Leacock, Len Lye, James Blue, Stan Vanderbeek, and Kenneth Anger, amongst others. Even though none of the sample of filmmakers was finally selected for the commission, this collaboration demonstrated the ongoing interest of using experimental and independent cinema and expanded screenings to signify American cultural identity in diplomatic contexts such as festivals and international exhibitions. Experimental and independent cinema was also the focus of Van Dyke’s first public film programme at MoMA. It took place in November 1965 and consisted of screenings and a debate on the work associated with the New American Cinema Group. The Independent Film Series: Selections from the New York Film-Makers’ Co-operative ran for a week at the museum’s auditorium.56 The project developed from a joint effort by the film department, MoMA’s Junior Council, which had recently organised a New Cinema Committee, and the Film-Makers’ Cooperative. The arrangements for the programme started in May 1965, as the organisers wanted it to coincide with the November New American Cinema Festival, also known as Expanded Cinema Festival, which was organised by Jacob Brockman, then working at the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque. Amongst the objectives of the series was to inform public opinion by highlighting professional artistic values. In a memo, Adrienne Mancia outlined the need to present a selection of these films and the difficulty of doing so. She observed that second-hand knowledge, lurid publicity and judgement by association are a disservice to the serious and talented filmmaker (. . .) Exposure of these films to an examination by the general public is, I believe, healthy—healthy for the community, the filmmaker and the art and craft of film.57

With these words Mancia stated MoMA’s contribution to eliminating the pornography controversies, myths, and misinformation. Furthermore, she asserted the suitability of MoMA’s criteria to make specific filmmakers stand out within the diversity of films represented by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative. To do so, MoMA would “raise again the familiar question, what is cinema, how does a film mean.”58 The symposium thus engaged with the current debates on film culture in specialised journals. MoMA’s officers were aware of the subcultural connotations of the term underground with which many of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative films were then associated. Margareta Ackerman, from the Junior Council, warned Mancia about this, stating that

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“underground filmmakers have certain social and sexual mores (the whole gestalt thing) which they believe differentiate them from the rest of us.”59 If MoMA avoided the term underground, it could be more inclusive in its selection and skirt the associations that repelled the more conservative audiences and purchasers of 16 mm films. MoMA’s director Rene D’Hanoncourt also recommended they drop the word.60 The institution thus opted to present a selection of these films from a middle and more socially-acceptable ground. Throughout the summer of 1965, the New Cinema Committee collaborated with Sheldon Renan in the organisation of the series. Renan was then a projectionist at the Pacific Film Society. He had written on Andy Warhol and was preparing a book on underground cinema. According to Michael Zimmer, chairman of the committee, Renan suggested “abbreviated screenings of certain films,” which could be a way to avoid the more controversial content.61 Renan also informed Zimmer that the New York Times was interested in the underground phenomenon, and that he wanted to write a piece coinciding with the show. Such writing would pitch these films as art, noted Zimmer, to make this type of cinema accessible to different audiences, because “ladies are too scared to go down to the Village, but this will no longer be a social event but an art event.”62 The programme would last for a week to give it the air of a festival, following the aims of giving “publicity for the movement and public education.”63 Variety anticipated the opening of the Series with an article that stuck to the term underground that the organisers had hoped to avoid. Variety also emphasised the more controversial aspects of the films. The article explained that these filmmakers’ “works range from the purely abstract to the unabashed purely pornographic (at least, that’s what the New York courts said about one of their features, Flaming Creatures).”64 For Variety the event meant that underground cinema “is now about to be recognized, though not necessarily accepted.”65 Such statements presented these films in tension with the stances of the general public and popular theatrical films. The challenge was enthusiastically punctuated by Van Dyke’s comments on the need for the general public to form an opinion on, “perhaps the single most significant fact of the cinema scene in the past ten years.”66 Van Dyke thus emphasised the serious purpose and much needed assessment of experimental and independent films that MoMA was undertaking. The opening of the series on November 18 was followed by a symposium entitled “Whither the Underground: A Discussion on the Independent Film” held in the museum’s auditorium.67 Amongst the panellists were filmmaker Robert Breer, cartoonist and painter Robert Osborne, and critics Susan Sontag and Judith Christ. A transcription of the symposium notes was made available at the request of Glamour, Mademoiselle, and Artforum.68 Van Dyke framed the discussion in terms of the potential of 16 mm equipment. To him, this had “led to an interest in probing the behaviour of human beings with a minimum

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of interference by the film-maker. It has also led to the idea that a single individual can make an effective film.”69 His assertion engaged with the concerns on objectivity and technology of documentary filmmakers, and ideas about individual filmmakers’ creative control, these being the basic components of “the personal film” whose forms, he admitted, were “almost as varied as the number of films produced.”70 Moreover, Van Dyke, who had testified in favour of Flaming Creatures during the censorship scandal, resolved the accusations of pornography that had previously caused uproar, pointing out that sex was just one amongst the variety of themes in these films. Accounting for MoMA’s selection processes, he said We found that, naturally enough, sexual behavior was one of the elements found in many of the films. But there was more than this. There was a concern with how man made his living, as in Mr. Hayashi. There was a return to childhood fantasy as in Sin of the Fleshapoids. There were artists who used symbology in the most contemporary terms, as in SCORPIO RISING and in Ed Emshwiller’s unfinished work entitled Relativity. And there were the delightful clarifying films of Stan Vanderbeek and Bob Breer.

Without reference to the drugs content of Scorpio Rising, Van Dyke emphasised its playful attitude towards symbols as characteristic of contemporary pop culture, offering a counter perspective on what others had considered blasphemous. Additionally, he stressed the films’ diverse explorations of matters such as sex, labour, imagination, and society. Van Dyke finished by defending MoMA’s commitment to present new work, engaging with the idea that modern art needs challenges to keep itself alive. After the screening, Van Dyke directed the debate towards questions of innovation in form and content, and discussed the presumed lower status of these films in relation to theatrical cinema and other arts.71 Breer underscored these films’ subversive stances “in terms of a revolutionary attitude toward society and more specifically towards conventional cinema itself.”72 Breer also acknowledged that the label underground was as misused by journalists as the tag pop art had been before. Eventually, they all agreed that there were no clear-cut themes and concepts which could encompass all the New American Cinema’s experimentations, noting the disparity between Breer’s and Anger’s work as an example. This conclusion stood in contrast with the cinema of the New Waves coming from France and Czechoslovakia where the discussants saw more readily identifiable aesthetics and themes. Trying to answer for lack of impact of the New American Cinema beyond specialised circles, Sontag noted that “I don’t just believe that it is because there aren’t talented people in this country ( . . . ) But perhaps it is ultimately an economic thing.”73 This comment led to one last observation by Christ regarding

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Hollywood’s sophisticated production and distribution infrastructures. Christ thought that Hollywood’s organisation and economic scale would have curtailed filmmakers’ creativity, as if artists are more original the less they are subjected to external forces. Sontag noted such a romantic idea was erroneous and, at some point, attempted to examine the wider industrial conditions affecting experimental and independent filmmakers in the United States. The discussion, however, diverted and the debate reached a dead end. The programme was considered an overall success. It allowed the film department to update its collection and rental service and received wide coverage in the press. Howard Junker reviewed the MoMA’s Series and the month-long New Cinema Festival (Expanded Cinema Festival) in an article in The Nation.74 Junker praised the technical competence of some of the individuals included in MoMA’s Series but regretted the material limitations within which they worked. He thought these limitations were curbing a substantial development of underground cinema, something he saw reflected in the inconclusiveness of MoMA’s symposium. Instead, he praised the “business sense” of Jacob Brockman in organising the Expanded Cinema Festival. The festival featured many multimedia works, such as experiments using projections, music, and dance performances. It included artists like USCO, Nam June Paik, Stan Vanderbeek, Andy Warhol, and Robert Rauschenberg. The selection highlighted an element of the New American Cinema which brought it closer to contemporary art practices than to European art films and New Wave cinemas. After praising the works selected for the festival, Junker stated, single screen movies are well and good, but the art form of the age is something else. ( . . . ) We need something bigger, more complex, more satisfying to the total sensorium. And whatever stimulation the Expanded Cinema Festival may have given the Underground, it also pointed the way to the spectacle of the future.75

Junker’s underscoring of the value of the intense aesthetic experience was permeated by McLuhan’s ideas on technology and communication. For Junker, expanded cinema offered a more promising avenue of aesthetic and infrastructural development. His example was Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome presented at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, which later appeared in Montreal in 1967. For Junker, the dome represented a fruitful collaboration between manufacturers, sponsors, broadcasters, artists, and researchers. The emphasis on these values opened new possibilities for financing, technological development, and public outreach. It differentiated these practices from amateur and underground productions and brought them closer to artistic and research enterprises with large institutional backing. Notably, the RF’s Arts

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Program officers attending both these events studied such considerations as they were sketching out their own approach to supporting experimental and independent filmmaking. QUESTIONS OF NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT After the New American Cinema Festival and the Independent Film Series, RF’s officers Boyd R. Compton and Henry Romney decided to give some tentative grants to experimental filmmakers. Romney was particularly acquainted with the New York underground community; from his personal office in the Rockefeller Center, Warhol had shot Empire (1964) with assistance from Jonas Mekas, an eight-hour fixed frame film of the top of the Empire State Building. Following the precepts of the 1963 Rockefeller Arts Program, Romney and Compton set out to define style, infrastructures, and critical apparatuses, singling out individuals, institutions, and critical approaches through fellowships and flagship projects. To do this, the officers asked for recommendations from people like Willard Van Dyke, Colin Young, Amos Vogel, and the New York gallerist Howard Wise, who specialised in exhibiting light and kinetic art works. However, the officers did not want to clash with the decisions on federal support for film and the tasks to be assumed by the forthcoming AFI. The Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Cinematheque appeared as firm candidates for the RF’s support, but Ernest Callenbach indicated that any support granted should be aimed at “stabilization and expansion on a truly national basis.”76 This entailed that the cooperative establish a business-like governing structure representative of the nation. Otherwise, Callenbach pointed out, the RF’s officers risked finding themselves “with a New York organisation that in fact has nothing to do with anything going on elsewhere.”77 Although the RF received a proposal from Film Culture in December 1965 to fund the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque screenings, the foundation decided to allocate money only to the individual salaries of Jacob Brockman and Leslie Trumbull.78 At this juncture, the decision to fund individuals through fellowships proved less difficult than supporting specific institutions. The RF decided to fund Stan Vanderbeek on grounds of his technical skills, and the research and the pedagogical applications of his work. Vanderbeek was then working as associate professor at Columbia University and had had a show at a New York gallery. While he had produced many films thanks to the Ford grant, he was interested in transcending single-screen projections.79 The officers contacted him regarding his movie-drome project in Stoney Brook, New York, a spherical building inspired by Fuller’s geodesic domes. Vanderbeek wanted to create an immersive viewing experience by

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having audiences lie on their backs while watching films projected on the interior of the dome. In response to the officers’ interest, he submitted a proposal to the RF that emphasised the need to carry out research into existing audio-visual devices, and to develop techniques for the presentation of experimental cinema.80 Additionally, he manifested his interest in applying McLuhan’s ideas, using films to induce repulsion to violence. He speculated on the possibility of setting up movie-dromes outside the United States too, aware of the potential of this project for cultural exchange and diplomacy. Vanderbeek’s application was endorsed by Rudolf Arnheim and Lutrelle Wassman, who agreed on the technological skills and educational value of his work.81 In 1966 Vanderbeek received a $14,500 grant from the RF Cultural Development fund which helped him to finish the construction of the movie-drome in the coming years. Inside it, Vanderbeek installed projectors which showed slides, documentary footage, and his own films while other activities and performances took place in the spherical space. Key to understand this audiovisually-saturated environment was that it opened possibilities of interactivity to projectionists, performers, and audience, changing with each individual experience, which was one of the running threads of nascent expanded cinema practices. During the years Vanderbeek enjoyed the Rockefeller grant, he maintained other fruitful parallel projects where he explored aesthetics, communication and technology. Starting in 1964, Vanderbeek had been part of a collaboration between artists and scientists enabled by Bell Telephone laboratories. There he worked with Ken Knowlton to develop the mosaic-like computer graphics that resulted in the Poemfield films (1965–1971). This type of collaborations and outputs exemplified the potential of experimental film envisioned by Junker after the Expanded Cinema Festival. Another Rockefeller grant went to Tony Conrad who also represented the convergence of intellectual, artistic, and technological pursuits. Conrad was a musician with a background in mathematics, but he was a younger artist and even more difficult to pin down within traditional arts and intellectual practices. In 1965 he was working on his first film, The Flicker, a five-minute film consisting of alternating black and white frames, where a flashing light after a black frame produced the illusion that the white light on the screen was coloured. This reductionist strategy offered an illustration that all that is seen is a product of the brain. The film was accompanied by a soundtrack, also created by Conrad with a synthesiser he built for the occasion. RF’s officers responded sympathetically to Conrad’s spontaneous address to the foundation after MoMA’s Series, where he explained his interest in filmmaking techniques that could explore the conscious and unconscious aspects of perception. Henry Romney saw the potential of his work in “the systematic development of a non-verbal system of aesthetics based on the most direct

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neuronic path between retina, occiput, and cortical motor and sensory areas— in other words, the bypassing of the reasoning process in reacting to visual perceptions.”82 While this understanding connected Conrad with the RF’s funding on other areas of scientific research on psychology and communications, the decision to support him proved complicated in terms of defining the length of the grant and the expected outcomes.83 Through 1966, Conrad had several interviews with the foundation’s representatives. The officers sought external opinion and approached critic and curator Henry Geldzahler, who was then sitting at the NCA discussions, and kept good relations with New York’s arts community.84 Eventually, Conrad was awarded $14,400 for a period of thirty-six months, but a note on the grant, written by James Kellum Smith, the foundation’s vice president, objected that “a very young worker on such a volatile medium might better be given a grant for a shorter period.”85 Still, given the strong trust of the other officers, Kellum Smith signed the letter of notification to Conrad. The hesitant decision on Conrad contrasted with the other two awards made for thirty-six months to Stan Brakhage and Bruce Baillie, who worked in the lyrical and low-budget tradition more readily identified as “personal films” within the New American Cinema. With regards to them, Kellum Smith acknowledged that they were “mature, thoroughly established filmmakers.”86 These grants were recommended by Van Dyke after the Series and approved in March and July 1966 respectively.87 The films of West Coast–based Baillie were both poetic and observational. Baillie often used superimpositions and close-ups to create what Jonas Mekas dubbed a “pastoral style,” where the life of Americans, often indigenous ones, appeared idealised, enacting their own foundational myths, in the continent’s vast and diverse environments. He had achieved acclaim with To Parsifal (1963) and Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964), the latter winning the Grand Prize at Ann Arbour Film Festival. Baillie had unsuccessfully applied to the Ford grants before, but his RF grant gave him a living stipend for a few years, while he produced films like the luminous Valentín de Las Sierras (1967).88 During this time, Baillie continued working to expand San Francisco’s Canyon Cinema into a distribution organisation which, like the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in New York, had an open policy and share of profits that benefited the filmmaker. Similarly, Brakhage had reached a distinctive style and audience at this point of his career. The success and specialised debates around Dog Star Man (1964), an epic on the creation of the universe, gave credit to it. The RF grant allowed him to continue with his prolific production over the later part of the 1960s, making compilations films such as Scenes from Under Childhood (Stan Brakhage, 1967–1970).89 The RF’s decisions, as well as the Ford Foundation’s before, implied a loose definition of what forms of experimental filmmaking were worth protecting and promoting, despite the

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“volatility” of some of these practices. Notably, there was only one female amongst the Ford grantees, Helen Levitt, who was renowned for her street photography and cinematography for films such as The Savage Eye (Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, and Joseph Strick, 1959). But there were none amongst the RF grantees, despite their relevance as filmmakers and close involvement in the experimental and independent film culture in New York and San Francisco, as it was the case of Storm de Hirsch and Chick Strand, which draws attention to the gender inequality that permeated these processes of selection and recognition. Such absences or only marginal mention were also part of the ensuing historicization of American experimental and independent cinema, as more systematic studies of these practices started to appear at this point in connection with Rockefeller support. HISTORICISING THE UNDERGROUND In 1966, Sheldon Renan, who had collaborated in the organisation of MoMA’s Series, applied to the RF for funds to finish his book The Underground Film, which would become a landmark work for later audiences, filmmakers, and scholars.90 Reviewing the application, Romney referred to the usefulness of Renan’s project, not as a critical study, but as an accurate inventory of underground filmmakers directed at undergraduates and film society programmers. Hence, the book would enable the latter “to program from a position of real knowledge instead of present day hearsay and guesswork.”91 Renan’s application was favourably referred to the RF by Eileen Bowser from MoMA’s Film Department and filmmaker Standish Lawder, who at that time was finishing his thesis on the relationship between experimental cinema, modern art and vision.92 Once finished, Romney recommended that Renan send a copy of the book to George Stevens Jr., who was “very interested in the college aspects of film-making and viewing, amongst other things,” thus being aware of Stevens’ wanting to incorporate a wide conception of American film culture in the institute plans.93 Today, Renan’s book has acquired historical significance as one of the earlier books dealing with this period’s American experimental films, even though Gregory Battock’s The New American Cinema came out the same year by the same publishers.94 One distinctive feature of Renan’s book is that the underground is located and specified within a set of notions and canons of film culture and film history that highlight the free character of artistic expression, or as Renan put it, “the artist’s unmitigated vision.”95 Willard Van Dyke’s foreword romanticises this vision as one that only seeks self-expression stating that “if you have something to say, and only yourself to satisfy, the limitations are your skill, the persistence of your vision, and the availability of a little money.”96 Van Dyke limited the influence

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of these films by saying that their self-expressive function overrode their aims to engage with audiences, and did not point out that their lack of reach could be due to infrastructural limitations. Renan, instead, offered a more complex characterisation, even if still following the idea of personal expression. Renan explained that “the term ‘underground film’ belongs to the sixties but the personal film is not a new phenomenon. It goes back almost to the beginning of film.”97 His loose historicization passed from early trick films like George Méliès’ to amateur films and art films. It also included the work of American innovators such as D. W. Griffith, Edwin S. Porter, and Mack Sennett, focusing on innovative techniques in a way not too different from Iris Barry’s MoMA programme notes. These antecedents set a long tradition of “personal films” where the directorial male figure crafted the film materials according to his creative vision. Renan’s historical sketch of the underground followed from Lewis Jacobs’ earlier exposition on the pre-war European avant-garde and its legacy on post-war American experimental cinema and updated the account to the 1960s, loosely following Jonas Mekas’ foundational discussion of the New American Cinema.98 He identified groups and styles, as in “Dance and Pattern Films,” “The West Coast Abstract School” and “New American Cinema.” For Renan, however, what differentiated the underground from the New American Cinema was that the later was a broader group whose main stance was its rebellion against Hollywood’s dominance. In the section “A Gallery of Film-Makers,” Renan examined the 1960s boom in filmmaking and included a nicely illustrated and extensive biographical and thematic outline of the best-known filmmakers of the time, such as Bruce Conner, Ken Jacobs, Larry Jordan, Andy Warhol, Robert Breer, and Carmen D’Avino. Renan’s argument on filmmaker’s vision acquired more complexity when he described how underground production, distribution, and exhibition infrastructures appeared in contrast to the conditions governing Hollywood. The latter, he noted, worked on the premise “that every film should make immediate sense, economically, visually, morally and politically.”99 While he did not identify the whole of the underground as having a specific style or political position, he pointed out that non-Hollywood productions enjoyed a form of self-determination that enabled more freedom of expression, especially with regards to openly representing gay and female eroticism. Yet, Renan did not state that the underground freedom was also relative, omitting that critics and programmers also acted as gatekeepers favouring certain aesthetics, forms of self-expression, and quality standards, as it was frequently pointed out in discussions on New American Cinema by people like Amos Vogel and Parker Tyler.100 Nevertheless, Renan’s rendition of the underground filmmakers enjoying creative freedom and pursuing technological exploration was influential for subsequent studies on experimental and independent cinema where the figure of the film author and innovation came to the front.

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Similarly, the recognition and support through grants of selected filmmakers responded to the values and priorities of patrons, critics, and curators, and that had an effect in creating a canon of renowned filmmakers at that time. Nevertheless, while philanthropies like the RF explicitly acknowledged the value of supporting minority practices per se, in addition to their understanding of the benefits of managing arts practices, it was still not clear at this point what would be the best way to philanthropically support an art like filmmaking from an inclusive nationwide perspective. NOTES 1. Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003). 2. Gregory M. Tomlin, Murrow’s Cold War: Public Diplomacy for the Kennedy Administration (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016). 3. Nicholas J. Cull, “Projecting Jackie: Kennedy Administration Film Propaganda Overseas in Leo Seltzer’s Invitation to India, Invitation to Pakistan and Jacqueline Kennedy’s Asian Journey,” in Propaganda: Political Rhetoric and Identity 1300–2000, ed. Bertrand Taithe and Tim Thornton (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999), 307–326. 4. Carol B. Schwalbe, “Jacqueline Kennedy and Cold War Propaganda,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 49, no. 1 (March 2005): 111–127. 5. Heide Fehrenbach, “The Berlin International Film Festival: Between Cold War Politics and Postwar Reorientation,” Studies in European Cinema 17, no. 2 (2020): 81–96. 6. George Stevens Jr., My Place in the Sun: Life in the Golden Age of Hollywood and Washington (Kentucky: Kentucky University Press, 2022). 7. Stevens, My Place in the Sun, p.176 8. Nicholas J. Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1954–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 209. 9. Richard Dyer MacCann, The People’s Films: A Political History of U.S. Government Motion Pictures (New York: Hastings House, 1973), 186. 10. MacCann, The People’s Films, 196. 11. Nicholas J. Cull, “Auteurs of Ideology: USIA Documentary Film Propaganda in the Kennedy Era as Seen in Bruce Herschensohn’s The Five Cities of June (1963) and James Blue’s The March (1964),” Film History 10, no. 3 (1998): 295–310. 12. Tomlin, Murrow’s Cold War. 13. Adam Knee and Charles Musser, “William Greaves, Documentary Filmmaking, and the African-American Experience,” Film Quarterly 3, vol. 45 (Spring 1992), 13–25. 14. George Stevens Jr. to Fred Zinnemann, November 12, 1963, Box 124, Folder 6, Fred Zinnemann Papers 1923–1996, Margaret Herrick Library Special Collections, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

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15. Ford Foundation, Annual Report (New York: Ford Foundation, 1963), 24. 16. Ford Foundation, Annual Report (New York: Ford Foundation, 1964), 78. 17. Kenneth Anger, Ed Emshwiller, Bruce Conner, James Blue, Carmen D’Avino, Jordan Belson, Stan Vanderbeek, Helen Levitt, Daniel Drasin, John R. MacDermott, Hilary T. Harris, and Kent Mackenzie. 18. “In the Year of Our Ford,” Time, April 3, 1964. accessed 06/07/2022. 19. “In the Year of Our Ford.” 20. Elaine M. Bapis, Camera and Action: American Film as Agent of Social Change, 1965–1975 (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland and Company, 2008). 21. Colin Young, “The American Experimental Film in the Last Decade Report” (UNESCO’s Contribution to the Mannheim Table, Paris, 12 October 1964). National Film and Television Archive, British Film Institute, London. 22. Bapis, Camera and Action. 23. David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 24. Jack Sargeant, Naked Lens: An Illustrated History of Beat Cinema (London: Creation, 1997). 25. Lord of the Flies Correspondence, 1960–1964. Lewis Allen Collection, 32.4, HRHRC. 26. Lewis Allen to Investors, December 7, 1964. The Lord of the Flies Correspondence 1961–1964, Receipts. Lewis Allen Collection, 32.5, HRHRC. 27. David Ehrensten, “Jack Smith,” in Film: The Front Line (Denver: Arden Press, 1984), 26. 28. Susan Sontag, “Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures,” in The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battock (New York: Dutton, 1967), 210. 29. Juan A. Suárez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). 30. Rockefeller Brothers Fund, The Performing Arts: Problems and Prospects, Rockefeller Panel Report on the Future of Theatre, Dance, Music in America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965). This report followed from the Heckscher Report commissioned by Kennedy’s administration to press forward the arts legislation. The Rockefeller Panel was led by Nancy Hanks, who had been the executive secretary for the earlier Rockefeller Brothers Fund’s reports and later became chair of the NCA between 1969 and 1977. See more on Hanks in chapter 4. 31. Charles P. Snow, The Two Cultures, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 32. Charles P. Snow, Science and Government (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 77. 33. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 1999). 34. Boyd R. Compton, “The RF and the Arts,” April 10, 1963, p. 1, folder 2, box 1, series 925, RG 3.2, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 35. Boyd R. Compton, “The RF and the Arts,” April 10, 1963, p. 1, folder 2, box 1, series 925, RG 3.2, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.

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36. Boyd R. Compton, “The RF and the Arts,” April 10, 1963, p. 2, folder 2, box 1, series 925, RG 3.2, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 37. Boyd R. Compton, “The RF and the Arts,” April 10, 1963, p. 2, folder 2, box 1, series 925, RG 3.2, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 38. Toby Miller and George Yúdice, “The United States, Cultural Policy and the National Endowment for the Arts,” in Cultural Policy, ed. Toby Miller and George Yúdice (London: Sage, 2002), 35–71. 39. Michael Brenson, Visionaries and Outcasts: The NEA, Congress and the Place of the Visual Artist in America (New York: The New Press, 2001). 40. John Kreidler, “Leverage Lost: The Nonprofit Arts in the Post-Ford Era,” Journal of Arts Management, Law and Society, 26, no. 2 (Summer, 1996): 79–100. 41. The Performing Arts, 198. 42. Stanley S. Madeja, “Kathryn Bloom and the Genesis of the Arts in Education Movement,” Art Education 45, no. 4 (July 1992): 45–51. 43. “Study and Position Paper: The Arts and Access to America Higher Education,” Current Programs in Public Media and Education, page 2. Seventh Meeting of the National Council on the Arts, December 14–15, 1966. National Endowment for the Arts-National Council of the Arts Records of Meetings, 1965–1992, RG288, National Archives at College Park, Maryland, (NACP). 44. Saettler, The Evolution of American Educational Technology, 412. 45. Special Meeting, National Council on the Arts, Tarrytown, June 25, 1965, p.46. NEA- NCA Records of Meetings, 1965–1992, RG288, NACP. 46. Special Meeting of the National Council on the Arts, Tarrytown, June 25, 1965, p. 47. NEA-NCA Records of Meetings, 1965–1992. RG288, NACP. 47. Special Meeting of the NCA, Tarrytown, June 25, 1965, p. 48. NEA-NCA Records of Meetings, 1965–1992. RG288, NACP. 48. Special Meeting of the NCA, Tarrytown, June 25, 1965, p. 49. NEA-NCA Records of Meetings, 1965–1992. RG288, NACP. 49. Congressional Record, Proceedings and Debates of the 88th Congress, vol. 110, part 10, June 6 to 16 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1964). 50. Special Meeting of the NCA, Tarrytown, June 25, 1965, p. 49. NEA-NCA Records of Meetings, 1965–1992. RG288, NACP. 51. Special Meeting of the NCA, Tarrytown, June 25, 1965, p. 51. NEA-NCA Records of Meetings, 1965–1992. RG288, NACP. 52. Lyndon B. Johnson, “Remarks at the Signing of the Arts and Humanities Bill, September 29, 1965,” in The American Presidency Project, ed. John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, https:​//​www​.presidency​.ucsb​.edu​/documents​/remarks​-the​-signing​-the​ -arts​-and​-humanities​-bill accessed 11/07/2022. 53. Brian Real, “Out of the Past: Public Policies, Political Pressures and American Film Preservation” (PhD Diss., University of Maryland, College Park, 2015). 54. Peter Decherney, Hollywood and the Cultural Elite: How the Movies Became American (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 55. Brian Real, “Designing Diplomacy: Jack Masey and Multiscreen Cinema at Expo 67” Journal of E-Media Studies, Special Issue 6.1 (2002).

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56. It included works from Vernon Zimmerman, Bruce Conner, Mike Kuchar, Stan Vanderbeek, Stan Brakhage, Ed Emshwiller, Gregory Markopoulos, Bruce Baillie, Stanton Kaye, Ron Rice, Jonas Mekas, and Harry Smith. Department of Film Exhibition Files, 176. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. 57. Memorandum. Adrienne Mancia. Film, 177. MoMA Archives, NY. 58. Memorandum. Adrienne Mancia. Film, 177. MoMA Archives, NY. 59. Margareta Akerman to Adrienne Mancia, May 7, 1965. Film, 177. MoMA Archives, NY. 60. New Cinema Meeting, August 26, 1965. Film, 177. MoMA Archives, NY. 61. Michael Zimmer to Adrienne Mancia, July 12, 1965. Film, 177. MoMA Archives, NY. 62. Michael Zimmer to Adrienne Mancia July 12, 1965. Film, 177. MoMA Archives, NY. 63. New Cinema Meeting, August 3, 1965. Film, 177. MoMA Archives, NY. 64. Variety, “Underground Cinema Has Foot Inside Museum Door,” November 3, 1965. 65. Variety “Underground Cinema.” 66. Variety “Underground Cinema.” 67. The Independent Film Symposium. November 18, 1965. Film, 176. MoMA Archives, NY. 68. Elizabeth Shaw to Willard Van Dyke. Film, 176. MoMA Archives, NY. 69. The Independent Film Symposium. November 18, 1965. Film, 176. MoMA Archives, NY. 70. The Independent Film Symposium. November 18, 1965, p. 2. Film, 176. MoMA Archives, NY. 71. The Independent Film Symposium. November 18, 1965, p. 4. Film, 176. MoMA Archives, NY. 72. The Independent Film Symposium. November 18, 1965, p. 5. Film, 176. MoMA Archives, NY. 73. The Independent Film Symposium. November 18, 1965, p. 5. Film, 176. MoMA Archives, NY. 74. Howard Junker, “The Underground Renaissance,” The Nation, December 27, 1965. 75. Junker, “The Underground Renaissance.” 76. Ernest Callenbach to Boyd R. Compton, February 1, 1966, p. 2, folder 2792, box 299, series 200, RG 1.2, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 77. Ernest Callenbach to Boyd R. Compton, February 1, 1966, p. 2, folder 2792, box 299, series 200, RG 1.2, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 78. Kreul, “New York, New Cinema,” 328. 79. Gloria Sutton, The Experience Machine: Stan VanDerBeek’s Movie Drome and Expanded Cinema (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015). 80. Letter, Stan Vanderbeek, November 2, 1965, folder 3983, box 466, series 200R, RG 1.2, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 81. Stan Vanderbeek, folder 3983, box 466, series 200R, RG 1.2, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.

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82. Interoffice Correspondence, November 22, 1965, folder 2965, box 321, series 200R, RG 1.2, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 83. Interoffice Correspondence, November 22, 1965, folder 2965, box 321, series 200R, RG 1.2, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 84. Henry Geldzahler to Boyd Compton, August 4, 1966, folder 2965, box 321, series 200R, RG 1.2, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 85. Note on GA Arts 6634, September 27, 1966, folder, 2965, box 321, series 200R, RG 1.2, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 86. Note on GA Arts 6634, September 27, 1966, folder 2965, box 321, series 200R, RG 1.2, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 87. Interview Willard Van Dyke, November 19, 1965, folder 3983, box 466, series 200R, RG 1.2, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 88. Bruce Baillie, folder 2763, box 295, series 200R, R.G. 1.2, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 89. Stan Brakhage, folder 2792, box 299, series 200, RG 1.2, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 90. Sheldon Renan’s application 1966, folder 3532, Series 200R, RG 1.2, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 91. Henry Romney, Interoffice Correspondence, folder 3532, box 409, series 200R, RG 1.2, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 92. Sheldon Renan’s application 1966, folder 3532, box 409, series 200R, RG 1.2, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. See Standish Lawder “Structuralism and Movement in Experimental Film and Modern Art, 1896–1925” (PhD Diss.: Yale University, 1967). 93. Henry Romney to Sheldon Renan, September 25, 1967, folder 3532, box 409, series 200R, RG 1.2, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 94. Sheldon Renan, The Underground Film: An Introduction to its Development in America. (London: Studio Vista, 1968), first published in the U.S. in 1967 by E.P. Dutton. Gregory Battock, The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1967). 95. Renan, The Underground Film, 51. 96. Willard Van Dyke, foreword to The Underground Film, 12. 97. Renan, The Underground Film, 17–18. 98. Jonas Mekas, “Notes on the New American Cinema,” in Experimental Cinema. The Film Reader, ed. Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (London: Routledge, 2002), 55–70. 99. Renan, The Underground Film, 210. 100. See Amos Vogel, “Thirteen Confusions,” in The New American Cinema: A Critical Introduction, ed. Gregory Battock (New York, Dutton, 1967), 124–138; Parker Tyler, “No Establishment at All?,” in Underground Film: A Critical History (London: Secker and Warburg, 1969), 33–34.

Chapter 3

The American Film Institute Takes Shape

THE STUDY OF FILM AS AN ART FORM Following Young’s 1961 proposal, an American film institute had been incorporated in 1963, even though the financial and administrative specifications of this project were never put into place.1 Some of the people behind that proposal were meeting regularly at the Lincoln Center, and some of them also took part in a major conference in Dartmouth College in October 1965. The conference was led by the ACE and supported by the U.S. Office of Education. At Dartmouth, the interests of colleges film societies were well represented. Dartmouth was chosen for being a key distribution point for the American Federation of Film Societies and where its chair, Jack C. Ellis, taught. At the conference there was a strong focus on the development of film studies as an academic discipline. David C. Stewart, an early instigator of National Education Television in the 1950s and media consultant to the ACE, edited a report in 1966 from what was discussed at the conference.2 The report built on previous ACE studies and was financially supported by the MPAA, which demonstrates the long-standing work of the ACE on film education matters, and the occasional material support offered by the MPAA. The report formalised contemporary ideas about how academic film studies could be institutionalised.3 It was devised to assist college teachers and administrators planning courses in the history, criticism, and appreciation of motion pictures from a firm consideration of film as an art form. Interestingly, film critic and historian Arthur Knight offered his view on film studies in “An Approach to Film History” suggesting groups of films to be examined, listed by their names and distributors, and accompanied by syllabus of readings.4 An important part of the selection of films centred around 85

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technical innovation, with titles such as “An Art Is Born,” “The Theatre Sets the Stage,” and others grouped around soundtrack, the moving camera, and editing. These selections followed closely from the film programmes and topics devised by MoMA, as the author acknowledged. What was more original in this instance was the section devoted to “The Independent Film Artist,” which included films by Ingmar Bergman, Vittorio de Sica, Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, Akira Kurosawa, Alan Resnais, and Satyajit Ray. This non-American sample was followed by “The Independent in America,” which included Stanley Kubrick, Jonas Mekas, John Houston, Frank Perry, David Lean, and Joseph Strick. Another component of the course engaged with documentary filmmaking, with an extensive coverage of British productions, in addition to others such as Robert Flaherty, Leni Riefenstahl, and Willard Van Dyke. Importantly, Knight finished his approach to history involving a section on “The New Avant-Garde” with a list of filmmakers which included Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, James Broughton, Curtis Harrington, Bruce Conner, Stan Vanderbeek, Norman McLaren, Jim Davis, Ian Hugo, and Andy Warhol. Examples from the prewar avant-garde were accommodated under other categories, such as the Soviets under editing, and Weimar Cinema under camera and sound innovations. The specificity of American early avant-garde cinema still had not been researched and acknowledged.5 Knight thus crystallised ideas for the incipient discipline of film studies by advocating the development of a thorough programme of film screenings at campuses, and the advancement of media literacy through learning how to look at films and how to teach them creatively.6 Indeed, this was a shift from looking at films not so much as the carriers of stars or branded by studios but as the result of the directors’ creative decisions, which presumedly would inspire others and lead to innovation and diversity in filmmaking. At the Dartmouth conference there was a special session on the project of the American film institute where contributors envisioned a wide, inclusive, and education-focused institute. Writing his thoughts for Stewart’s edited volume, Colin Young expressed his concerns about the institute project not fulfilling the needs of film scholarship, needs such as having a wide variety of national and international prints available and having regional access to them.7 Young insisted that a film school was not necessary, as he noted that “universities provide sufficient training in film given the present employment chances.”8 In February 1966 it became publicly known that the NCA had allocated funds to the SRI to plan for the American Film Institute.9 Young’s concerns were echoed by Variety, which reported that the people being involved in the first proposal for an American film institute were not being officially included in the discussions run by the SRI.10 They feared that the shape of the institute had already been decided and felt that private interests were

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taking over public needs. The NCA discussions of Spring 1966 evidenced the importance of the potential involvement of the MPAA in the AFI. The practical implications of this became evident in the resolution of the NCA fifth meeting in May 1966. The NCA members had convened to decide the projects that would receive unrestricted funds, having to choose between the National Educational Television project, which aimed to integrate production and distribution of educational programmes for non-commercial stations, the preservation of MoMA’s nitrate film collection, the AFI, a photographic slide project for showing artworks at schools, and a project for audience development.11 Present at this discussion were Livingston Biddle for the NCA, Gregory Peck for the AFI, Rene D’Hanoncourt for MoMA, Henry Geldzahler for the slide project assumed by the Metropolitan Museum of New York, and David C. Stewart for the National Educational Television project. Biddle noted that there had been an increase in war expenditure, and the funds allocated to Great Society projects had decreased. Therefore, they had to prioritise the distribution of the government funds in a way that they attracted significant matching funds from private philanthropies and thus secure the projects took off the ground. D’Hanoncourt explained that transferring MoMA’s collection into acetate was urgently needed as many nitrate films were decomposing and this meant losing an important part of America’s cultural heritage. After asking D’Hanoncourt to leave the room, Peck replied that the institute project should be given priority after National Educational Television and before MoMA. He explained that “we would rather coordinate all the available prints from all sources” and so to lead a national film preservation project.12 For Peck, as much as this was a question of priorities, it was one of practicalities. He said that they were considering matching grants from the MPAA, the Lincoln Center, and UCLA. The focus on practicalities suggested that if the AFI had the support from the MPAA, it would be crucial in advancing AFI’s preservation and scholarship plans. The trust’s influence could facilitate the acquisition of film copies for preservation and help in gathering information for the catalog project, which was to be an important resource for film scholars. Furthermore, the NCA obligation towards the AFI was noted like something inescapable, as the chairman said “we are so far committed into the Film Institute that we would have to use normal appropriations if we can’t get a matching fund.”13 In the end, the NCA decided that the AFI would oversee the preservation project, coordinating the archival resources of MoMA, Library of Congress, and George Eastman House.

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THE STANFORD RESEARCH INSTITUTE REPORT Problems with surveying the needs and potential arrangements for the film institute surfaced in the last part of 1966 when the NCA was waiting on the SRI report. Drawing from a variety of sources and advisors, the SRI report was to gather analytical information to help with the specifics of planning at a later stage.14 In December the council members stated that the report was not finished but that the council “will not be financially obligated for his extension.”15 How the study was funded to its completion is not extant in the NCA records. In the final SRI report, the AFI project appeared as stemming from the Congressional Acts of 1963 and 1964 that established “the case for the federal government to supplement private initiative.”16 It acknowledged that the institute could help the industry become stronger and more comprehensive, but it would not interfere with the industry’s self-regulation. Following the same discourse as the Rockefeller Performing Arts report, to make the case for federal funding, the report focused on how film could contribute to general education and American cultural leadership. Throughout the document there was a mixed and interchangeable conception of the political and economic importance of film, its national and international significance, and the meaning of film education. These various concerns were considered in the AFI’s statement of purpose: To foster and promote national policy to develop leadership of the United States in artistic and cultural film endeavors and the use of film, both nationally and internationally, in the best interests of the country.17

From the start, the study appealed to a broad set of educational interests and stated the institute’s objective to maintain, develop, and coordinate the nation’s artistic and cultural resources on film. This entailed a wide idea of national film culture and heritage, and justified the archival project. The report’s first pages summarised the findings and established some priorities that later proved problematic. It started from narrowing down its area of interest by conceptualising film as an art form as focusing on individual filmmakers, defining these as “those who cause a film to happen and who exercise the dominant ideological influence on its form, content, and overall artistic quality.”18 Thus, it engaged with an auteuristic notion of filmmaking and identified the director as the main creative force behind the work, acknowledging that other skills and trades would fall under and be coordinated by this vision. Despite also recognising the wide range of applications of film, including educational, instructional, documentary, informational, and television, it specified the institute’s focus on theatrical films, for their “length,

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technique, structure, and content, as well as method of exhibition, rarely are equalled in other areas of application.”19 This particular stance towards theatrical filmmakers was expressed as the NCA Film Committee’s own view in the statement: “the Committee believes that the initial focus logically should be placed on deriving the best essence of the creative genius generated within the theatrical film field and communicating it in the interests of developing professional excellence.”20 Following from this focus on the creative individual at the top of a professional hierarchy, and on the theatrical field as the main area of interest and impact, the report stated that the Film Committee had identified “the needs pertaining to film art” as “those concerned with increasing and enhancing opportunities for film makers, with particular reference to the initiation of films of ideas.”21 It is significant that the report states the institute’s mission as facilitating the production of films associated with creativity, reflexivity, and skill, films demonstrating awareness of their own status as cultural artefacts, very much like art films, experimental, underground, and B-movies, and that it directly ascribes this opinion to the Film Committee. From this standpoint, the institute’s task was to promote and provide professional training for filmmakers with a curriculum that linked wide film scholarship with the theatrical film industry. At this point, the report envisioned the possibility of the AFI granting a “first film program.” The presentation of the film training function was followed by the archival and information services, noting that the library copies would be housed at the “Center for Advanced Study” where trainees and staff members could make use of these resources. The Center would also act as a clearing house for copies to be circulated beyond it, thus alluding to centralising non-theatrical distribution and widening access to old and lesser-known films. The report acknowledged, nevertheless, that providing a home for both a national film school and archive was an ambitious project, performed by few other national film institutions. Another function would be encouraging the study of film history and aesthetics, where the institute could work towards teacher training, producing educational materials, and supporting film scholarship. THE FUTURE OF INDEPENDENT PRODUCTION To situate experimental and independent filmmaking within the AFI project, the report foregrounded the relevance of these approaches when it noted the specifics of film training not for theatrical, but for television and non-theatrical productions like business, industrial, educational, governmental and other purposes. In particular, the report spelt out the place of independent production methods in relation to the expansion of film training and film studies. Between 1952 and 1965, the number of film courses had grown from 575 to

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825, a significant 43 percent increase that included training in filmmaking techniques as well as appreciation of film art and history.22 In established film courses like those at the University of Southern California, which produced between seventy-five and ninety annual graduates, 70 percent of them went to the non-theatrical film industry.23 By 1965 the estimated placement of graduates in each of the industry’s sectors was close to a half in the non-theatrical motion picture sector (150 out of 330).24 The second largest amount of graduates went into television (75 out of 330). This was followed by other film-related occupations in teaching, administration, and others (50 out of 330), while only five graduates went into the theatrical motion picture sector. This data confirmed that, in terms of employment, there was no need for a theatrically-oriented film school. The report also noted that larger scales of production of the typical feature film for theatrical exhibition implied a clear division of professional activities. This contrasted with smaller productions, where many functions such as producer, writer, director, cameraman, and editor tended to fall to the same person, “the typical independent ‘filmmaker’ (or ‘cineaste’).”25 The statistics then pointed to the incorporation of independent production methods in film training, their real need being felt in the television and non-theatrical film sectors. The report included other data significant to contextualise the future of independent filmmaking more widely. The largest numbers of non-theatrical films were required for advertising, public relations, and industrial communication to fulfil functions such as sales, training and internal communication.26 Following in importance, there were government and education films, which sponsored films on specific issues such as health, history, sex education, social and cultural issues, usually from a liberal, non-radical perspective. Avant-garde productions represented the smallest number of productions in the non-theatrical sector, 190 of 10,670 total. At the time of the report, there were 862,000 16mm projectors across the United States.27 The prediction for growth of the non-theatrical film sector was supported by the increasing availability of television sets, video cassette players, and projectors.28 Nevertheless, it would take many years for this growth to materialise. Echoing the arguments previously made by people like Amos Vogel and Colin Young, the report addressed the question of broadening film culture through film education. While it suggested that this could be achieved by expanding the repertoire of films available through film libraries and film societies, and stated that the number of non-theatrical film repositories amounted to 5,000, it did not give specific provisions for how to achieve this.29 Janna Jones has noted that the report’s calls for duplication of films and widening circulation was taking into account technologies that were not yet fully available and it optimistically relied on a transferral of rights by copyright owners.30

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Moving on from training in filmmaking and specialised film study, the film institute was envisioned as an “overall source for stimulating and coordinating film study in general education.”31 This broad statement connected the project with the legislation’s aim to instigate an early and comprehensive education through audio-visual communication. Notably, it called for engaging with youth culture, for “continuing emphasis on books and other literary forms of communication, to the general exclusion of film, seriously impairs rapport between students and the educational system.”32 This echoed the contemporary proposal for education reform by the influential critic Daniel Bell.33 Bell decried the generational gap and social unrest currently witnessed by Americans, and advocated transforming education from its elementary level by engaging more with popular and minority cultures. Bell argued for reducing the widening schism between society and university, researchers and undergraduates, and first and second-class universities. Like other reform advocates such as C. P. Snow, Bell placed this interest in the pressing context of international relations and made the international success of the United States dependent on its home governance, a perspective that helped to gain support amongst those reluctant to government intervention in education. The report used the same rhetoric as Snow and Bell to propose expanding film education into primary and secondary education, and beyond the main academic filmmaking centres—UCLA, University of Southern California, and New York University—although, its solution was to coordinate this expansion from an exclusive film school–centre whose location was still to be decided. In summary, the report’s data framed the establishment of the AFI as an educational project but closer analysis reveals the gaps and contradictions in articulating these aims, as it focused the institute’s interests first on theatrical filmmaking, its training and cultural heritage, to then draw attention to the growth of the non-theatrical film sector, where most film graduates would go. Furthermore, the financial plans to run the centre as well as to offer the resources to expand film education were not clearly established. As a result, the SRI report’s plan for the AFI’s enacting a wide conception of film as a means of education and improving film productions was basically flawed. Even if these were years of change and uncertainty for the theatrical film industry, arguing for putting taxpayers money into feature film training could be easily dismissed by saying that those interests were competence of the major companies and not of the federal government, but the report appealed to the need to protect national culture and heritage. Just as European countries protected their cultural identity and industries from U.S. dominance by setting quotas, tariffs, and production funds, the SRI report argued for an American film institute to define the criteria that secured the past and future of American cinema. Additionally, references to foreign film archives highlighted the deficiencies in the U.S. archival system and created a sense

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of urgency for the institute. The report, which was presented to the NCA in February 1967, was not conclusive as to what would be the institute’s permanent sources of funding. It recognised that the film industry could support the film school, given its direct links with it and interest in training professional filmmakers. It considered the possibility of levies and tariffs imposed on trade and materials as a possible source of funding for its wider activities but none of these plans were certain. While this does not appear in the records of the meetings with the Film Committee, in February 1967, Roger Stevens, chairman of the NCA, wrote to Gregory Peck raising expectations that after the initial funding from the NCA, the AFI could receive “approximately a 10 percent of the available Endowment funds” in the ongoing years.34 As George Stevens noted in a later interview, this informal promise was a key factor in him taking the job, and also implied that the AFI was to oversee all NEA film-related activities.35 Shortly after the report’s publication, George Stevens corresponded with David C. Stewart to clarify his position towards it.36 Stevens himself decried its lack of clear planning and the sloppiness of its concepts. He noted as particularly problematic its focus on theatrical filmmaking and stated a majority of the great filmmakers have developed their talents in some form of the short film (which Stanford persist in considering “non-theatrical”) and for this and other reasons such a narrowing of the Institute’s emphasis is senseless. I think it is essential that this thinking not be attributed to the Film Committee.37

He recommended changing the document so to avoid the ascription of those views to the committee and so to be read as generalisations and not an action document. The extant document does not incorporate the said changes and the ensuing actions of the AFI seem a materialisation of the views of the SRI report, despite Stevens then disavowing it. THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE AFI The AFI was incorporated in March 1967, announcing plans for centres in different cities, although its two main locations were to be in Los Angeles (AFI West) and in Washington DC (AFI East).38 The NCA through the NEA, the Ford Foundation, and the MPAA provided matching grants of $1,300,000 each. The AFI’s head was George Stevens, and its trustees included Gregory Peck and Sidney Poitier, United Artist executive Arnold Picker, MPAA’s head Jack Valenti, intellectual and presidential advisor Arthur Schleshinger Jr., film historian Arthur Knight, budding film director Francis Ford Coppola, experimental filmmaker Ed Emswhiler, and documentary

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filmmaker and producer Fred Wiseman amongst others. The institute’s priorities were to organise the archival project, lead an oral history project in collaboration with UCLA, start off a production fund solely funded by the NEA, and lead various national film education programmes. The Ford Foundation’s grant, which was not renewable, was mostly directed to the last aspect. Shortly after the public announcement of the establishment of the AFI, Martin Quigley Jr., veteran film writer at the Motion Picture Herald, devoted an editorial to it. Quigley remarked that the AFI’s independence from box-office pressure could help the industry to find direction during a moment of crisis. At the same time, he anticipated difficulty if the “government’s wishes [were to] take priority over what is good for the arts.”39 Quigley thus invoked fears of state control and defended the idea of film as an art and industry which is better by being self-regulated. Effectively, the AFI’s management did nothing to interfere with the theatrical film trade. Rather the contrary, the selection of its board was received with scepticism because it veered towards the mainstream of the film industry and weakly represented the independent film community, despite Stevens having been familiar with it during his years at the USIA and having people like Ed Emshwiller and James Blue there. Criticism was voiced by critic Pauline Kael in an article in Newsweek, who said that the board looked like a “showcase instead of a working group, which probably means that it will act as a rubber stamp for whatever George Stevens Jr., wants to do. At worst, the institute could turn into his production company.”40 Quigley’s concerns represent the sense of uncertainty prevailing in the film press and film organisations at that time, while Kael’s criticism appears to lament the lost opportunity for independents to find more recognition at a time of fluctuation and change. It is significant that while the SRI was exploring the potential participation of different interest groups in the AFI project, including the major film companies, the MPAA was sorting out its own uncertainty with regards to the film industry’s business model after the Paramount Decision, which had turned studios mostly into distributors.41 In the mid-1960s a gradual takeover of the main Hollywood studios by large media corporations started to take place. Eventually, this takeover integrated film businesses within other media and entertainment industries. Changing from vertical to horizontal integration provided economic stability to maintain the cash-flow needed for large investments. Not only was this a time of mergers and takeovers for the traditional film companies, there was also an increased number of independent producers and exhibitors which were not necessarily tied to a single studio, which refocused attention on individual films. Additionally, the mores had changed and the MPAA needed to establish new content standards and ways of applying them. The PCA’s sanctions were hardly enforced, and its moral guidelines were outdated, with the baby boomers demanding films closer to the concerns of their generation.

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After the death in 1963 of the MPAA head, Eric Johnston, the trust had lacked leadership for a few years. Uncertainty finished when Jack Valenti moved from his position of press aide to President Johnson, to head of the MPAA in 1966. Valenti, who would also sit at the AFI, stopped the PCA from conferring seals of approval and started to design a new system. The new ratings system, launched in October 1967, responded to the increasing importance of international and independent productions, as well as the diversification of media and entertainment options. The ratings classified films into rough age categories and set guidelines to consider at production stage. It was a way of dividing the market so to plan for production, marketing, and distribution. It converged with the methods of classification used in other countries such as Britain, which also facilitated international standardisation. Meanwhile, despite the changing mores and increased number of independent art theatres, theatrical distribution continued to prove difficult for the people associated with the New American Cinema. Support came from filmmaker and arts patrons Jerome Hill, Mekas, Rogosin, and Clarke, in which they had launched the Film-Makers’ Distributors Center in 1966 to reach art house cinemas. In January that year, the Cinematheque had released The Chelsea Girls (Andy Warhol, 1966), a two-strip film devised to create a split screen effect which ran for over three hours. The film juxtaposed scenes from the lives of Warhol’s acquaintances at the Chelsea Hotel, feeling like an endless and often amusing stream of sounds and images with no concessions to the representation of drug use, desire, and boredom. After its success at the Cinematheque, the Center distributed it to arthouse theatres beyond New York for the remainder of 1966 through 1967. The Center also released Portrait of Jason (1967), Clarke’s lengthy yet captivating interview with a black gay hustler and failed actor. The film’s long takes, close-ups of Jason moving in and out of focus, and the audible comments from the director called attention to the objectification of the interviewee who, at the same time, is knowingly performing for the voyeuristic camera. These films’ distribution aimed at pushing the boundaries of typical theatrical screenings of American films. For this purpose, the Center had adopted more professional values than the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, having a greater margin to negotiate rental fees and promotion with filmmakers and exhibitors. Nevertheless, the plans for the Center did not go as expected. Warhol decided to distribute his films by himself, commercial films were increasingly appropriating the underground tropes, and there was division of opinion within independent filmmakers as to what was the best path to follow, with some believing commercialism was artistic suicide and others defending it as a form of survival.42 The Center ran into financial difficulties, leaving Mekas facing a large debt, and had to close in 1969, alongside the Cinematheque.

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During this time, there were other initiatives that, even if more niche, meant less economic risk and proved more successful in the long term. Mike Getz of New York’s Cinema Theater selected film programmes for midnight screenings to be shown at his uncle’s theatre chain in the Midwest. His Underground Cinema 12 ran across different venues until the mid-1970s, bringing the films of people such as the Kuchar Brothers, Storm de Hirsch, and Stan Vanderbeek to more than twenty cities across the United States by 1969, at the peak of its popularity.43 This manifests that there was not a single success formula for independent and experimental cinema to reach out across the country at that time. Meantime, the AFI had started its production programme, which also raised questions as to how the resulting films were going to be distributed. THE IFP PRODUCTION GRANTS AFI gave its first grants in spring 1968. Initially, these grants belonged to two different programmes: the IFP, offering production money of up to $10,000, and a student grant scheme with funds ranging from $250 to $2,500 directed “to support projects as part of the student curricula in filmmaking.”44 The process was competitive, with hundreds of applicants for each cycle selected by the AFI review panels. The IFP fund targeted both established and emerging filmmakers and artists. Grantees should fall into any of the following categories: 1.  Recognised artists who, because of the artistic, experimental or non-commercial nature of their work cannot find funding elsewhere. 2.  Filmmakers who want to expand their accomplishments into new areas of cinema: for instance, from documentary to drama, or from drama into experimental. 3.  Artists who have established themselves in another discipline and now want to expand their creative efforts in the field of cinema. 4.  Students enrolled in universities whose skills warrant support beyond what university funding can afford.45 Like the grants put into place in France in the late 1950s that gave a push to the New Wave filmmakers, the IFP gave the opportunities for discovering talent but it also protected minority practices from the strictures of the market. Its cross-genre and interdisciplinary approach evidenced an interest in the formulae of European art film, New Wave films, Direct Cinema and earlier experimental and independent American films, thus supporting the creation of what the SRI report had identified as “films of ideas.”

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The review panels of the IFP over 1968 included a mix of people like Willard Van Dyke, James Blue, film critics and writers Stanley Kauffman and Arthur Knight, artist Mark Sabin, and Hollywood figures like Gregory Peck, George Stevens Sr., Jack Valenti, and producer Antonio Vellani. The profiles of the IFP grantees were wide-ranged and winners were often invited to participate in future review panels, thus offering further opportunities for professional and personal development. In the following years, many experimental films were made with IFP funds, including not only established experimental filmmakers associated with the New American Cinema and the distribution network of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative. After finishing Re-Entry with the Ford Foundation’s grant, Belson had embarked on Samadhi (1964), a visual exploration of yoga. While his application for the IFP was unclear of the project, he expressed his will to continue with his previous film’s drive, and this resulted in Momentum (1969), an animation taking the sun as a metaphor to draw a visual parallelism between “subatomic phenomena and the cosmological vast.”46 Around that time, Belson quit his job as commercial artist and dedicated himself to full time filmmaking, having his films distributed to universities and colleges through Pyramid. After Good Bye in the Mirror, Storm de Hirsch walked away from straight storytelling to explore more inventive image-making. She scratched and etched directly on film and deconstructed linear movement in Divinations (1964) and had used double projections to create kaleidoscopic effects in Peyote Queen (1965). She received an IFP grant with which she made The Tattooed Man (1969), a film based on one of her poems. It was distributed by the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Canyon Cinema and praised for its symbolism and deft manipulation of the image. Since Pull My Daisy, Robert Frank had continued producing successful beat movies such as Sin of Jesus (1961) and Me and My Brother (1965–1968). He received an IFP grant that resulted in About Me: A Musical (1971). Initially thought to be a study of indigenous American music, the project turned into a symbolic examination of Frank himself. Under the auspices of the IFP programme, a younger generation of filmmakers was also allowed to experiment and independently produce their first films. Robert Russet made Under the Juggernaut (1970), a nine-minute film that reflected on the recent tide of political violence in the United States with a rapid montage of archival footage, speech and news excerpts accompanied by discordant music. The opportunity to move between disciplines was offered to art graduate David Lynch, who received an IFP grant after presenting his portfolio of inter-media experimental films. The portfolio consisted of Six Figures Getting Sick (1966), an animation of six figures repeatedly bursting in visceral effluvia which was projected over a sculptured screen, and The Alphabet (1968), a short piece mixing animation and live action that

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represented the nightmarish side of formal education. In these films, Lynch, who had been trained as a painter, used abstract, surrealist and expressionists visual motifs and sounds to convey existential anxiety. With the IFP grant he made The Grandmother (1970), the story of an angst-ridden boy who is abused by his parents and grows a grandmother to comfort him. The film deftly used high-contrast photography, black painted sets and atmospheric sound design to signal extreme and unsettling emotions. Its brooding thirtyfour minutes of duration demonstrated potential to be a feature-length film. The Grandmother received several prizes and, subsequently, Lynch was offered a place to study at AFI’s Centre for Advanced Film Studies (CAFS) when it opened in Autumn 1969. The IFP grants also supported another promising filmmaker, John Korty. Korty had garnered praise with the Academy Award nominated Breaking the Habit, a satirical look at smoke cessation. This was followed by freshly humorous films such as Crazy Quilt (1964) about a carpenter turned termite exterminator who marries an innocent and joyful girl, and Funnyman (1967) about a comedian who has lost his comic mojo. Korty’s next film, Riverrun (1968), signalled a mood change more in tune with the times. This was a beautifully photographed drama of a young couple choosing to live like outsiders. With the IFP grant, Korty finished the biographical documentary Imogen Cunningham, Photographer (1972), a close-up look at the life and work of the aging photographer. When the film was released it was distributed by Time-Life Films. The company, which in the early 1960s produced Direct Cinema documentaries for television broadcast, attempted to expand by distributing educational content for cable television in the early 1970s.47 Another IFP recipient was Robert Kramer who had been involved with the Newsreel Group, an association producing and distributing documentaries and pamphlets on political subjects and the anti-war movement. Kramer had received attention for experimenting with the boundaries of documentary and fiction in The Edge (1968), which dealt with the plans of a radical group to assassinate a war-mongering president. Kramer’s IFP grant contributed to the budget of Ice (1969), also produced by David C. Stone, who had been earlier involved in feature production with Adolfas Mekas’ Hallellujah The Hills and Jonas Mekas’ The Brig. The film Ice was a post-apocalyptic drama about the internal tensions of a guerrilla group fighting against a repressive U.S. government which had invaded neighbouring Mexico. Like The Edge, Ice blurred the lines between documentary and fiction. It incorporated the low-quality aesthetics of guerrilla filmmaking and dealt in a self-reflexive manner with the effects of alternative media on political activism. After its opening in 1970, the New York Times’ review noted that what distinguished Kramer’s movie from the vogue of Hollywood’s fare capitalising on revolution themes was its humourless, cold, and disjointed melodrama.48 In a deeper analysis, a

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Film Quarterly critic noted the film’s lack of address of the socioeconomic and psychological causes of the problems it invoked.49 With all its merits and failures in representing revolutionary politics, Ice was open for discussion. As well as presenting it in Cannes and showing it at the New Yorker and other commercial theatres, Kramer travelled throughout the country to introduce the film to different student and radical groups in special and non-theatrical screenings. David James identified Ice as one of the period’s American art films for its attempt to strike a balance between the imperatives of commercial features and personal or political expression. Ice engaged critically with the politics and media culture of the time, exemplifying too the creative freedom that the IFP grants allowed. Kramer gained production support based on a rough idea of the project, which filmmaker and crew where free to develop. Help from AFI staff was also available, if the filmmaker required it. This was very similar to the method that Stevens had followed at the USIA to encourage personal expression and promote innovation, but the granting and finishing of the IFP did not have to follow the command of the U.S. government propaganda message. In the IFP films, the individual’s creative integrity was asserted by a card attached to the credits. In Lynch’s The Grandmother the title card appeared as follows: The filmmaker (NAME) received a Production Grant from THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE (AFI logo) the filmmaker retained complete control over the design and content of the film ©1970 by (NAME), All Rights Reserved.50

The card hinted at the liberal aims of the sponsoring institution in producing these films, which enabled freedom of expression. However, this should not be taken as an attempt of the institution to blatantly promote itself. Prior to 1973 the AFI was not consistent in enforcing the card and press references of released films did not always mention the AFI or the NEA as producers. The IFP distribution arrangements proved less straightforward than production, nonetheless. At its incorporation in March 1967, the AFI notified the Internal Revenue Service that it was an organisation “for exclusively

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charitable and educational purposes.”51 Special mention went to the plan for distribution services, pointing out that this would be mostly through the non-theatrical sector, and therefore “distribution of such films for commercial exploitation will be a very infrequent activity.”52 It entailed that the AFI itself would not earn revenue from them. Further, the institute did not plan to help other distribution associations, either theatrical or non-theatrical which, in turn, curtailed the hopes of independent and experimental filmmakers of expanding distribution across the United States. The AFI, nevertheless, retained the right to decide over distribution matters of IFP films. In the grant contract, the applicant was identified as an “independent contractor” who should “have artistic control over all aspects of the production of the Film” and “retain and own the copyright.”53 It also specified that he or she should leave the negative in the laboratory in the name of the AFI. Nevertheless, the AFI insisted that after consultation with the filmmaker on “a general plan under which the film may be distributed,” final decisions “on all matters pertaining to distribution and exhibition of the film shall be exclusively ours.”54 Through this last stipulation, the filmmaker would “grant us [the AFI] exclusive worldwide distribution and exhibition rights of the Film for a period of fifteen years.”55 The contract also established non-theatrical exhibition rights in connection to AFI’s educational or research activities like showing the films at AFI venues like CAFS and AFI East. While the AFI had priority in deciding over the distribution of the film, it was not obliged to do so. After consultation, the filmmaker could arrange his or her own deal with an interested party, as long as such a deal did not affect the AFI’s “right for receipts,” which gave 75 percent to the AFI, and 25 percent to the filmmaker until the production funds were recouped. After, the profits were to be divided on a 50/50 basis. Many production funds establish clauses about recouping costs to keep the fund active or to run other not-for-profit projects. Nevertheless, the split of benefits controlled the amount of profits that filmmakers could make from the films in the short-medium term, with no promising returns for non-lucrative films. Furthermore, those seeking their own distribution deal for their film faced a burdensome task. Selfrepresentation increased filmmakers’ workloads, since they needed to have access to networks of distribution, promotion, and exhibition. Influential festivals often ran under the conditions of large companies and did not deal with films on an individual basis because of packages and exclusive contracts with distributors. Control over profits thus implied that filmmakers without large commercial prospects, such as established experimental filmmakers or those who opted for independent distribution, could hardly generate income for living expenses or be invested back into further production or independent distribution. They had to make their way within the set boundaries of the nontheatrical sector, and its particular social and cultural values, and prompted

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them to diversify their funding sources, resorting to self-funding and/or other philanthropic initiatives. MOMA AND EXPERIMENTAL FILM EXHIBITION Since the 1965 Independent Film Series, MoMA played an important role in presenting experimental films, not just in New York but also through touring programmes abroad which contributed to the eventual wider recognition of American experimental films as modern art. In 1966 and 1967 MoMA coordinated with the USIA the exhibition Two Decades of American Painting, which travelled to London, Delhi, Tokyo, and Sydney.56 It showed works from American abstract expressionists, colour-field painters, and pop artists, along with a number of experimental films. Willard Van Dyke and Adrienne Mancia arranged an accompanying film programme entitled The Personal Film: 20 Years of Short Film in the United States.57 The exhibition followed from MoMA’s previous touring art shows in Europe, but this time focused on the Asia/Pacific region, including countries such as India, who were then under both Soviet and U.S. influence, and Australia, which was going through a process of social reform and liberalisation. MoMA had acquired the films directly from the filmmakers or their representatives at low prices on the condition that no charge would be made for admission and that the screenings were for adults only. Accordingly, MoMA’s staff prepared the circulation schedules and programme notes to avoid over-handling of the copies and ensure that they were screened and introduced according to their guidelines. Van Dyke’s curatorial statement underlined MoMA’s authority and entrepreneurial spirit when he stressed the institution’s long-standing work in supporting film as an art form. He differentiated experimental from commercial cinema and linked the former with other U.S. achievements of artistic and intellectual enterprises. He asserted this by declaring that no period of American film history had “seen so many artists and intellectuals allied to the power of kinetic imagery as the present.”58 This comment pointed to America’s cultural maturity and leadership. Even if Van Dyke avoided a strict stylistic categorisation of the films, he underlined the liberating aspects of surrealist and abstract aesthetics when he described them as “fused dreams, documents, abstract forms and fantasies with light and shadow, movement and sometimes colour, to release emotions and ideas.”59 This emphasis on subjective and formalist aesthetics introduced the films as counterparts to the paintings at the exhibition. After the well-known controversy around the exhibition of Scorpio Rising and Flaming Creatures in 1964, the organisers could not have been oblivious to the consequences of sending abroad Scorpio Rising and another polemical

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film, O Dem Watermelons (Robert Nelson, 1965). This last film was produced as part of “The Minstrel Show—or Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel,” a sardonic entertainment programme funded by student and left groups. It satirised the treatment of blacks in the United States and had provoked a heated debate which led to cancelling shows on campuses. Effectively, Scorpio Rising and O Dem Watermelons were seized by the authorities in Australia, an event that led Australian media to voice different opinions about its film censorship.60 Some reported on the bad image that censors created for Australians: “every second week, our official censors make Australians look foolish in the eyes of the world” which was “an insult to the intelligence and maturity of Australians.”61 By comparison, American culture and institutions appeared more liberal. The views of distributors were also heard, ironically commenting that the censoring body “is doing a magnificent job in carrying out these antiquated laws and it should not be subjected to unfair criticism and ridicule.”62 The American films thus took part on an ongoing debate about censorship specific to the Australian context and the authorities responded to the pressure and started to draft new legislation. Eventually launched in 1971, the new standards considered age groups similarly to the MPAA new ratings.63 Continuing its commitment to experimental and independent film culture, MoMA organised a two-part screening of films by recipients of the AFI grants at its New York home in June 1968.64 The event was the occasion for the filmmakers to voice their opinions on the possibilities offered by the grants. The first night of screenings focused on the grantees of the AFI Student Program. MoMA’s curatorial statement emphasised the filmmakers’ intellectual and social engagement. It established authoritative references by comparing the filmmakers with pioneering figures, as in the case of Thom Andersen, who was equated with Edward Muybridge for his “solid scholarship, professional attitude and high-reaching experimental attitude.”65 Similarly, MoMA emphasised the anthropological concerns of Howard Smith, James Bryan, and Ed Lynch who used the student grant to complete Still/Slice of Gold (1968), Camden, Texas (1968), and A Question to Mr. Humphrey (1968), correspondingly, all commenting on personal, social, and political relationships in contemporary America. The introduction stressed that the grants gave opportunities to minorities for self-expression. This was evident in the selection of James Mannas’ comments. Mannas, an African American filmmaker who made The Folks (1969) on people’s reactions to the death of Martin Luther King, said that I want to make as many meaningful films as I can. I want to deal with Black People, our loves, laughter, hates, personalities, and above all our aspirations. I’ll do it here in America, with the help of people who understand.66

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The second day of the screenings was devoted to recipients of the IFP’s grants. MoMA then highlighted the comments of Tom McDonough, who noted that since the Ford grants “there is a feeling that it might be possible to make personal films for a wide audience.”67 The organisation of the screenings gave Mancia the opportunity to informally discuss the work that the AFI was doing so far. McDonough expressed his gratitude to the AFI, yet he noted that its promotion of short and independent films “ties in with the AFI distribution ambitions.”68 He also referred to the poor bookings that independent shorts had in uptown art houses and the problem of having to compete with subsidised foreign films. His expectations were high “if the AFI seed money could help create a market for shorts beyond the underground and the college circuit. The market is changing anyway and the AFI may bring the day of the independent feature a little closer.”69 McDonough revealed the hope that the AFI could substantially affect people’s expectations about theatrical films. He believed that independent production was a viable solution for the rearrangement of American film industry, and that the AFI had the duty to promote such change. Mancia also discussed with Paul Sharits the grant he had for the completion of Razor Blades (1968).70 Sharits stated that, at first, he was apprehensive about the government grants: “I had bad dreams about supporting a downright mean social system, a decadent ‘Selective Service System,’ the Vietnam mistake and so on.”71 However, he thought that this policy was compensating for the others, because “after dealing with sincere and co-operative people at the AFI it seemed to me that the more money the government spends on encouraging social and aesthetic beauty, the less they will be able to spend on primitive ‘projects.’”72 Even if Sharits’ view on the IFP taking away from military’s expenditure seems a bit naïve, it still underscores the tension inherent in receiving funds from a government whose foreign policies he did not approve. Moreover, Sharits appreciated the support he received from AFI staff but acknowledged that the acceptance of the grant was controversial because it restricted the filmmakers’ rights over the films. Mancia’s responded to Sharits that she was not aware that the “AFI was also handling the distribution of the films made by the grantees although a 50–50 contract is good.”73 While for this event MoMA screened some of these filmmakers’ previous work, Mancia’s main concern was whether the AFI held exclusive rights over the newly produced films. Shortly after the screening of the AFI’s films, MoMA started to organise the successful Cineprobe Series. The series ran from 1968 to 1994, consisting of screenings and discussions of experimental and independent films accompanied by programme notes. It became a model for other museums throughout the country. The organisation allowed MoMA to maintain a strong place in the field of experimental and independent cinema exhibition and collection

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in the face of the appearance of the AFI as a national film institution. This objective was clearly stated in a correspondence between Van Dyke and Iris Barry. Van Dyke pointed out to Barry that conservation was mainly an economic matter but also noted that for the future they should take advantage of the institution’s privileged position because “we are considered acceptable by the most esoteric underground filmmaker and respectable by all but the most conservative old lady members.”74 Effectively, MoMA had acquired a special position amongst a generation of filmmakers, as well as being a reference for middlebrow arts establishments. However, MoMA’s continuing presence as film collector was being challenged. Van Dyke observed that since the entrance of television, motion picture companies “have no interest in letting us have any film that can bring them revenue from television so we have to woo them in ways that were unnecessary years ago.”75 MoMA needed to update their collection, but the museum competed with the AFI for films and public funding for conservation. Having more direct connections with the motion picture industry, the AFI presented a threat to the growth of MoMA’s film collection. The collaboration between the MPAA and MoMA was discarded after a meeting with Ralph Hetzel and Jack Valenti. Valenti, who also sat at MoMA’s advisory committee, asserted the MPAA exclusive commitment to the AFI in this regard.76 In view of this, Van Dyke stated to Barry that he did not object to AFI’s work providing we [MoMA] maintain a position that allows us maximum freedom for acquisition, exhibition and circulation. We have a pre-eminent position which I intend to fight to preserve. Let the AFI collect the films, but let us be sure we can make copies for our study center. Let us be sure we continue to be the only archive that circulates in the educational field.77

This objective could clash with AFI’s priority for distribution and non-theatrical exhibition of films produced with IFP funds. Nevertheless, MoMA could acquire non-IFP films as well as foreign films for its catalogue because the AFI’s Conservation Project was only interested in American productions. To expand its experimental and independent film collection with non-IFP films, MoMA could also take advantage of its good relationships with New York filmmakers and artists. Occasionally, Cineprobe could help to pay the finishing costs of film prints, and the films could be added to the Library’s collection. This was the case when Hollis Frampton sold the print of Surface Tension (1968) at laboratory costs to MoMA, and complimented the institution for “giving a discretionary fund to Joyce [Wieland] for Rat Life.”78 Weiland’s Rat Life and Diet in North America (1968) intercut newsreel footage on guerrilla training and a kitchen table, offering a political allegory of Vietnam War’s draft dodgers trying to escape from political

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imprisonment in the United States and make their way to Canada. Thus, MoMA’s Cineprobe was able to help “at the same time to renew the artistic community through fees and much needed exposure for filmmakers,” some of them like Wieland critically addressing current political issues in the United States.79 A Cineprobe session was devoted to Weiland in January 1970 and another to Frampton in April 1970. This modus operandi entailed dealing with filmmakers on a one-to-one basis and favouring those closer to the museum. As in previous series organised by MoMA, the institution’s non-theatrical status and arts’ orientation gave the organisers some freedom to select films. For Van Dyke the word Cineprobe was “a combination of cinema and probe, it represents the camera’s objective ability to probe in the world, and at the same time invites the audience to probe into the filmmaker’s subjective attitudes.”80 Nonetheless, MoMA set limits on the type of attitudes they presented. The second Cineprobe session in November 1968 was devoted to the Kuchar Brothers, known for their irreverent take on all themes. After the screening, MoMA received a letter complaining about the films’ rampant obscenity. To this grievance, Van Dyke expressed satisfaction, as he wrote in pencil on the letter: “it would appear that Cineprobe is a success.”81 In contrast, Mancia’s proposal to exhibit Carolee Schneeman’s Fuses (1967), an open exploration of domesticity and marital life from a female perspective with more challenging sexual content and less humour than the Kuchars’, was deemed “too much for a General Public Screening” and Fuses was not shown, thus putting a limit to what the institution considered appropriate to probe at that time.82 It is worth noting that, as the series progressed, MoMA also received funding from corporations and commercial film companies. In January 1971, Standard Oil provided funding for Cineprobe at a time that MoMA trustees’ links with the armament industry and war policies were criticised by activist artists.83 During late 1969 and 1970, the Guerrilla Art Action Group staged performances at the entrance of MoMA to protest against the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil loan of production facilities for the fabrication of napalm for use in Vietnam. The group asked for the resignation of the Rockefeller Brothers from the museum’s board and carried out further protests in relation to the My Lai napalm massacre.84 Standard Oil’s name appeared in the programme advertisement in the Village Voice. The company used the sponsorship as a public relations decoy for the youth, since MoMA programmed what the museum named “revolutionary and porn films.”85 Cineprobe was also sponsored by the motion picture clients of the Chelsea National Bank, although, in contrast to Standard Oil, only the bank and not its clients were to be publicly credited for this support.86 Hence members of the motion picture industry gave funds to sustain experimental cinema in non-theatrical settings, an arrangement that promoted a broader film culture but did not conflict with its

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own commercial interests. Simultaneously, through the last years of the 1960s and early 1970s, a variety of concerns emerged regarding the administration of the AFI. AFI’S TAKE ON FILM EDUCATION Issues about the conditions of the AFI’s student grants were raised in March 1969.87 The first student grant cycle of April 1968 had thirty-four applicants, five of which received grants. Some of the review panel members were the same as for the IFP, as in the case of James Blue and Stanley Kauffman, and it also included AFI trustee, documentarian Richard Leacock. This programme attracted many applicants complying with the condition that they should be enrolled at a university or college. The application form focused on the individual’s project, and its endorsement by a faculty member. It noted that “grants will be made to universities on behalf of the students and the university film departments will administer the grants.”88 Yet, it did not specify how the rights over the films once finished would be managed. The conditions of this grant were released when the grantee was notified. They stated that the AFI kept the distribution rights, while the university kept the copyright. This attracted the attention of Yale professor Howard Weaver, who addressed the AFI’s general counsel regarding two proposed contracts. Weaver observed that these contracts “are not grants as we understand the term but are advances against purchase of certain rights to artistic materials or products.”89 Although the contract eventually enabled the student to make the film, it was misleading because, unknowingly “his personal application for a grant results in a contract in which the university retains copyrights to his work and assigns distribution rights to the AFI, both for all time.”90 For Weaver this hindered the university and the AFI’s educative aims, because the approval of the projects depended on the previous acceptance by the university, who then will acquire rights over the films’ exploitation. In his own words: If decisions about students’ promise or need are made not by faculty but by a benefactor adjudging his specific project, with a view to eventual possession of certain rights to it, thus the process is akin to saying that blackboards will be provided contingent upon an accepted prediction of what will be written upon them.91

Weaver thus pointed out that the AFI funding arrangements minimised risks before production, which limited the educational opportunities and final ownership of the work. Importantly, the arrangements of this grant were

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similar to Stevens’ student projects for the Young America series at the USIA, but in AFI’s case the distribution and copyright arrangements undermined the educational aims, as noted by Weaver. He then suggested changes in the contract whereby the AFI would still have priority, but not exclusivity, over the films, and the university could also apply its own standards. The AFI did not follow this suggestion nor offered a different one and the student programme was terminated later that year. This event was one amongst others that caused disappointment amongst educators on certain aspects of AFI’s management. Furthermore, for some independent and experimental filmmakers the conditions of the distribution of IFP films were restrictive or insufficient, which caused general discontent towards the institution. Meanwhile, it seemed that Stevens was putting his attention and more AFI resources on training for feature filmmakers at CAFS, which always felt as the less needed of AFI’s tasks. NOTES 1. Elaine M. Bapis, Camera and Action: American Film as Agent of Social Change, 1965–1975 (Jefferson, NC: MacFarland and Company, 2008). 2. David C. Stewart, Film Study in Higher Education (Washington DC: American Council on Education, 1966). 3. There had been a six-month preliminary study supported by the MPAA, instigated by Ralph Hetzel, then acting president of the MPAA and Lawrence E. Dennis, director of the Commission on Academic Affairs of American Council on Education. The report was made with assistance from Erik Barnow, Ernest Callenbach, Arthur Knight, Arthur Mayer, and Colin Young. 4. Arthur Knight, “An Approach to Film History,” in Film Study in Higher Education, ed. David C. Stewart, 52–67 (Washington DC: American Council on Education, 1966). 5. Jan-Christopher Horak, Lovers of Cinema. The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). 6. Bapis, Camera and Action. 7. Colin Young “A Critique and Some Comments on Creating an American Film Institute,” in Film Study in Higher Education, 117–126 (Washington DC: American Council on Education, 1966). 8. “Rootie-Toot, Film Institute!” Variety, February 9, 1966, 22. 9. “Secret Treaties (So Negotiated) Loom as Fear Re Film Institute; Say Decision Should Follow Debate,” Variety, March 16, 1966. 10. “Rootie-Toot, Film Institute!” Variety, February 9, 1966, 3, 22. 11. Fifth Meeting of the NCA, May 15, 1966. NCA-NEA Records of Meetings, 1965–1992, RG288, NACP. 12. Fifth Meeting of the NCA, May 15, 1966, p. 3–16. NEA-NCA Records of Meetings, 1965–1992, RG288, NACP.

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13. Fifth Meeting of the NCA, May 15, 1966, p. 3–18. NEA-NCA Records of Meetings, 1965–1992, RG288, NACP. 14. Peter D. Tilton, Charles K. Martin Jr., and Carleton Green, Organisation and Location of the American Film Institute, February 1967. National Endowment for the Arts Library, Washington DC. Thereafter, SRI Report. 15. Seventh Meeting of the NCA, December 14–15, 1966, p. 8–9. NEA-NCA Records of Meetings, 1965–1992. RG288, NACP. 16. SRI Report, 5. My emphasis. 17. SRI Report, 7. 18. SRI Report, 9–10. 19. SRI Report, 14. 20. SRI Report, 14. 21. SRI Report, 14. 22. SRI Report, 61. The report used the data of David C. Stewart, “The Study of Motion Pictures in Colleges and Universities,” Educational Record no. 1 (1965): 33–67. 23. SRI Report, 65. 24. SRI Report, 70. Source: SRI Report. The report provided an estimated of total graduates ranging between 330 and 460. I have used the lower values of the range. 25. SRI Report, 73. 26. SRI Report: Characteristics of the U.S. Motion Picture Industry, Non-Theatrical Motion Pictures, SMPTE. 27. SRI Report, B-6, Appendix B: Characteristics of the U.S. Motion Picture Industry, Non-Theatrical Motion Pictures. Source: SMPTE. 28. The number of television receivers in the U.S. was 67,100,000 in 1965. This number expanded the horizon of potential exhibition screens much further than the 862,000 16mm projectors, and the 13,200 theatrical screens available the same year. SRI Report, Characteristics of the U.S. Motion Picture Industry, Television. Source: Motion Picture Almanac, 1965. 29. Non-Theatrical Film Repositories. Source: SRI Report, Characteristics of the U.S. Motion Picture Industry, Nontheatrical Motion Pictures. UNESCO, World Communications, New York, 1966. 30. Janna Jones, The Past is a Moving Picture: Preserving the Twentieth Century on Film (Gainesville, University of Florida Press, 2012). 31. SRI Report, 61. 32. SRI Report, 58. 33. Daniel Bell, “The Reforming of General Education,” in American Higher Education Transformed, 1940–2005: Documenting the National Discourse, ed. Wilson Smith and Thomas Bender (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008), 169–172. 34. Roger Stevens to Gregory Peck, February 16, 1967. George Stevens Personal Papers. Private Collection. I am very grateful to Brian Real for this document. 35. Brian Real, “The Hidden History of the American Film Institute: The Cold War, Arts Policy, and American Film Preservation,” The Moving Image 18, no. 1 (2018): 38.

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36. George Stevens Jr. to David Stewart, March 2, 1967, Box 284, Folder 3016, Gregory Peck Papers 1923–1996, Margaret Herrick Library Special Collections, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library. 37. George Stevens Jr. to David Stewart, March 2, 1967, page 2. 38. Correspondence Internal Revenue Service, U.S. Treasury Department to the American Film Institute, c/o Charles B. Ruttenberg, May 19, 1967, p. 1, folder 2, box R1497, sub-series R, series 200, RG 200, Rockefeller Foundations Archives, RAC. Vincent Canby, “AFI Plans Several Offices in Major Cities,” New York Times, March 28, 1967. 39. Martin Quigley Jr., “AFI,” Motion Picture Herald, June 21, 1967. 40. Pauline Kael, “The American Film Institute,” Newsweek, September 4, 1967. 41. Justyn Wyatt, “From Roadshowing to Saturation Release: Majors, Independents, and Marketing/Distribution Innovations,” in The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 64–86. 42. David James, introduction to, To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 3–16. 43. Jim Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Midnight Movies (New York: Da Capo Press, 1991). 44. “Film Institute Student Grants,” Hollywood Reporter, April 18, 1968. 45. The American Film Institute, Independent Filmmaker Program Annual Report, May 1977, p. 3, Jan Haag Materials at the Library of The Woman’s Collection at Texas Woman’s University, Denton, Texas, (hereafter, IFP Report 1977). 46. Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (London: Studio Vista, 1970), 176. 47. Scott W. Fitzgerald, Corporations and Creative Industries: Time Warner, Bertelsmann and News Corporation (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012). 48. Robert Greenspun, “Insight into World of Revolution: Robert Kramer Puts It on Personal Level,” New York Times, October 16, 1970. 49. James Roy Macbean, “The Ice-man Cometh No More (He Gave His Balls to the Revolution),” Film Quarterly 24, no. 4 (Summer 1971): 26–33. 50. David Lynch, The Grandmother (1970). 51. Correspondence Internal Revenue Service, U.S. Treasury Department to the American Film Institute, c/o Charles B. Ruttenberg, May 19 1967, p. 1, folder 2, box R1497, series 200R, RG 200, Rockefeller Foundations Archives, RAC. 52. Correspondence Internal Revenue Service, U.S. Treasury Department to the American Film Institute, c/o Charles B. Ruttenberg, May 19, 1967, p. 2, folder 2, box R1497, series 200R, RG 200, Rockefeller Foundations Archives, RAC. 53. Independent Filmmaker Program Contract, March 1972. Report on the American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Program, May 1973, p.74, folder 5, box R1497, series 200R, RG A79, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 54. Independent Filmmaker Program Contract, March 1972. Report on the American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Program, May 1973, p.74, folder 5, box R1497, series 200R, RG A79, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 55. Independent Filmmaker Program Contract, March 1972. Report on the American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Program, May 1973, folder 5, box R1497, series 200R, RG A79, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.

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56. Rebecca Elliott, “Two Decades of American Painting” (PhD Diss.: National University of Australia, 2008). I am especially thankful to Rebecca Elliott for providing me with the documents on this exhibition. 57. It consisted of five extensive film sessions, including works by John Whitney, Larry Jordan, Stan Vanderbeek, Bruce Conner, Ed Emshwiller, Paul Sharits, Kenneth Anger, Robert Nelson, Stan Brakhage, and Maya Deren. Willard Van Dyke, The Personal Film: 20 Years of Short Film in the United States. Two Decades of American Painting Exhibition, Art Gallery New South Wales Archive Library (AGNSW), Sidney. 58. Van Dyke, “The Personal Film.” 59. Van Dyke, “The Personal Film.” 60. “Exhibition Films Ban by Censor,” Sun Herald, July 23, 1967. 61. “Censors again,” Daily Telegraph, July 25, 1967. 62. Errol S. Heath, “Censoring Films,” Daily Telegraph, July 29, 1967. 63. Ina Bertrand, Film Censorship in Australia (Santa Lucia: Queensland University Press, 1978). 64. Films by Recipients of the American Film Institute Student Film Grants. Department of Film Exhibition Files 247, MoMA Archives, NY. 65. Films by Recipients of the American Film Institute Student Film Grants, June 28, 1968, p. 2. Film, 247, MoMA Archives, NY. 66. Films by Recipients of the American Film Institute Student Film Grants, June 28, 1968, p. 2. Film, 247, MoMA Archives, NY. 67. Films by Recipients of the American Film Institute’s First Independent Film Grants, June 27, 1968. Film, 247, MoMA Archives, NY. 68. Tom McDonough to Adrienne Mancia, May 21, 1968. Film, 247. MoMA Archives, NY. 69. Tom MacDonough to Adrienne Mancia, May 21 1968. Film 247. MoMA Archives, NY. 70. Paul Sharits, Statement for MoMA Regarding Grant from the AFI. Film, 247. MoMA Archives, NY. 71. Paul Sharits, Statement for MoMA Regarding Grant from the AFI. Film, 247. MoMA Archives, NY. 72. Paul Sharits, Statement for MoMA Regarding Grant from the AFI. Film, 247. MoMA Archives, NY. 73. Adrienne Mancia to Paul Sharits, June 24, 1968. Film, 247. MoMA Archives, NY. 74. Correspondence Willard Van Dyke to Iris Barry, December 10, 1968, p. 2. Records of Bates Lowry I.116. MoMA Archives, NY. 75. Correspondence Willard Van Dyke to Iris Barry, December 10 1968, p. 2. Records of Bates Lowry I.116. MoMA Archives, NY. 76. Willard Van Dyke to Bates Lowry, November 13, 1968. Records of Bates Lowry I.116. MoMA Archives, NY. 77. Correspondence Willard Van Dyke to Iris Barry, December 10, 1968, p. 3. Records of Bates Lowry I.116. MoMA Archives, NY.

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78. Hollis Frampton to Adrienne Mancia, December 18, 1968. Records of Bates Lowry I.116. MoMA Archives, NY. 79. Cineprobe Fact Sheet, p. 1. Film, C2. MoMA Archives, NY. 80. Museum release from Willard Van Dyke and Adrienne Mancia, December 13, 1968, p. 2. Film, C1. Sub-Series, 1968–1977, Organisation, General. MoMA Archives, NY. 81. Correspondence Jesse Levine to MoMA, November 8, 1968. Records of Bates Lowry I.116. MoMA Archives, NY. 82. Correspondence Adrienne Mancia to Bates Lowry, November 20, 1968. Records of Bates Lowry I.116. MoMA Archives, NY. 83. Grant from Standard Oil, September 1971. Film, C1. Sub-Series, 1968–1977, Organisation, General. MoMA Archives, NY. 84. Francis Frascina, Arts, Politics and Dissent: Aspects of the Art Left in the Sixties America (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 175–186. Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The Dematerialisation of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972 (Berkeley: California University Press, 1973). 85. Adrienne Mancia to John Hightower, August 19, 1971. Film, C1. Sub-Series, 1968–1977, Organisation, General, MoMA Archives, NY. 86. Peter Schwartz to Willard Van Dyke, January 20, 1971. Film, C1. Sub-Series, 1968–1977, Organisation, General. MoMA Archives, NY. 87. The American Film Institute. Report 1967–1971 (Washington DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971). 88. Application for Student Filmmaker Program. Film, 247. MoMA Archives, NY. 89. Correspondence Weaver to Kananack, March 17, 1969, p. 2. AFI Correspondence 1971. Subject Files of Deputy Chairman Michael Straight, 1969– 1978. NCA- NFAH, RG 288, NACP. 90. Correspondence, Weaver to Kananack, March 17, 1969, p. 2. AFI Correspondence 1971. Subject Files of Deputy Chairman Michael Straight, 1969– 1978. NCA- NFAH, RG 288, NACP. 91. Correspondence, Weaver to Kananack, March 17, 1969, p. 4. AFI Correspondence 1971. Subject Files of Deputy Chairman Michael Straight, 1969– 1978. NCA-NFAH, RG 288, NACP.

Chapter 4

AFI’s Feet of Clay

NEW HOLLYWOOD AND THE NIXON ERA After Johnson announced he would not run for president again, the split in the Democratic Party was signalled at the August 1968 Democratic Convention. As well as marking the end of the Democrats’ liberal momentum, the convention was dramatically tainted by a violent clash between police and anti-war protesters, which drew considerable media attention and provoked widespread distrust of U.S. authorities. Republican candidate Richard Nixon became president in 1969, promising a progressive withdrawal from Vietnam. Against this background of growing anger towards U.S. foreign policy, and widespread wariness towards its handling of domestic matters, Hollywood looked hopefully at the youth that had become the protagonist of the times. Between 1969 and 1972, 75 percent of the U.S. population was under thirty.1 Studios started recruiting new talent, expecting they would bring fresh ideas to theatrical filmmaking.2 Many of these new figures had trained at the major film schools and were acquainted with Hollywood classics, European art films, and the New Waves, as well as underground and B-movies. They were also influenced by the writings and discussions on the director’s personal style and creative control prominent in American film criticism, especially after Andrew Sarris applied the idea of the auteur to Hollywood filmmakers such as John Ford, Frank Capra, and Billy Wilder.3 The new filmmakers, some of them young but not all, demanded more control over their productions while having access to the large distribution and exhibition arms of Hollywood. The first signs of success appeared with the release of The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967) and Bonnie and Clyde (Arthur Penn, 1967), both targeting the youth market with more complex characters, renewed storytelling approaches, more dynamic editing style, and a more open take on sexual relationships and violence. The Graduate, the story of the 111

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affair between an apathetic young man and older woman, was produced and distributed by Embassy Pictures, who dealt mostly with foreign and exploitation films. Meanwhile, Bonnie and Clyde, with its nostalgic look at America’s Prohibition Era and explicit references to the French New Wave, was produced independently and sold to Warner for distribution. Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), which revisited the American dream of the Frontier from the perspective of a confused youth, produced even greater economic return. Significantly, part of Easy Rider’s crew, which included Dennis Hopper, Peter Fonda, and Jack Nicholson, had had its first filmmaking opportunities with Roger Corman’s AIP in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The cast and script of Corman’s The Trip (1967) are Easy Rider’s most direct antecedents. Both films engaged with countercultural interests on drugs and the search for freedom. For The Trip, Corman did not want to either condemn or endorse LSD, but being released at a moment of public debate about it, the producers pushed for a more disapproving stance for the final edit of the film. Shortly after, part of the team involved in The Trip embarked upon Easy Rider, where the script portrayed the youth journeying into insanity, thus endorsing a tragic view of America’s counterculture and ascribing a damaging role to drugs in it. It was significantly influenced by experimental film aesthetics, using subjective camerawork, anamorphic lens, montage techniques and Direct Cinema–style location shooting. Yet, as David James argues, Easy Rider’s underground references were incorporated as stylistic devices that had surpassed their original social uses.4 The film received production funds from Columbia via Bert Schneider, son of one of Columbia’s directives. It was shot outside Hollywood guilds but then was sold for distribution to Warner, which resulted in the company negotiating a payment with the guilds to have it approved. Eventually, the film earned Warner substantial revenues. Convinced by its generous returns, major companies were eager to acquire the next Easy Rider. Francis Ford Coppola saw this as the opportunity to advance a group of film school graduates bred on film societies’ screenings and critics’ ideas about directorial control. A UCLA graduate, Coppola had started honing his skills re-editing and dubbing old Soviet science fiction films for Corman’s AIP, knowing well that these subversions would satisfy teens’ hunger for humour and aberration.5 After being at AIP, Coppola made You Are a Big Boy Now (1966) for Seven Arts, a small Hollywood company whose films were released by other companies. This was a comedy much in the style of the French New Wave and preempting the themes of The Graduate. Even if it did not excel at the box-office, it drew critical attention to the young director, who was then invited to sit at AFI’s founding board of trustees. In 1969, Coppola convinced Warner to furnish $600,000 to make movies for the youth market in exchange for Warner gaining rights to

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first refusal for distribution.6 Coppola thus set up the production company American Zoetrope in San Francisco which included promising figures like George Lucas, Walter Murch, Jim McBride, Carroll Ballard, Gloria Katz, Matthew Robbins, Hal Barwood, and two IFP grantees: Steve Wax and John Korty. Coppola invested in state-of-the art equipment and started developing a series of projects which included Lucas’ THX 1138, a barely verbal futuristic story of a man trying to escape a controlling society, and Apocalypse Now, which reworked Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in the deranged scenario of the Vietnam War. Warner did not like the projects and asked for its money back, meaning that Zoetrope had to reimburse it by making ads and editing state-funded documentaries over the following years. Nevertheless, the Zoetrope group had already planted the seeds for their success in the following years. Like Coppola, other young filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, James Cameron, Peter Bogdanovich, Joe Dante, Jonathan Demme and Jeremy Paul Kagan, started training their skills at Corman’s AIP in tasks such as acting, writing, directing, and editing. AIP’s production model allowed a degree of creative autonomy during production that recalls that of the auteur, where producer and director negotiated decisions about the film on a one-to-one basis.7 Such model of creative autonomy was a distinctive feature of what came to be known as New Hollywood in the early 1970s and not dissimilar to Stevens’ approach in the AFI. THE CENTER FOR ADVANCED FILM STUDIES AND STEVENS’ ART FILMS Stevens wanted CAFS to breed its own talent, trained in feature production under a specific scholarly understanding of film history and styles. Opening in September 1969 and located at the Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, CAFS offered Masters in Fine Arts to twelve graduates starting that year and going up to fifteen the following one.8 In contrast to the discontinued university-led student grants, this set-up realised Stevens’ vision of bringing graduate film training closer to the film industry. His statement at the centre’s opening ceremony framed the school as concerned with film in the broadest sense: as a form of art, as entertainment and enlightenment, making clear that they had “shaped the center according to the needs in the country as we saw them.”9 Stevens tried to reconcile some of the issues found with the SRI report, say, the unnecessary establishment of an elite film school focused on commercial filmmaking, by tying it with the film archive project. He stated that the centre would have “for examination the great work of cinema” and “the personal assistance of many of the most accomplished creators of these

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works.”10 His idea of authorial control came to the fore when saying that the common problem the default male filmmaker faces is “finding support for his work and maintaining control over his work.”11 He hoped that CAFS could act as a hub to address these issues and also experiment in film form and “challenge conventions,” yet keeping what he called “film structure” as one of the centre’s main concerns.12 He spoke to the idea of independence of creative vision and believed that a tutorial system with accomplished artists was the way of learning about keeping the integrity of the art of film in the face of commercial pressures. He finished by reminding that films still relied for their success on reaching audiences of different tastes and relative sizes. Stevens’ CAFS statement thus laid out the vision of reconciling creative control and commercial imperatives that he wanted to materialise. CAFS’ key staff included Frank Daniel, from the Czech national film school, Hollywood producer Antonio Vellani, and James Blue. The curricula of seminars and internships benefited from collaborations with Hollywood organisations, such as Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the American Society of Cinematographers, and the Screen Actors Guild, with directors, actors, and producers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Vicente Minelli, Roberto Rossellini, Anthony Quinn, and George Seaton leading seminars at the centre. Some filmmakers associated with New Hollywood and Zoetrope, such as screenwriter Matthew Robbins, director and screenwriter Jeremy Paul Kagan, and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, joined CAFS as students at this point. Other students that would graduate from CAFS’ first promotion included Stanton Kaye, Terrence Malick, and David Lynch. As in other film schools, students collaborated on each other’s projects, thus nurturing a sense of community and long-lasting collaborations, as when Deschanel was in charge of the cinematography of Malick’s graduation film, Lanton Mills (1971), a satirical bank robbery story. From the start, CAFS’ research and scholarship placed significant attention to Hollywood’s past, its genre conventions, and the personal style of “great directors.” This is evident in Peter Bogdanovich’s collaboration with the film school at that time. Bogdanovich had first worked as an actor and film critic. His writings, very much like those of the Cahiers du Cinema’s critics and Andrew Sarris’, drew attention to filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, Joseph H. Lewis, and Howard Hawks. After being involved with the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and MoMA’s Film Library, he directed his first film, Targets (1968), backed by Roger Corman. At this point, Bogdanovich started to work for the AFI Oral History Project carrying out interviews with Hollywood directors Allan Dwan, Leo McCarey, and Raoul Walsh.13 He also directed the auteuristic television documentary Directed by John Ford (1971), which was produced by AFI and the California Arts Commission. During this time, Bogdanovich found critical recognition as a

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New Hollywood director with The Last Picture Show (1971), a melancholic story about small-town youngsters coming of age which engaged with those years’ nostalgic mood for a bygone innocence. Paul Schrader was another relevant figure taking part in the few AFI scholarship programmes of the early 1970s. While finishing his studies at UCLA and writing film criticism, Schrader was appointed to be a CAFS scholarly fellow and made a survey on film noir and existential philosophy.14 His book Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (1972), which explored international art films’ existential themes from an auteuristic perspective, evolved from this study and much of his later work as scriptwriter and director is inflected by such existential themes.15 Nevertheless, Schrader resigned from his research fellowship in April 1971 in response to a wave of redundancies at AFI’s research department. CAFS’ focus on filmmaker training took up most of the Ford Foundation grant that was initially aimed to all kinds of educational activities within the centre. Stevens wanted to have an active role in renewing Hollywood via accommodating expressive and commercial aims, but his drive as a producer overtook the wider educational aims of the CAFS, which was catastrophic under AFI’s unconsolidated economic circumstances. During the early years of the 1970s, Stevens embarked upon some feature productions with support from major production companies and theatrical exhibitors.16 AFI supported the creative development of a project by Jim McBride. McBride, another of the filmmakers that David James identifies within the American art film mode of production, had found earlier success with the self-reflective mockumentary David Holzmann’s Diary (1967). The film emulated the video journal format to present the daily moments and concerns of an alienated cameraman whose only way to participate in his own life is through his camera equipment. Given Stevens’ investment in bringing new forms and themes into theatrical filmmaking, he backed McBride’s new project Glen and Randa (1971), which placed two young adults in an apocalyptic scenario. McBride, associated with Zoetrope at this point, received screenwriting and pre-production support from the AFI, and the crew counted with other New Hollywood/ Zoetrope figures such as Steve Wax, who worked as production manager. The independent producer Sidney Mayers supplied further funds, and the film, which was given an X rating, was distributed by another of Mayers’ companies, Universal Marion Corporation. Stevens’ ventures as feature producer experienced a major hiccup during the development of a project by Stanton Kaye, a final year fellow at CAFS. After the success of Georg (1964) and the autobiographical Brandy in the Wilderness (1969), Kaye had been labelled the new Orson Welles. Stevens committed to finance his final year film, for which he signed a joint

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venture agreement with the businessman Herbert Allen Jr. and the Picker Foundation.17 The foundation was led by United Artists executives David and Arnold Picker. Arnold already sat at AFI’s Board of Trustees and had been instrumental in establishing AFI offices in Washington DC to oversee film preservation. It is not surprising the Pickers’ involvement in AFI’s feature production at this point. United Artists had fronted the change in the majors’ transition to the New Hollywood business model after the Paramount decision.18 Advised by lawyer Arthur Krim, the company went from almost bankrupt in the early 1950s to lead the international distribution market in 1967 with a formula based on the acquisition of exclusive distribution rights for independently produced films in exchange of production money, creative control, and a share of the profits tailored to each film or “package.” United Artists took advantage of foreign subsidies, having been previously involved in co-productions of European art films, and was knowledgeable of international marketing and distribution strategies. However, by 1969 United Artists had a backlog of films that were proving expensive and out of tune with the current youth trends, reason for which the young David Picker was placed at the helm of the company to rejuvenate it. While United Artists was not nominally involved in the production of Kaye’s AFI project, the proximity between the Picker Foundation and the company cannot be obviated. Kaye’s AFI project was In Pursuit of Treasure (n.d), a futuristic story set in a desert where Native Americans reclaim gold mines.19 Shooting started in 1970 in Utah and was initially budgeted at $220,000, but a myriad of troubles affected the production and costs increased exponentially, which the AFI had to provide, as it later transpired. While this troubled project sparked media attention and demanded accountability from Stevens, a dedicated team and changing reviewing panels continued selecting IFP awards during these years. These included the acclaimed photographer Bruce Davidson who made Living Off the Land (1969) on New Jersey’s meadow scavengers, a film which received the Critics Award at AFI’s Film Fest in 1970. Richard Myers also received an IFP grant at this point. His previous work included Confrontation at Kent (1970), which documented the National Guard shootings of Kent University students when protesting against Nixon’s campaign in Cambodia. With the IFP grant Myers made Deathstyles (1971), which loosely followed a man driving through the city surrounded by dreamy images and juxtapositions. Myers’ work was distributed through the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, which also distributed the IFP film of another experimental filmmaker, Scott Bartlett. Bartlett pioneered mixing video and film in Metanomen (1966) and Off/On (1967). He used his IFP grant to make 1970 (1970), a kinaesthetic construction of sound and images detailing San Francisco’s counterculture. Constance Beeson, another Bay Area filmmaker associated with Canyon Cinema, also

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received the IFP grant at this point. She had made significant experimental films before, including Unfolding (1969), the first film commissioned by the educational organisation, the National Sex Forum, and circulated through its multimedia resource centre. This educational film pioneered in its use of multiple exposures and a loose narrative to touch upon myths, symbols, and fantasies relating to love and sexuality, from a wide perspective that included hetero and homosexual relationships. In May 1970 Beeson was awarded an IFP grant, with which she made Ann, A Portrait (1971), a documentary on experimental choreographer Ann Halprin, which included interviews and dance performances. The IFP grants thus prompted crossovers and renewal in various productions such as documentary, educational, experimental, and fiction films, supporting the diversity of many films produced during that time. The IFP awarded funds earmarked by the NEA only for this programme. Consequently, it cannot be said that what happened with CAFS affected the IFP but it did affect other activities as the wave of resignations and redundancies of 1971 confirm. MEDIA LITERACY AND EXPERIMENTS IN PUBLIC TELEVISION While Stevens concentrated its efforts in production and training at CAFS, the wider educational programmes were not fully attended, which created tensions within the Public Media Panel of the NCA. Despite AFI being officially placed under the Public Media Panel in the NCA structure, the panel could not direct large sums to other institutions dealing with film. Furthermore, AFI had exclusivity in awarding grants to individual filmmakers and priority over distribution of the IFP films. The NCA had simultaneously increased the AFI and the panel’s budgets during the organisations’ first years of operation, but the latter’s power to endow to other institutions and filmmakers was restricted by the AFI’s exceptional status.20 Accordingly, between 1967 and the early 1970s, the Public Media Program concentrated on supporting media literacy programmes and the development of non-commercial television and video. An important instance of this support was the 1967 grant to Fordham University, where John Culkin and Marshall McLuhan developed media literacy courses for schools, and demonstration materials for teachers to integrate examples from films into literature and history lessons.21 This project followed a model of enlightened discussion and engaged with the equality aspirations of contemporary America by addressing students from culturally and economically disadvantaged backgrounds. Such an approach set standards for media literacy projects nationwide over the late 1960s and 1970s.

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Other leading Public Media Program projects created spaces for experimentation with video and television technologies. These practices often followed McLuhan’s ideas on television’s potential for more participation in the process of communication. In 1968, the NCA addressed a $70,000 grant to KQED, San Francisco’s educational television station, an amount matched by the Rockefeller Foundation.22 KQED used the money to employ five artists as mentors. Each was from a different discipline such as poetry, choreography, music composition, sculpture, and playwriting, and their work was monitored by two KQED staff. The project assumed the educational value of studying and subverting medium-specific aesthetics in that its productions should “emphasize the unique characteristics of the television medium—its illusion of intimacy, imposed point-of-view, immediacy, ability to manipulate the electronic image and electronic colors, and powers of magnification.”23 The project grew from these initial workshops to become the National Center for Experiments in Television in 1969, receiving further NCA funds for day-to-day operations and individual fellowships. The workshops kept track of discussions, hypotheses, and conclusions and these notes were eventually edited by Brice Howard in 1972 as the Videospace Electronic Notebooks. The National Center for Experiments in Television emerged contemporaneously with other experimental television workshops, such as the Artist-in-Residence project at Boston’s WGBH under Fred Barzyk, and WNET in New York under David Loxton. These programmes received substantial support from the RF and their corresponding recently created State Councils for the Arts. The projects created stable infrastructures for electronic image experimentation, linking arts, social concerns, and technology development in different measures. For instance, Stan Vanderbeek, while Rockefeller artist in residence at WGBH in 1969, created Violence Sonata. This was a live performance in front of a studio audience, also broadcast to audiences at home which could provide feedback via telephone. It was designed to relieve social tension and open questions on race, discrimination, and activism at a time of riots and bomb scares across Boston. Other projects funded by the RF enabled the creation of tools for audio-visual processing, such as the electronic image synthesiser created by Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe while Paik was artist in residence at WGBH labs. The synthesiser was a heavy machine that processed and manipulated electronic colour signals thus superimposing and mixing images to produce collage effects. Paik mixed abstract and figurative images and created rhythmical patterns and reverberations, often jettisoning conventional sequencing and narrative, and infusing electronic images with visual noise and a sense of spontaneity and freedom. Some programmes produced at the labs were broadcast, but their abstract imagery often did not appeal to many viewers.24

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These experimental TV and video centres, soon to be called media art centres, set up standards of collaboration for foundations, public institutions, technology manufacturers, and artists, thus mixing corporate, academic, artistic, and public interests very much like Jacob Brockman foresaw at the Expanded Cinema Festival. They also set national references for the development of new media practices. A comprehensive history of philanthropic and public support for these centres is beyond the scope of this book. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that this growing support was concomitant with the limited help received by organisations which dealt with distribution and exhibition of experimental and independent films, areas where the AFI had exclusivity in funding. NEW WALLS FOR THE AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE In the early 1970s the endurance of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative was being tested as expectations of sustained support from government and philanthropies like the Rockefeller Foundation had waned. In response to this, Jonas Mekas, Ken Kelman, P. Adams Sitney, James Broughton, and Peter Kubelka created Anthology Film Archives with the financial support of long-standing patron and artist Jerome Hill. Anthology Film Archives was envisioned as a screening venue as well as a preservation and research resource. Its design and programme signalled the canonisation of a specific strand of American experimental cinema. At its auditorium, a selection of films named “Essential Cinema” was screened. The list included international examples of the pre-war avant-garde filmmakers like Luis Buñuel and Rene Clair, some European art filmmakers like Carl Dreyer and Robert Bresson, and a specific formation within the New American Cinema group which included Kenneth Anger, Bruce Baillie, Paul Sharits, Robert Breer, Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, Maya Deren, Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs, and the Whitney Brothers, amongst others, but excluded relevant female figures like Shirley Clarke and Storm de Hirsch. The establishment of Anthology Film Archives signalled a move further away from the hopes for crossing over to theatrical venues of the first part of the1960s. During this time, the writings of film critic P. Adams Sitney theorised the fundamental distance between the avant-garde films included in the canon of Anthology Film Archives and the American art film features. Through the spring of 1971, Sitney gave a series of lectures at MoMA that were later edited and published in Film Culture.25 During these lectures, Sitney presented the idea of morphological change in avant-garde film history, choosing the term avant-garde for the art history and militant connotations, as opposed to the tentative character of the term experimental. From his perspective, the

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emotional subjectivism of the early trance and mythopoietic aesthetics was overcome by the more recent structural films. The latter included films by Tony Conrad and Paul Sharits which, along the lines of minimal art, insisted on formal arrangements of materials more than on content, features which Sitney saw asking ontological questions about the medium. For Sitney, structural films had evolved from the reductionist approaches of underground films like the fixed camera, and from the interest in kineticism present in the films of Peter Kubelka and Robert Breer. In contrast to this historical evolution, Sitney asserted that films like Jim McBride’s David Holzman’s Diary and Stanton Kaye’s Georg stood apart from the avant-garde tradition, since these were “Hollywood modern films, getting funded by Hollywood and the government (. . .) talented, but committed to a kind of realism.”26 For him, such differentiation was due to some inner necessity existing in the American avant-garde forms, as there was an “essential definition of the two genres; avant-garde stresses the primacy of the imagination against the other, committed to a certain vision of reality that permits certain epistemological paradoxes.”27 Sitney had initially hinted at infrastructural conditions and audience demands that differentiated these films, but ultimately he subsumed these differences to a formal imperative, accepting a normative view of the aesthetics and reception for both avant-garde and Hollywood films. These lectures provide the foundational narrative of Sitney’s influential book Visionary Film, published in 1974. The schism between Hollywood and American experimental film also reflected the dissatisfaction of the non-theatrical film communities with the effective functioning of AFI. It had become apparent that hopes for a national film institution that would widen American film culture by supporting non-theatrical and independent distribution and exhibition were unfulfilled. AFI was concentrating too much on running its expensive film school and gave less attention to the general film education programmes and film scholarship. This placed it as the target of deserved criticism from both the NCA and the wider film education constituency. In 1969 Nixon had appointed Nancy Hanks as chairman of the NCA. Hanks had previously worked on Rockefeller’s Performing Arts report and was deft in securing congressional appropriations for the NEA. Hanks also took closer control of the administration of NEA programmes. Early in 1971, as AFI was running into internal difficulties it had to account to the NCA for it. Stevens notified Hanks that they had cut personnel and services, mostly from the research and education divisions, as well as from the distribution office.28 As if compensating, Stevens pointed out that the public received the IFP films well. He wrote to Hanks, “chickens are now beginning to come home to roost,” noting the positive press reviews of Jordan Belson’s Momentum and John Korty’s Imogen Cunnigham.29 Nevertheless, as news of

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the redundancies spread, which coincided with the production debacle of In Pursuit of Happiness, the specialised press became a forum for discussion about the AFI’s lack of achievement, which was often compared unfavourably with the British Film Institute.30 UNDELIVERED PROMISES Insufficient support for educational and independent film distribution was lamented by Ernest Callenbach, whose observations are particularly relevant for evaluating AFI’s achievements in relation to the educational proposal delineated in the early 1960s. While Callenbach praised the IFP as one of the projects that was most efficiently administered, he also observed that “funds spent on filmmaking help bolster supply; they do nothing to increase demand.”31 Callenbach stated that AFI could have organised a national plan to deal with independent and non-theatrical distribution, but effectively did nothing. He noted with irony that if AFI had not given serious consideration to these needs, it was “not, apparently, because of obstructionism by industry representatives on the Board of Trustees, as has been rumoured.”32 Callenbach implied that it would have been counterproductive to the MPAA that AFI encouraged the strengthening of non-theatrical and independent distribution. The difficulties for independents did not end there. Large corporations were buying out independent distributors like Tom Brandon and Leo Dratfield that previously supplied the art cinema circuit. While the new management made profits by distributing old collections of experimental, independent, and art films, they eliminated staff with expertise in these forms of filmmaking, and they rarely ventured into acquiring new films. As a result, an increased number of experimental and independent filmmakers that were aided by IFP grants could not rely on them and had to turn to established “self-help” non-theatrical distributors like the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Canyon Cinema, or create new distribution networks.33 Examples of new independent distributors established at this time were Serious Business, ran by Freunde Bartlett in the West Coast, and New Day, ran by IFP grantee Amalie Rothschild, which distributed women’s films in the East Coast. However, the self-help option was a risky alternative, which needed investment to start off and a stable market to secure returns. Callenbach depicted the problem of creating demand within the larger context of U.S. industry. Its protectionism stopped imports from entering into the country, leading Americans to a kind of “cinematic illiteracy.”34 In addition, distributors had increased the price of colleges’ film rentals, which caused outrage around the educational community, but AFI did nothing to mediate in this conflict.

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AFI received further criticism with regards to film scholarship from Jim Kitses. Kitses had been deputy education officer at the British Film Institute for five years before Stevens hired him for a similar role at AFI. After the firings, Kitses published a critical letter in Film Comment. He recognised that “no one is very clear about the relationship of media study and film study, or the connections between filmmaking as an education tool and film as critical discipline.”35 To overcome this, more scholarship and testing out of ideas in a variety of areas was needed, especially in documentary film, experimental film, and television. Instead, he observed, AFI’s understanding of film education was “the know-how of feature filmmaking,” disguised under the conveniently vague motto of encouraging the art of film. Kitses concluded that at the heart of AFI’s policy there was “a vulgar auteurism at work: individualism carried to its logical extreme in an elitist ‘great men’ theory of art and education.”36 These critiques hit the core of AFI’s approach, which clashed with the idea of film education that the independent and educational film community had hoped to fulfil. Shortly after, in 1972, it became publicly known that the AFI had used $300,000 of public money to make Stanton Kaye’s In Pursuit of Treasure.37 The project was a failure and the film was never released. Stevens had it confiscated when Kaye presented a rough cut to him and saw that it ended with a massacre of miners by Native Americans, perhaps pointing to a limit in what Stevens wanted to see in an AFI-produced American art film. These events gave AFI further bad press and raised serious questions about its priorities and accountability. CHANGES IN THE IFP DISTRIBUTION POLICY While AFI was at the heart of a public storm, the NCA’s Public Media Panel started a series of enquiries. In April 1971, David C. Stewart, then director of the Public Media Panel, complained to the NCA about the AFI failing to deliver on a co-production project for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.38 Stewart, who had raised before with Stevens the limited and vague plans envisaged by the SRI report, knew well of the discontent of the educational and independent film sector. Along with Gerald O’Grady, a key figure in the development of media arts then leading the Center of Media Study in Buffalo, they commissioned a survey of patterns of distribution of 16 mm films.39 The “Study of the Distribution of Short Films by Independent Filmmakers” was led by Willard Van Dyke and John Handhardt, who sent a thirty-six-question form to over a thousand filmmakers.40 The survey was undertaken by Sheldon Renan, and while it was in preparation the NCA officers were cautious in releasing information to the AFI.

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After the 1971 cuts, the AFI stopped seeking distributors for the IFP films. However, in April 1972, it signed a contract for non-theatrical distribution with Time-Life.41 Time-Life committed to pay for striking an inter-negative print as well as release prints for non-theatrical distribution in America and presentations at festivals. Yet, the non-theatrical and mainly educational orientation of Time-Life did not suit all the films. It could be particularly disadvantageous to independent filmmakers who first wanted to reach theatrical audiences. To a lesser degree, it could also affect experimental films provided the content of these films did not fit into the categories normally distributed by Time-Life, or if the company did not market them to programmers adequately. In December 1972, Michael Straight, deputy chairman of the NCA, informed Nancy Hanks that he had received a call from Stevens, who had been told that the public media panel had received an unfavorable report on the AFI filmmaker award (a reference presumably to Sheldon Renan’s report which dealt with the largest context and recommended an alternative film fellowship program). I assured him that Sheldon had not been asked to make it and had not made a direct report on the AFI.42

Subsequent communications suggest that, by April 1973, the panel must have shown a draft of the report to AFI staff, which led to a change in policy. A first draft had been submitted to the panel in December 1972, and between then and April 1973 “minor editing was undertaken and the report was retyped.”43 Such revision concerned the section dealing with the distribution of IFP films. The report’s final version was submitted to the panel early in July 1973.44 The 1977 Report on the Status of Independent Film in the U.S., in which Renan also participated, mentions some results of the 1973 survey.45 It indicated that the average income for an individual avant-garde filmmaker was $845, which included all film rentals, grants, institutional support, and other income available. It reported that “89 percent of the filmmakers did not recoup production costs from film income, and 96 percent of the respondents indicated that they could not support themselves on the income generated by their films.”46 Those results must have put pressure for a policy change in 1973 of the IFP distribution practices, but also reverberated in later changes in the areas and programmes where the Public Media Panel could act, so it could directly support non-theatrical filmmakers. In May 1973, presumably after seeing the first draft of the report, the AFI announced modifications to the IFP policy, concurring with a change to the members of the board of trustees. One amendment stated that, from then onwards, “the filmmakers will be entitled to all revenues resulting from the distribution of their films.”47 It also cancelled the Time-Life contract, which

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was distributing thirty-one films by that date. Another change in the policy permitted filmmakers to apply for living stipends as part of the grants. The decision had been reached by a special trustee committee including John Korty and Ed Emshwiller, and film executives Gordon Stulberg and Frank Yablans, on 21 May 1973. The press release reiterated the sustained assistance that American filmmakers had received from the programme for the past six years, even if in 1971, when the first crisis emerged, it was cut back $17,500 due to “budgetary limitations,” but now it had secured $200,000 from the NEA that would remain stable for the next year. A complete IFP report was released in May 1973, at the same time as the announcement. It contained updated data on the programme, and further explanations of the changes, which were retroactive. It stated that up to March 1973, the programme had awarded eighty-six projects, fifty-two of them had been finished and twenty-three had generated income.48 While the AFI had not accrued benefits from the distribution deals, it stopped having priority over them while retaining the rights to show the films at the CAFS or any AFI theatre. The report also summarised some of the results of a survey in which sixty-nine out of the eighty-six recipients had thus far participated.49 The survey asked for the filmmakers’ opinions on the Time-Life non-theatrical distribution contract, and if they thought that they could handle the distribution better by themselves. The answers were varied, with 54 percent agreeing with the arrangement, 22 percent not agreeing, and 24 percent unsure. The qualifying comments reflected that, regardless of their positive, negative, or mixed views on the arrangement, filmmakers felt that it was too soon to tell whether Time-Life could be an effective distributor, as the contract had been signed only one year earlier.50 Nevertheless, in all groups many observed that the contract was rather inflexible regarding exclusivity with the company and its non-theatrical orientation. With regards to their preference for handling distribution themselves, 25 percent answered affirmatively, while 72 percent said that they preferred not to distribute their own films.51 If filmmakers were to arrange their own distribution deals, they could choose where to go, thus encouraging do-it-yourself initiatives and promotions. However, the resources of experimental films distributors such as the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and Canyon Cinema were limited, and they needed further public support. The greatest unease with the IFP concerned the split of benefits. Regarding this, 58 percent considered the arrangement fair, twenty-six of them unqualified, and fourteen with qualifications. Forty-one percent said it was unfair. One percent did not respond. For those that agreed with the arrangement with qualifications, their main observation was the rigidity of the non-theatrical orientation of the Time-Life deal. It did not suit those filmmakers who wanted to produce films for the theatrical market. The 1973 changes stopped the AFI from having priority

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on distribution and being an organisation with exclusive rights for funding films, but nevertheless, those privileges took place over six crucial years of transition in American filmmaking. Additionally, from 1973 onwards the IFP contract stipulated that each film must signal both the AFI and the NEA as sponsors, specifying the font size to do so.52 Over 1973 the IFP continued awarding funds for established experimental filmmakers, people crossing disciplines, and emerging filmmakers. Amongst them was Stephen Beck, video experimenter and founding member of the Chicago Chapter of Experiments in Art and Technology. He received the IFP while he was electronic video artist in residence at the Center for Experiments in Television at KQED TV in San Francisco. There he developed a live video synthesiser and made Cycles (1974), co-directed with Jordan Belson, where they merged abstract and figurative imagery through cyclical sequences to allude to the underlying structure of all life phenomena. Tony Conrad also received an IFP grant in 1973. After the Rockefeller grant, Conrad had continued experimenting with the flicker effect in Straight and Narrow (with Beverly Conrad, 1970) where alternating horizontally and vertically striped frames created flowing patterns and a subjective perception of colour. During this time, Conrad also explored the materiality and expectations on films through other media in what Jonathan Walley has called “paracinematic” practices.53 Such is the case of the painting series Yellow Movies (1973–1974) where he applied housepaint on low quality paper in the shape of squares that resembled film screens to highlight the durational aspect of the passage of time on this particular medium. Conrad’s IFP film, Articulation of Boolean Algebra for Film Opticals (1975), was another turn on the so-called structural concerns of the time. In Articulation, Conrad made the case for film’s relationship with the mechanism of its production, the photographic printer. He marked black and white patterns directly onto the celluloid and the audio track following a precise mathematical organisation, which unified visual and aural stimuli. An IFP grant also went to veteran experimental filmmaker Ian Hugo, who made the trance-like Transcending (1975), where a person with a dissected brain tries to overcome a split personality. Further funds went to emerging filmmakers like West Coast animator Vince Collins who made Euphoria (1974), a richly coloured and fast-moving series of morphing images which engaged with psychedelic culture through fractals and a rock soundtrack. Abigail Child, who started her career in the early 1970s making independent documentaries in San Francisco, gained an IFP grant for the documentary project Tar Garden (1975). Child soon moved on to reworking existing footage and applying pixilation and montage techniques to explore cinematic movement and the conventions of narrative construction, casting a critical eye on questions of genre, gender, and sexuality. Child started distributing her

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films with Canyon Cinema and moved to New York in the 1980s to develop a productive career as an experimental filmmaker. It is worth noting that the May 1973 IFP report contained some statistical data that indicates the growing number of women applying for production funds.54 The first round of IFP in April 1968 received thirty-three applications of which only one was a woman, and she was not awarded funds. The availability of the IFP funds became more widely known and the next month there was another round of applicants: 180 were men and fourteen women, with two of the seven final awards going to women. Award distribution was uneven over the coming rounds. In December 1970, Women for Equality in Media protested against sexual discrimination marching into CAFS’ campus.55 They demanded equal awarding of grants, as well as 50 percent representation of women in AFI’s Board of Trustees, CAFS’ faculty and fellows. This led to the recruitment of a woman, Jan Haag, to manage admissions and awards, although the changes were slow to come and never achieved full parity. Tellingly, in the March 1973 round, there were 159 women applying out of the 396 total, but only four out of the fourteen final awards went to women. While this reveals that women increasingly looked at the IFP to finance their independent projects, coinciding with the invigoration of second wave feminism, the distribution of awards was not even. Shortly after, AFI started another programme seeking to prop up females for directing roles in Hollywood. CAFS DIRECTING WORKSHOP FOR WOMEN In early 1974, AFI launched the Directing Workshop for Women (DWW), a programme closely tied to CAFS. It was designed to give women the opportunity to direct a first film project and thus stop male-biased job recruitment in Hollywood. The idea was suggested by Mathilde Krim, a scientist and philanthropist married to United Artists executive Arthur Krim. She was given a tour around CAFS facilities at the Greystone Mansion when she raised the question: “why there are no women filmmakers?” While Krim echoed Linda Nochlin’s interrogation about the existence of great women artists in history, it is worth noting that, implicitly, Krim was referring to women filmmakers in Hollywood, which brushed further to the side relevant female figures in experimental and independent filmmaking.56 Krim suggested that AFI should help remove the stumbling blocks encountered by women when trying to access directing jobs in Hollywood. She recommended AFI send a proposal to the RF Humanities Program asking them for financial help and given her presence at the philanthropy’s board of trustees, she promised to press for it.

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The DWW followed from other Hollywood-specific initiatives such as the Women in Film discussion group founded in 1972 by Tichi Wilkerson, editor of the Hollywood Reporter and vocal denouncer of racial and gender discrimination in the West Coast, which aimed to make visible the work of Hollywood female screenwriters and provide networking opportunities. Along these lines, the DWW pilot project was conceived as “a workshop for professional women who wish to enter the field of feature film directing.”57 It was modelled on CAFS’ Directing Workshop which allowed its students to work with actors cast from the Screen Actors Guild. Participants would shoot a first project with video equipment. Screenings of the project would take place along the actors and other workshop participants, followed by discussions to “clarify and verbalise concepts and ideas.”58 If the first video project proved successful, participants would go and produce a feature film. Stevens expressed his hope that the workshop “will develop the unique talent that women can bring to directing and that, as promising new directors, they will receive equal opportunity for employment.”59 The statement engaged directly with the wording of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which prohibited discrimination based on race, sex, national origin, or religion. Considering AFI’s formation under the umbrella of the wider educational and cultural policies devised to achieve equality, it is no surprise that Stevens’ words echoed the concerns that pushed for the amendment of Title VII in the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, an act that gave the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission more power to pursue cases of discrimination. The RF awarded a first grant to AFI for the DWW project which consisted of $100,000. A large amount of it, $40,000, went to personnel expenses, while $22,000 went to the acquisition of video equipment. The individual projects received little funding, sometimes just $100, something that made this programme stand apart from the IFP. The advisory committee was composed, amongst others, of Antonio Vellani, then chair of the CAFS, Stevens, and Jan Haag. The committee thought the workshop would receive good publicity if they counted with famous names for the first cycle. They wrote and invited to apply to female actors such as Kathleen Nolan, then vice president of the Screen Actors Guild and closely involved with releasing statistics about sexist employment practices in the industry; Ellen Burstyn, who had recently received an Academy Award for Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974); Lee Grant, who was then nominated for the one she would receive for Shampoo (1975); and Karen Arthur, whose recent project Legacy (1975) was supported by an IFP grant and dealt with the mental health issues of a middleaged, middle-class woman. Other actresses invited included Lilly Tomlin and Margot Kidder, and only after they realised that they needed to include a person from a racial minority to comply with federal policy for inclusion

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they wrote to African American poet Maya Angelou, who had written the screenplay for the successful Georgia, Georgia (1972). The Hollywood orientation of the project was clear from the onset. Martin Manulis, director of AFI-West, noted in a press release, “the DWW is another step towards closer cooperation and increased communication with the professional film community of Hollywood.”60 The programme received attention from the general press as well as trade journals. Nevertheless, it soon received criticism because one of the conditions for applicants was to be a resident in the Los Angeles area.61 AFI’s response to this was that the workshop entailed continued contact with the CAFS site, and the grant could not afford to pay for living expenses. The workshop saw another backlash for awarding women who were already inside the industry and mostly well-off, thus putting into question the educative aims of the programme and its promotion of equality. The AFI response was to say there was more likeliness of success if these women had already proved successful in other areas within the industry. This logic showed no concern for merely reproducing the existing status quo. Despite the DWW intentions to provide training opportunities, some participants complained about the meagre resources with which they counted. Only a fortunate few like Lee Grant had IFP grants to complement their funds, but this was exceptional, as it would have been unsound if the AFI used money from one programme to finance another. Sometimes, some of the participants had to contribute with their own production money to finalise the project—something that only the more affluent participants could do—while other times the team and facilities they had available were CAFS students, and some complained it did not help with achieving a professional outcome. Additionally, for the first cycle, the programme did not match the skills required for directing with the potential seen in the applicants. Instead, they recruited actresses expecting they would draw publicity, leaving success to chance. As stated by Jan Haag, “if Ellen Burstyn or Julia Phillips turns out to have talent, Gordon Stulberg (president of Twentieth Century–Fox) is more likely to give her a chance than (sic) an unknown.”62 The workshop emphasised the importance of sharing experiences and giving feedback to develop confidence, very much like a self-help group, but AFI did not encourage activities which raised consciousness such as making structural analyses of inequalities within the film industry and the wider society, reason for which the achievements of the workshop would remain limited in terms of achieving equality. While considering the outcomes of the DWW takes us beyond 1974, it is worth looking further into it for how it tried to prop discriminated groups with the theatrical film industry. The tenuous engagement of the DWW with feminist perspectives was something that programme officer Jan Haag tried to account for in an

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interview in 1976. Haag noted that the workshop filmmakers did not necessarily pick feminist themes but noted that “women can bring to the screen something it needs—less violence and brutality, less sexist sex, and more compassionate dealing with people. Their insight digs deeper into what makes us people.”63 With this humanist emphasis, Haag resolved the tension between being a female filmmaker and having a feminist approach, which is a common burden women filmmakers experience. This difficulty was also observed by RF officer Peter Wert when he visited AFI in 1976. Wert reported that the DWW project had begun “speculating women would have a different vision,” but it was something they had not really investigated, therefore it was difficult to prove true.64 The fact that the DWW was awarding already affluent women eventually weighted in the decision of the RF not to continue funding for 1977, addressing Haag to apply to other funders like the Markle Foundation, at that time led by Jean Picker Firstenberg, sister of David Picker, who eventually became AFI’s head in 1980.65 Many of the DWW first years’ participants did not see their directing careers start until the 1980s, which speaks of the size of the obstacles for women directors in Hollywood.66 Perhaps Lee Grant’s was this period’s DWW most noted involvement, even if it had hiatus and delays in taking off. After a successful video project for the workshop, she directed an adaptation of August Strindberg’s play The Stronger (1976), finished with $10,000 from an IFP grant, which evidences that further economic support was needed to complete the projects to a professional status. The fact that The Stronger is one of the only DWW tapes preserved at AFI’s archive and it was included within the AFI’s List of 100 Best Films also demonstrates that this project stood out for the very institution that supported it.67 After some time, Grant went on to direct other short films, documentaries, and television movies, some of them very successful, like Down and Out in America (1986), which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary, and Nobody’s Child (1986), a TV movie for which she won the Directors Guild Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement, thus becoming the first woman to win in that category. Another DWW success story is Karen Arthur, who also struggled to finance film projects but found more fulfilment in famous television series like Cagney and Lacey and Remington Steele. The DWW is a programme that still endures today but has shifted its focus to underrepresented women instead of existing celebrities, at last considering class and race conditions in its attempts to break down barriers in the film industry. While in the 1970s there was still no parity in IFP grantees and review panels, at least the grants did not require one to live in the Los Angeles area. Thus, funds were more widely distributed across the United States, even though on average more than half of the awards went to applicants from New York and California. During the IFP’s first ten years, people like Abigail

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Child, Amalie Rothschild, Constance Beeson, Nell Cox, Susan Seidelman, Martha Coolidge, Claudia Weill, and Barbara Kopple received grants that helped them continue independently producing their films and/or launch their careers. As IFP funds were only for production, female filmmakers had to find their own resources for distributing and exhibiting their work, and this period saw a burgeoning scene of independent women film festivals and film distributors like New Day and Women Make Movies, thus establishing autonomous spheres of practice, while other filmmakers used their IFP films as calling cards to venture into Hollywood-backed production and distribution. AFI’S HEARINGS AT CONGRESS By 1974, around the same time that the DWW was being launched, the MPAA’s and the Ford Foundation’s seed funding ran out. Democratic congressman John Brandemas, who chaired the committee in charge of the NEA, introduced a bill to amend the 1965 legislation and make the AFI an independent agency by receiving two-third of its budget directly from Congress.68 At the hearings, Charlton Heston and Stevens claimed the special status of the institute as an organisation dealing with one of the most expensive arts. Heston noted the financial assistance of studios was missing given the difficulties and reconfigurations that they had been experiencing over the last ten years. The audits, nevertheless, proved that the AFI had not been keeping its books in order and giving AFI such a special status amongst other art institutions did not seem fair.69 Experimental and independent filmmakers that had been previously related to AFI testified against the move, their statements reflecting the widespread dissatisfaction of the wider independent and film education community. Ed Lynch, for instance, who received a student grant in 1968 and was then heading the Association for Independent Video and Filmmakers in New York, provided a statement against separate funding in that the “effect would be to give the new institute a favoured position in the field without evidence that it has the support for the people in the field”70 Lynch expressed concerns about his own two hundred–people organisation not having been surveyed or consulted. Even though many have received support from the IFP, there was no consideration of how this legislation would affect them. Lynch proposed a more open and service-oriented national organisation with more participation by the artists. CAFS graduate Terrence Malick, fresh from the success of Badlands (1973), provided a more benevolent statement, declaring he was not familiar with recent difficulties at Greystone but the two years he had spent there as a film student he encountered problems no different from problems at other institutions. For him, the problems of graduates finding work were the

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problems of the industry, not the school. Others like Maya Angelou and Ellen Burstyn talked favourably about the DWW in its support for people from minority backgrounds, also bringing in the case of African American Oscar Williams, who had been a CAFS fellow and had produced the successful Final Comedown (1970) and the Blaxploitation film Five on the Black Hand Side (1973). John D. Hancock testified about the IFP grant, grateful that it gave him the opportunity to move from theatre to feature filmmaking. His IFP film was the humorous Sticky My Finger, Fleet My Feet (1970), which was nominated for the Academy Short Award and accompanied the national distribution of the political satire Bananas (Woody Allen, 1971). At the hearings, Hancock was also commended for his recent feature film adaptation of Bang the Drum Slowly (1973), a story of endurance and male bonding in the face of disease which brought young actor Robert de Niro to the attention of critics. He was queried about the $10,000 IFP grant he received, being asked if that was enough to produce a quality film, to which he answered that he had to gather another $10,000 to make Sticky my Fingers, thus noting that IFP was only seed funding for the standards expected in theatrical filmmaking. Considering the lack of financial sustainability of AFI, he commented on the institution’s earlier attempt to recapture funds from the IFP through the split of distribution benefits but noted that this had a very bad impact on the programme, and that he saw an improvement in filmmakers being allowed to keep whatever income that came from their films since the 1973 changes. During his turn, Ed Emswhiler commended the IFP programme, highlighting experimental films as something that people should be more exposed in order to expand awareness of film as an art form. He regretted that most of AFI’s budget was going to CAFS, a good trade school, but not one that should be funded by taxpayers. He proposed that half of the trustees from the film world should be non-Hollywood, from a variety of backgrounds. In a detailed statement, Gerald O’Grady highlighted the same problems as Ed Lynch before. The AFI had not actually developed an educational policy, it had no constituency and no confidence from the most dedicated professionals in the field. These problems had appeared since its inception and the quick turn over of staff, such as Jim Kitses, Frank Daniel, and Sam Kulla, did not give credit to its management. These testimonies advocated for proper consultations to substantiate what AFI should do if directly funded by Congress. Eventually, the bill was not passed and the NCA subsequently changed the exclusive granting rights that AFI had held so far. From then onwards the Public Media Panel was fully able to: (1) fund individuals directly; (2) grant up to $50,000 in matching funds to other non-profit institutions; (3) sponsor the placement of independents as interns in cable television companies; and (4) support public television stations which were willing to have independents as artists in residence.71 The Public Media Panel’s, the RF’s, and

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Markle Foundation’s ensuing focus on the non-theatrical film, television, and video sector, and regional development of media art centres reflected a wider conception of film and video as moving-image technologies. They funded the coordination of the Committee on Film and Television Resources which, starting from the Mohonk Meeting of February 1973, held several regional meetings throughout the next couple of years bringing together media arts and educational organisations to develop a strategy to foster distribution of independent film and video.72 The eventual publication of the report on The Independent Film Community recuperates some of the early 1960s ideas on the importance of a self-sustaining independent film community and its connection with the values of diversity of expression and participation in America’s cultural life.73 While this report’s main focus was independent film and its specific challenges, it noted the increasing significance of video technology. The ensuing years saw a shift in attention to the use of video in arts and education, something for which the RF guided by the figure of Howard Klein, provided substantial support following the advice of Nam June Paik, who had become Klein’s special advisor.74 NOTES 1. John Belton, American Cinema: American Culture, 4th Ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012). 2. David Cook, “Auteur Cinema and the ‘Film Generation’ in the 1970s,” in The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis, 11–37 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). 3. Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929–1968 (New York: Dutton, 1968). 4. David James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 5. Stéphane Delorme, Masters of Cinema: Frances Ford Coppola (Paris: Cahiers du Cinema, 2010). 6. Jon Lewis, Whom God Wishes to Destroy: Francis Ford Coppola and the New Hollywood (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). 7. Thomas Elsaesser, “Auteur Cinema and the New Economy Hollywood,” in The Persistence of Hollywood, 237–255 (London: Routledge, 2012). 8. American Film Institute, Report: The First Ten Years: 1967–1977 (Washington DC: American Film Institute, 1977). 9. “Aims of the Center: From Remarks by George Stevens Jr., at the Opening of the Center September 23, 1969,” The American Film Institute Program Announcement, 1970–1971, 8.

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10. “Aims of the Center: From Remarks by George Stevens Jr., at the Opening of the Center September 23, 1969,” The American Film Institute Program Announcement, 1970–1971, 8. 11. “Aims of the Center: From Remarks by George Stevens Jr., at the Opening of the Center September 23, 1969,” The American Film Institute Program Anouncement, 1970–1971, 7–14, 10. 12. “Aims of the Center: From Remarks by George Stevens Jr., at the Opening of the Center September 23, 1969,” The American Film Institute Program Anouncement, 1970–1971, 7–14, 12. 13. American Film Institute, Report 1967–1971 (Washington: American Film Institute, 1971), 54. 14. George Kouvaros, Paul Schrader (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 2008). 15. Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Berkeley: California University Press, 1972). 16. Ben Kauffman, “Feature Cos., Film Institute Teams for Pics,” Hollywood Reporter, March 19 1968; The American Film Institute, Report 1967–1971 (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1971). 17. Agenda for Meeting, May 1974 A1 26 RG288, 130, 53, 2, Shelf, Box 1, Folder: Audit Info Subject Files of Deputy Chairman Michael Straight, 1969–1978. 18. Tino Balio, “New Producers for Old: United Artists and the Shift to Independent Production,” in Hollywood in the Age of Television, ed. Tino Balio, pp. 165– 183. London: Routledge, 2013. 19. Steve Mikulan, “Stanton Kaye: Father of Reinvention,” LA Weekly, March 5, 2008. www​.laweekly​.com​/news​/stanton​-kaye​-father​-of​-reinvention​ -2152374, accessed 11/07/2022. 20. Michael Straight, Twigs for an Eagle’s Nest: Government and the Arts, 1965– 1978 (New York: Devon Press, 1979). 21. National Endowment for the Arts, Annual Report (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1967), 29. 22. KQED Experimental Television Project. Project in Public Media for FY 1968, p. 1–2. NEA-NCA Records of Meetings, 1965–1992. RG288, NACP. 23. KQED Experimental Television Project. Project in Public Media for FY 1968, p. 1–2. NEA-NCA Records of Meetings, 1965–1992. RG288, NACP. 24. Kathy Rae Huffman, “Video Art: What’s TV Got to Do with It,” in Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, eds. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Finder, 81–90 (New York: Aperture, 1990). 25. P. Adams Sitney, Avant-Garde Film Theory Lectures. Film, 71.18, 71.19, 71.20, 71.21, MoMA Archives, NY. 26. P. Adams Sitney, “The Myth of the Filmmaker,” April 14, 1971, Avant-Garde Film Theory Lectures. Film 71.21, MoMA Archives, NY. My transcription from the audiotapes. 27. P. Adams Sitney, “The Myth of the Filmmaker,” April 14, 1971, Avant-Garde Film Theory Lectures. Film 71.21, MoMA Archives, NY.

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28. George Stevens to Nancy Hanks, March 29, 1971, p. 2–3. AFI Correspondence, Subject Files of Deputy Chairman Michael Straight, 1969–1978. NCA-NFAH, RG 288, NACP. 29. Stevens to Hanks March 29, 1971, p. 2–3. AFI Correspondence. Subject Files of Deputy Chairman Michael Straight, 1969–1978. NCA-NFAH, RG 288, NACP. 30. Austin Lammer, “Showdown at the Greystone Corral: An Editorial,” Film Comment 7, no. 2 (Summer 1971): 2; George Stevens Jr., “A Response from the American Film Institute,” Film Comment 7, no. 2 (Summer 1971): 4. For a comparison with the BFI, see Richard Thomson, “The American Film Institute,” in Screen 12, no. 3 (Autumn 1971): 57–95. 31. Ernest Callenbach, “The Unloved One: Crisis at the American Film Institute,” Film Quarterly 24, no. 4 (Summer 1971): 45. 32. Callenbach, “The Unloved One,” 45. 33. Scott MacDonald, Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor (Berkeley: California University Press, 2008). 34. Callenbach, “The Unloved One,” 46. 35. Jim Kitses, “Letters to the Editor,” Film Comment 7, no. 3 (Fall 1971), 78. 36. Kitses, “Letters to the Editor,” 78. 37. The agenda for the NCA Meeting in May 1974 had a note that the final budget of the film was $500,000 and $300,000 of it from NEA funds. Audit Info, Subject Files of Deputy Chairman Michael Straight, 1969–1978. NCA-NFAH, RG 288, NACP. 38. Chloe Aaron to Nancy Hanks, Memorandum Regarding David Stewart Visit, April 9, 1971. AFI Correspondence/Report 1971, Subject Files of Deputy Chairman Michael Straight, 1969–1978. NCA-NFAH, RG 288, NACP. 39. National Endowment for the Arts. Annual Report (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1971), 61. 40. Gerald O’Grady, “Introduction to the Frontier, 1979–1980,” in Video History Project. http:​//​www​.experimentaltvcenter​.org​/introduction​-frontier​-1979​ -1980, accessed 11/07/2022. 41. The American Film Institute, Narrative Report to the National Endowment for the Arts. Fiscal Year 1972, p. 5. AFI Correspondence/Reports 1973. Subject Files of Deputy Chairman Michael Straight, 1971–1974. NCA-NFAH, RG 288, NACP. 42. Michael Straight to Nancy Hanks. December 22, 1972. AFI Correspondence/Reports 1973. Subject Files of Deputy Chairman Michael Straight, 1971– 1974. NCA-NFAH, RG 288, NACP. 43. Nancy Raine to Nancy Hanks. July 27, 1973. AFI-NEA Conference. Files of Deputy Chairman Michael Straight, 1971–1974. NCA-NFAH, RG 288, NACP. 44. Raine to Hanks, July 27, 1973. AFI Correspondence/Report 1973. Subject Files of Deputy Chairman Michael Straight, 1969–1978. NCA-NFAH, RG 288, NACP. 45. Peter Feinstein, ed., The Independent Film Community: A Report on the Status of the Independent Film in the United States, folder 26, box 4, series 3, RG 1, Markle Foundation Collection, RAC. 46. Sheldon Renan, The Economics of Independent Filmmaking: A Report Prepared for the Public Media Panel Program of the National Endowment for the Arts,

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February 1973. Quoted in Feinstein, The Independent Film Community, page 20, folder 26, box 4, series 3, RG 1, Markle Foundation Collection, RAC. 47. “Four New Trustees Elected to AFI Board. Board Approves Changes in the Policy for Independent Filmmakers Awards,” AFI Press Release, Washington DC, May 23, 1973, p. 3, folder 5, box R1497, series 200R, RG A79, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 48. Report on the American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Program, May 1973, p. 8, folder 5, box, R1497, series 200R, RG A79, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 49. Report on the American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Program, May 1973, p. 17, folder 5, box R1497, series 200 R, RG A79, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 50. Report on the American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Program, May 1973, p. 17–18, folder 18, box 13, series 3, RG Area 1, Markle Collection, RAC. 51. Report on the American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Program, May 1973, p. 19, folder 18, box 13, series 3, RG Area 1, Markle Collection, RAC. 52. Report on the American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Program, May 1973, p. 79, folder 5, box R1497, series 200R, RG A79, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 53. Jonathan Walley, “The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema: Contrasting Practices in Sixties and Seventies Avant-garde Film,” October no. 103 (Winter 2003): 15–30. 54. Report on the American Film Institute Independent Filmmaker Program, May 1973, p. 79, folder 5, box R1497, series 200R, RG A79, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 55. Mary B. Murphy, “Women on March, Give AFI Demmands,” Los Angeles Times, December 11, 1970. 56. Lauren Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance, Women, Power & Politics in the New York Avant-Garde Cinema, 1943–71 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991). 57. Correspondence, Jan Hagg to Joel Compton, October 10 1974, folder 1, box R1497, sub-series 200, series R, RG A79, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 58. Directing Workshop for Women, Pilot Project, folder 1, box R1497, sub-series 200, series R, RG A79, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 59. AFI Press Release, August 16, 1974, page 2, folder 1, box R1497, sub-series 200, series R, RG A79, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 60. AFI Press Release, August 16, 1974, page 2, folder 1, box R1497, sub-series 200, series R, RG A79, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 61. Internal Correspondence, Naomi Foner (Children TV Workshop) to Jean Finstenberg, President Markle Foundation, May 20 1977, folder 18, box 4B6, series 3, sub-series 19, RG 1, Markle Foundation Collection, RAC. 62. Mary Murphy, “AFI Women: A Camera Is Not Enough,” Los Angeles Times, October 27, 1974. 63. Jan Haag, Dallas Morning News, August 22 1976, folder 3, box R1497, sub-series 200, series R, RG A79, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.

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64. Inter-Office Correspondence, Peter Wert, November 3 1976, folder 3, box R1497, sub-series 200, series R, RG A79, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 65. Internal Correspondence, May 21 1976, folder 3, box R1497, sub-series 200, series R, RG A79, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 66. Maya Montañez Smukler, Liberating Hollywood: Women Directors and the Feminist Reform of 1970s American Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2019). 67. Philis M. Barragan Goetz, “Breaking Away from Reverence and Rape: The AFI Directing Workshop for Women, Feminism, and the Politics of the Accidental Archive,” The Moving Image 15, no. 2 (2015): 50–71. 68. House Subcommittee on Education of the Committee on Education and Labour, To Create the American Film Institute as an Independent Agency: Hearings on H.R. 17021, 93rd Cong., October 7 and 8, 1974. 69. Audit Info, American Film Institute, Subject Files of Deputy Chairman Michael Straight, 1969–1979, NCA-NFAH, RG288, NACP. 70. House Subcommittee on Education of the Committee on Education and Labour, To Create the American Film Institute as an Independent Agency: Hearings on H.R. 17021, 93rd Cong., October 7 and 8, 1974, p. 67. 71. Straight, Twigs for an Eagle’s Nest, 89. See also Audit Info, American Film Institute, Subject Files of Deputy Chairman Michael Straight, 1969–1979, NCA-NFAH, RG288, NACP. 72. Committee on Film and Television Resources and Services, “A Proposal to Support Regional Seminars and Continued Study Submitted by Anthology Film Archives,” July 25, 1974, folder twenty-five, box 4, series 3, sub-series 4, RG R1, Markle Foundation Archives, RAC. The Committee was represented by Anthology Film Archives, which assumed the surrogate name of Film Art Fund. 73. Peter Feinstein, ed., The Independent Film Community: A Report on the Status of Independent Film in the United States, folder 26, box 4, series 3, RG 1, Markle Foundation Archives, RAC. 74. Howard Klein, “The Rise of Televisualists,” in The New Television: A Public/ Private Art, ed. Douglas Davis and Allison Simpson (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1977), 158–169; Howard Klein, introduction to Video: The State of the Art (New York: The Rockefeller Foundation, 1976). See also Marita Sturken, “Private Money and Personal Influence: Howard Klein and the Rockefeller Foundation Funding on the Media Arts,” Afterimage 14, no. 6. (January 1987): 8–15.

Conclusion

In the previous chapters I have identified how the AFI institutionalised a particular idea of independent and experimental filmmakers as liberal artists through the IFP grants. But this was not an overnight turn of attention seeking to control these practices. The infrastructural and ideological conditions for it had been established before. The flourishing of American film culture in the 1940s and 1950s was greatly enabled by greater access to filmmaking technologies and growing infrastructures for non-theatrical exhibition in museums, film societies, and university film courses, as well as film education programmes. Many of these programmes and resources were supported by philanthropic foundations like the RF and Ford Foundation or were part of educational institutions like universities and colleges. This establishment was promoted since the mid-1930s, as the analysis of RF Communications policies during this time demonstrates. Despite their growth over the 1940s and 1950s, the crossover of film societies to independent theatrical exhibition by the 1960s, was unlikely to happen with large philanthropic support. In this light, an important part of experimental and independent film culture was closely tied to not-for-profit ventures since the 1930s and not something suddenly appearing in the 1960s. The importance of the RF in supporting modern arts through MoMA in the context of the Cold War and the foundation’s pushing for national arts policies through working groups and reports cannot be underestimated. RF’s explicit attention to avant-garde and experimental art practices in the mid-1960s Arts Program implied a liberal vision of art whereby enabling relative freedom and subversion was a key driver of a competitive arts sector for it dynamizes mainstream art practices and provides audiences with alternatives to the mainstream. The ideological and institutional context of the cultural Cold War enabled the conditions of possibility of the AFI, as this institution resulted from the growing engagement of the U.S. federal government with arts and culture during the Cold War which Kennedy wanted to make more systematic and professionalised. AFI’s particular attention to 137

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experimental and independent cinema is rooted in the liberal idea of free art which had become a weapon of the cultural Cold War and Stevens had already instituted during his years at USIA. The notions of personal cinema and authorial vision pervasive in film culture through the 1960s drew from romantic and modernist discourses on authenticity and reflexivity, and was applied to various modes of production, inside and outside Hollywood. It invoked different degrees of creative control in the production of the film and/or the appearance of recurrent themes, style, or self-reflexive stances in the film text. Even before the AFI, creative control underpinned the approach of the Ford Foundation and the RF when they first supported individual film artists in 1964 and 1966 correspondingly. These institutions applied existing models of support for arts and sciences where notions of creative autonomy are preserved and they were rather loose in terms of the outcomes of the grants, even if that was a difficult decision to make, as evidenced by the case of Tony Conrad. AFI’s own approach to experimental and independent cinema was strongly marked by Stevens’ liberal vision of personal cinema and the “films of ideas.” Stevens valued experimentation in the instrumental sense: as a way of testing new grounds that could stimulate theatrical filmmaking, but also in its own right, setting precedent of this appreciation and encouragement during his time at the USIA, which continued in the different categories of aspirants that could apply for an IFP grant. Nevertheless, beyond the well-administered IFP, the AFI clearly did not support distribution, exhibition, scholarship, and preservation, therefore, its provision for experimental and independent cinema as modes of film practice was restricted and disappointed film practitioners, independent film businesses, film critics, and educators. AFI’s mandate specified that support for film was to supplement but not compete with private enterprises, and its board of trustees and funding heavily involved the MPAA. Even in the 1930s, the RF had clearly established it would support film education without interfering with the interests of major theatrical film businesses. Therefore, it was very unlikely that the AFI would have helped the establishing of a strong nationwide independent theatrical cinema circuit that some would have liked to see. This book has also identified the multifarious nature and interests of these communities, in particular the New American Cinema Group, which might have seemed more homogeneous at that time than they were in practice; some were firmly placed in the non-theatrical realm like Stan Brakhage while others wanted to step into theatrical businesses like Shirley Clarke. Consequently, not every measure or programme would satisfy them in the same way. The picture that results from examining the conditions of the IFP production programme is that it enabled the making of a significant amount and variety of films, bearing in mind that the grant scheme only sanctioned

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a rough idea of the project, not the result, and the AFI could boast enabling freedom of expression in its productions as it accorded with its liberal ideology during the Stevens’ years. If there was a form of regulation it might have been internalised by filmmakers when writing their applications and gauging their chances to succeed. AFI’s administration of IFP funds seems to have been mostly efficient and well monitored, as opposed to other programmes. Nevertheless, what happened with the films after being made is a story where there is continuity with what was happening before. AFI’s involvement with the institutionalisation of experimental and independent film at this point protected and encouraged production and creativity but left it to market forces or other philanthropic or self-help enterprises to decide on their circulation and economic viability. The notion of independence instituted by the IFP only regarded creative autonomy in the conception of the film, disregarding the conditions of control that also affect distribution and exhibition which could have helped towards building more sustainable practices. AFI could have done more to strengthen the non-theatrical sector and this lack of attention concerned the Public Media Panel of the NCA. It is also worth noting that CAFS’ feature productions aimed at commercial release, such as Stanton Kaye’s In Pursuit of Treasure, depleted money destined to running the institution and attending to wider film education programmes. Understandably, this caused great discontent and suspicion over CAFS and AFI’s overall priorities because the wider education activities more germane to a publicly funded institution fell in disregard. AFI’s attempt at sorting out its financial instability by seeking independent funding from Congress in 1974 seems also an attempt to move away from the NCA and the Public Media Panel’s overseeing. The failure of this motion led to some of the changes in what the Public Media Panel was able to fund from then on, which ended the AFI’s exclusivity of funding for film, and qualified the panel to cover some areas that the AFI had neglected. It is worth noting some developments in the following years, first, in the area of theatrical filmmaking and then in experimental and avant-garde film practices. AFI’S AUTEURS AND THE NEW HOLLYWOOD ECONOMY With regards to AFI’s orientation towards Hollywood, this book has only tangentially addressed CAFS film training programme when it was relevant to the criticism raised amongst the wider independent film and education community. What comes across from this first look at CAFS is that Stevens, along with colleagues like Antonio Vellani, instituted in CAFS ideas of independence as personal expression and creative control but oriented to the

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specific context of feature theatrical filmmaking. Such ideas would fit well within the distinctive economy that characterised Hollywood from 1970s onwards. In this context, as noted by Thomas Elsaesser, production was rejuvenated through expansion and diversification, which also translated into more flexible exhibition practices to suit the different needs of individual films and audiences.1 New promotional strategies and ties also appeared, plus new talent which would experiment with characterisation and new ways of symbolising America, and appeal to more fragmented audience groups. The New Hollywood economy valorises the figure of the director as a romantic artist, an auteur seeking creative control and often struggling against oppressive forces. It is significant that two CAFS alumni from that generation, David Lynch and Terrence Malick, have come to epitomise such roles of outsiders in Hollywood, occupying a distinctive, even if flexible, position within a strand of contemporary American cinema that aims to reconcile expressive aims and commercial ends. David Lynch’s career represents a success story in AFI’s attempt to bridge art house and experimental aesthetics with directorial control and commercial imperatives. Lynch’s graduation project at CAFS resulted in Eraserhead (1977). With a stark black and white photography and elements of grit, fantasy, and visual effects, the film follows a young man living in the threatening landscape of a post-industrial city who must look after an unwelcomed baby-monster, feeling trapped in fatherhood and society’s norms. The production also suffered from funding problems but at least was finalised, unlike In the Pursuit of Treasure. It was acquired for distribution by Libra Films, an independent company specialising in underground, experimental, and exploitation movies.2 Libra released Eraserhead along with the animation Asparagus (Suzan Pitt, 1979), made with IFP support, it inventively explored female sexuality and fantasy. In the long-run, Eraserhead acquired cult status in the midnight movie circuit which had emerged in the late 1970s when Roger Corman formed New World Pictures, a small production and distribution company for the specialised market of low budget and foreign films. It helped to revive urban independent theatres where international art films were seen along with exploitation and horror movies. Eraserhead’s cult reputation drew producers’ attention to Lynch and he was offered the opportunity to direct the art cinema horror story The Elephant Man (1980). Mel Brooks acted as an independent producer, securing funds by pre-selling U.S. distribution rights and attracting an important international crew.3 After this film’s success, producer Dino de Laurentis offered Lynch to make Dune (1984), a large-scale science-fiction adaptation that had been gestating for a long time and was packaged with the ambition of becoming a blockbuster. The film’s production was complicated, and Lynch did not approve the final edit. Dune was a box-office failure. It hinted at Lynch’s unsuitability for the big movie formula of the 1980s. Lynch found his art cinema niche again with

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Blue Velvet (1986), a story of perversion hiding behind the beautiful façade of American suburbia. Backed again by de Laurentis, the agreement between producer and director made explicit that the director would retain creative control over the film. By the early 1990s Lynch’s auteur status and the marketing value of his name was firmly established. Lynch’s name sets expectations for the style and themes of the films, in a similar way to genres and stars in the studio system.4 In particular, Lynch’s treatments focus on the underside of American society and popular culture, and more recently, he has leaned towards exploring Hollywood’s own representations in a self-reflective way, as in Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006). Lynch’s recognisable style has been built through long-standing creative collaborations with two other CAFS students: sound designer Alan Splet and cinematographer Fred Elmes. Nevertheless, these and other contributions are not always given that much importance, and publicity tends to hold on to the romantic idea of the individual auteur’s style. This was patent throughout the production of the first two seasons of the late-night TV series Twin Peaks (1990–1991), which succeeded in mixing murder mystery and soap-opera television formulae. Lynch wrote the pilot idea with Robert Frost and directed some of the episodes of the first season. When he began to work on Wild at Heart (1992) he spent significant time away from the series. Other individuals, including CAFS alumni Caleb Deschanel, Tim Hunter, and Lesli Lika-Hunter, wrote and directed many episodes. Lynch only went back to direct one important episode of the second season. In an interview, Frost acknowledged that Lynch was credited for the whole series, a type of publicity that relied upon Lynch’s higher profile.5 For most audiences, the whole of the series is associated with Lynch’s unique style and themes, making patent the separation between the author as creative agent and the author as perceived by the public. Another CAFS graduate, Terrence Malick, also enjoys an auteur status within Hollywood’s margins. Malick’s theatrical debut was Badlands (1973), an example of the period’s vogue for reworking American cinematic types and genres with the sensibility of modernist art cinema. Badlands told the story of two teenage runaways that evoked Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950) and the then recent Bonnie and Clyde.6 As the latter, Badlands was bought for distribution by Warner Brothers.7 Yet, Badlands’ treatment of the myth of the outsiders had a pervasive philosophical awareness, punctuated by a stream of consciousness commentary of the female character. The film’s cinematography and sound score were highly crafted, and its slow tempo made it stand out against its antecedents’ more accelerated paces. Badlands thus invited reflection by representing the teenagers’ violence and romantic relationship with some detachment. At the same time, it conveyed a sense

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of lost innocence. This film, as well as Malick’s later works, such as Days of Heaven (1978) and The Tree of Life (2011), deals with the themes of life, love, and death from a perspective that evokes American transcendentalism, and revisits American identity topics such as the Frontier.8 Malick has often found difficulties in adapting the final cut of his long and often contemplative movies to more saleable versions. Like Lynch, he has also found obstacles gathering production funds. Nevertheless, both Lynch and Malick have peripheral yet reputed places within the production modes and marketing strategies of post-1960s Hollywood. Their films are seen as a recognisable part of contemporary American culture and sensibility. They engage with the aesthetics and production methods and marketing of international art cinema, which is an adaptable counterpart to blockbuster cinema. Their historical emergence as Hollywood’s auteurs can be better understood considering the wider context of the film industry, and discourse on the filmmaker as an artist in which the AFI participated. Not only ideas around directorial control found their place within Hollywood’s new economies of production and publicity. Many of the thematic concerns and moral standards that had made experimental and independent cinema more distinctive and transgressive in the earlier part of the 1960s, became more widely accepted under the updated moral standards of the MPAA ratings, which allowed for different treatments and thematic approaches. This first look at the AFI suggests that its focus on creative expression and directorial control cemented the auteur idea beyond its support for experimental and independent cinema and across other programmes, such as CAFS, where oral history, mentorships and training in filmmaking were part of the curriculum. More research into CAFS’ curriculum and alumni could offer a rich field where to explore how the AFI contributed to the multiple crossovers that took place at this time and the implementation of auteurism as a specific aesthetic ideology in film training at that key moment in American film history. BLACK BOXES AND WHITE CUBES After the 1974 changes on the AFI’s exclusive film granting, the Public Media Panel started the programme “Short Film Showcase” whereby a selection of experimental films, especially animation, reached general audiences through theatrical exhibition.9 The selected filmmakers received a one-time honorary award and the panel paid for blowing up prints from 16 to 35 mm, publishing promotional materials, and distributing the films. Nonetheless, the conditions of this programme established limits to the exploitation of

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experimental films in theatrical exhibition. One condition was that the panel and filmmakers would not receive any benefit from it. Beyond the one-time honorary the only return filmmakers could reap was publicity and exposure. A second condition was that the rights over the materials would remain with the panel, although filmmakers could strike copies of the 35mm prints at their own cost. Finally, a third condition stated that the films needed to be less than ten minutes in length and be approved by the MPAA to be screened to the general public. The Short Film Showcase’s first round included films by established filmmakers and animators, such as Robert Breer, James Whitney, and Bruce Baillie.10 The programme lasted for several years and thus fulfilled the aim of widening audiences for experimental works by using them as part of the program in the screening of theatrical features but it did not glean economic returns to the filmmakers. Simultaneously, a certain view on the history of American experimental film and a canon of filmmakers had become established. In 1976, the American Federation of Arts, with support from the NEA, organised the major retrospective History of American Avant-Garde Cinema.11 The exhibition catalogue included the writings of John Handhardt, Stuart Liebman, Fred Camper, and Gene Youngblood who put the emphasis on these films’ engaging with consciousness, self-reflection, and an ontological reduction of cinema’s properties, very much in line with Sitney’s view of avant-garde cinema’s historical evolution up until structural films. Nevertheless, this now canonical view also started to be challenged. Andrew Sarris reviewed the exhibition and noted the teleological pitfalls of the formalist approach endorsed by Sitney and other critics such as Annette Michelson who saw avant-garde films seeking to define a new way of vision.12 Sarris pointed out that these authors “reduce the bulk of film history to a sketchy overture for the presumed grand operas of Michael Snow (. . .) and Hollis Frampton.”13 Sarris also underscored the closed system of practice, criticism, and theory that accompanied the philanthropically-supported avant-garde. Shortly after, feminist critics Constance Penley and Janet Bergstrom also argued for the need to distinguish between advocacy of these films and rigorous film theory and history.14 As Sarris before, they pointed out that the advocacy approach was underpinned by a common institutional and methodological matrix formed by Film Culture, Artforum, Anthology Film Archives, and New York University to which Sitney and Michelson were affiliated. Years later, David James pointed out that, even if supported by federal grants, museums, and academic institutions, structural film failed to assimilate itself to the workings of the art world.15 It did not attract capital investment by producing a self-contained object that could be marketed on its scarcity, as other art commodities. Further, it often found public indifference when not regarded as inaccessible due to its reflexive attention to filmic signification

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in extremis and apparent refusal to signify. In James’ marxist-materialist reading, structural film embodied and repressed its social determinations. More recently, Michael Zryd has offered a finely nuanced assessment whereby the institutionalisation of structural film within the ethos of academia gave way for productive contradictions in the context of progressive and experiential education: it allowed the foregrounding of aspects of the exhibition, perception, and reception of cinema, thus becoming “useful by being anti-useful, by opposing utilitarian instrumental pedagogy in favor of an approach that invites open, complex, and sometimes discomfiting experiences.”16 The 1980s provoked further drifts in funding for experimental and independent films. The conservative government of Ronald Reagan carried out a series of budgetary cuts which deeply affected funding for the arts. The IFP’s funding for film production, and the Public Media Program support for Major Media Centers and Services to the Field, which provided film equipment, as well as facilitated training, distribution, exhibition, and discussion of experimental and independent film work, suffered from these cuts.17 Over the coming years, corporate philanthropy could have become more involved in giving to the arts, but it was rather the opposite and when it happened, support focused on certain exhibitions at large institutions more than helping with the running costs of minority art centres. Despite Reagan’s attempt to completely dismantle the NEA, arguments against it grew and the agency resisted, but not without seeing its budget diminished—raises only kept up with inflation. The NEA continued support for film initiatives during this time, such as the independent-focused Sundance Institute and National Center for Film and Video Preservation, the latter launched in 1984 in association with the AFI. Between 1986 and 1996, AFI gave the Maya Deren Award to recognise the careers of experimental filmmakers and video artists such as Stan Brakhage, Bruce Baillie, Bruce Conner, Shirley Clarke, and George Kuchar amongst others. Occasionally, AFI also organised retrospectives of experimental films. Nevertheless, the political context was changing throughout these times. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the NEA was engulfed in what became known as the culture wars, where congressmen and critics disputed the content of work and exhibitions with homosexual and critical content sponsored by the federal government, signalling the breakdown of the consensus on freedom of expression that had characterised the administration of the arts agency during the 1960s and 1970s. Towards the end of the Cold War, congressmen put into question the political relevance of free art. By the mid-1980s there was a sense that American avant-garde film was in crisis, if not actually reached a dead end. While some critics set out to polemicize by lamenting the academicism resulting from the institutionalisation of experimental cinema within universities, and blamed the loss of

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independence on the appearance of this and government support, this was too much to fault only on the institutions themselves. Such view lacked analysis of the differentiation of a variety of modes of production during the 1960s and 1970s and the exact role played by specific programmes of philanthropic and federal government support before and after, which this book has addressed. Moreover, it did not recognise the wider context of liberal cultural policies of the 1960s and its demise in the politics of the 1980s. Finally, it goes without saying that in the following years innovation, subversion, and alternative production modes continued to appear in various forms of audiovisual practice, engaging with concerns, technologies, and audiences correlative to their generational and historical moment. Importantly too, developments of video art through the 1980s and 1990s offered, as Erika Balsom has demonstrated, a more self-contained art object that could be editioned and sold as a commodity in the art market, which opened the path for video art and audiovisual installations to be part of museum collections and galleries.18 While it is fair to say that AFI’s attention to the wider ecologies of experimental and independent cinema beyond production was very limited, a variety of reasons relating to changes in film and art practices, audiences and the overall audiovisual industry also influenced the demise of the golden age of American experimental and independent cinema. NOTES 1. Thomas Elsaesser, “Auteur Cinema and the New Economy Hollywood,” in The Persistence of Hollywood, 237–255 (London: Routledge, 2012). 2. Jim Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Midnight Movies (New York: Da Capo Press, 1991). 3. David Hughes, The Complete Lynch (London: Virgin, 2003). 4. Timothy Corrigan, “Auteurs and the New Hollywood,” in The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). See also John Berra, Declarations of Independence: American Cinema and the Partiality of Independent Production (Bristol: Intellect, 2008). 5. Robert Frost, quoted in Hughes, The Complete Lynch, 107. 6. Peter Kramer, The New Hollywood: From “Bonnie and Clyde” to “Star Wars” (London: Wallflower Press, 2005). 7. Alexander Horwath, “A Walking Contradiction (Partly Truth and Partly Fiction),” in The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, ed. Thomas Elsaesser, Alex Horwath, and Noel King, 83–105 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004). 8. Hannah Patterson, ed., Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America (London: Wallflower Press, 2003).

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9. Short Film Showcase (SFS). Subject Files of Brian O’Doherty, Director of Media Arts, 1974–1981, NCA-NFAH, RG288, NACP. 10. Letter to Gene Youngblood, April 1, 1974. SFS, General 1974. Subject Files of Brian O’Doherty, Director of Media Arts, 1974–1981, NCA-NFAH, RG288, NACP. 11. Marilyn Singer, ed., A History of Avant-Garde Cinema (New York: The American Federation of Arts, 1976). 12. Zryd, “Experimental Cinema as Useless Cinema.” 13. Andrew Sarris, “Avant-Garde Films Are More Boring than Ever,” in Politics and Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 197. 14. Constance Penley and Janet Bergstrom, “The Avant-Garde: History and Theories,” in Movies and Methods, vol.2 of Movies and Methods: An Anthology, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: California University Press, 1985), 287. 15. David E. James, Allegories of Cinema. American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 16. Zryd, “Experimental Cinema as Useless Cinema,” 317. 17. Maureen Turim, “The Retraction of State Funding of Film and Video Arts and Its Effects on Future Practice,” in Cinema Histories, Cinema Practices, ed. Patricia Mellencap and Philip Rosen, 132–141 (Los Angeles: American Film Institute: 1984). 18. Erika Balsom, After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).

Appendix Archival Collections

The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Archive Library, Sidney. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. National Film and Television Archive, British Film Institute, London. Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin. The Library of The Woman’s Collection at Texas Woman’s University, Denton, Texas. Margaret Herrick Library Special Collections, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles, California. National Endowment for the Arts Library, Washington DC.

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Index

Abbot, John, 19 Abe, Shuya, 118 abstract expressionism, 7, 27, 29, 36 Academy Awards, 57 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 114 Acland, Charles, 3, 23 Advancing American Art Exhibition, 26 Allen, Lewis, 37–42, 60 Allen, Woody, 131 American Council on Education (ACE), 18–21, 85 American Federation of Arts, 143 American Film Institute (AFI): catalog project, 87; proposal, 17–21, 39, 41, 58, 85–86, 121; Student Program, 95, 101, 106. See also Center for Advanced Film Studies; Independent Film Program; Stevens, George, Jr. American International Pictures (AIP), 11, 112–13 American Society of Cinematographers, 114 Andersen, Thom, 101 Angelou, Maya, 127, 131 Anger, Kenneth, 4, 29, 57, 61, 70, 80n17, 86, 109n57, 119 Ann Arbour Film Festival, 76 Anthology Film Archives, 119, 143

Antioch Symposium, 39–41 Antonio, Emile de, 33 Archer, Eugene, 33 Arnheim, Rudolf, 24, 75 art: cinema, 5, 25, 35, 38–41, 121, 140–42; film, 11, 31, 36, 41, 43, 59, 73, 78, 89, 95, 98, 111, 113, 115–16, 119, 121–22, 140 Art Cinema Guild, 39 Artforum (magazine), 71, 143 Arthur, Karen, 127–28 Art in Cinema, 4 Art of Assemblage series, 69 Association for Independent Video and Filmmakers, 130 Association of School Film Libraries, 21 Atoms for Peace exhibition, 30 Australia, 100–101 auteur, 11, 13, 60, 113, 139–40, 141–42 auteurism/auteur theory, 34–35, 53, 60, 88, 111, 114–15, 122 avant-garde, 2–4, 7–8, 10–11, 20, 22, 25, 27, 62, 78, 86, 90, 119–20, 123, 137, 139, 143–44 Bachman, Gideon, 37 Baillie, Bruce, 2, 76, 82n56, 119, 143–44 Ballard, Carol, 113 159

160

Index

Balsom, Erika, 145 Barron, Bebe and Louis, 23 Barry, Iris, 17, 19–20, 78, 103 Bartlett, Freunde, 121 Bartlett, Scott, 2, 116 Barwood, Hal, 113 Barzyk, Fred, 118 Battock, Gregory, 77 Bay Area, 25, 116 Beck, Stephen, 125 Beeson, Constance, 116–17, 130 Bell, Daniel, 91 Belson, Jordan, 2, 29, 57–58, 80n17, 96, 120, 125 Bergman, Ingmar, 5, 37, 86 Bergstrom, Janet, 143 Berlin Film Festival, 53 Bernstein, Elmer, 30 Biddle, Livingstone, 87 Biennales, 7, 27 Bloom, Kathryn, 65–67 Blue, James, 54–55, 57, 70, 80n17, 93, 96, 105, 114 B-movies, 25, 31, 51, 89, 111 Bogdanovich, Peter, 113–14 Bowser, Eileen, 77 Brakhage, Stan, 4, 24, 29, 40, 43, 76, 82n56, 86, 109n57, 119, 138, 144 Brandemas, John, 130 Brando, Marlon, 61 Brandon, Tom, 121 Breer, Robert, 24, 43, 71–72 Bresson, Robert, 115, 119 Brigante, Louis, 33, 59 British Film Institute, 18, 121–22 Brockman, Jacob, 70, 73–74, 119 Brook, Peter, 60 Broughton, James, 86, 119 Brown, Kenneth, 59 Brussels World Fair 1958, 29–30, 36 Buckminster Fuller (domes), 30, 69, 73 Buñuel, Luís, 38, 119 Burckhardt, Rudy, 23 Burstyn, Ellen, 127–28, 131 Bute, Mary Ellen, 23

Cahiers de Cinema, 34, 114 Callenbach, Ernest, 35, 40, 74, 106n3, 121 Cambodia War, 116 Cameron, James, 113 Camper, Fred, 8, 143 Canada, 39, 54, 59, 104 Cannes Festival, 30, 39, 41, 52, 54, 59, 98 Canyon Cinema, 9, 76, 96, 116, 121, 124, 126 Capra, Frank, 5, 37, 111 Cassavetes, John, 4–5, 32–34, 36, 43–44, 60 Castle, William, 31 censorship, 4, 23, 31, 40, 61, 72, 101; boards, 31–32, 42 Center for Advanced Film Studies (CAFS), 1, 11, 13, 89, 97, 99, 106, 113–17, 124, 126–31, 139–42 Center of Media Study in Buffalo, 122 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 26–27 Chaplin, Charles, 25 Child, Abigail, 125–26 Christ, Judith, 71–73 Chytilova, Vera, 68 Cinema 16, 4, 23–25, 33, 40–43 Cinémathèque de Belgique, 29 Cinema Verite, 35 Cineprobe, 102–4 civil rights, 6, 28, 54, 60, 64, 101, 127 Clair, Rene, 119 Clarke, Larry, 1 Clarke, Shirley, 4–5, 29, 32, 36–42, 54–55, 57, 60, 67, 94, 119, 138, 144 Cold war, 6, 7–10, 12, 24, 26–28, 44, 52, 62, 68, 137–38, 144 Collins, Vince, 125 Columbia, 60, 112 Compton, Boyd R., 63, 74 Congress for Cultural Freedom, 27 Conner, Bruce, 8–9, 24–25, 57, 78, 80n17, 82n56, 86, 109n57, 119, 144 Conrad, Beverly, 125

Index

Conrad, Joseph, 113 Conrad, Tony, 2, 75–76, 120, 125, 138 Coolidge, Martha, 130 Coppola, Francis Ford, 92, 112–13 Corman, Roger, 11, 31, 113–14, 140 Corso, Gregory, 39 counterculture, 112, 116 Cox, Nell, 130 creative autonomy, 37, 44, 53, 55, 57–58, 113, 138–39 Creative Film Foundation, 24–25 Croce, Arlene, 33 Crockwell, Douglas, 23 Cromwell, John, 34 Culkin, John, 116 Cultural Development Act 1964, 64, 67 Cunningham, Merce, 55 Czechoslovakia, 53, 68, 72, 114 Dale, Edgar, 21 Daniel, Frank, 114, 131 Dante, Joe, 113 Dartmouth College Conference, 85–86 Davidson, Bruce, 2, 116 D’Avino, Carmen, 24–25, 57, 78, 80n17 Davis, Jim, 23, 86 Dean, James, 61 Decherney, Peter, 11 Demme, Jonathan, 113 Democrats, 1, 35, 111, 130 Deren, Maya, 4, 22–24, 69, 86, 109n57, 119, 144 Deschanel, Caleb, 114, 141 de-Stalinization, 68 D’Hanoncourt, Rene, 71, 87 Dickinson, Thorold, 19 diplomacy, 21–22, 67; cultural diplomacy, 8, 12, 25–28, 30, 75 Direct cinema, 35–36, 38, 54, 56, 59, 95, 97, 112 Directing Workshop for Women (DWW), 126–31 Dratfield, Leo, 121 Drew, Robert, 4–5, 35 Dreyer, Carl, 115, 119

161

Duras, Marguerite, 38 Dwan, Alan, 114 Eames Brothers, 29–30 Educational Film Library, 41 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 27–28 Ellis, Jack C., 85 Elmes, Fred, 141 Emshwiller, Ed, 2, 55, 59, 67, 72, 80n17, 82n56, 109n57, 124 Encounter (magazine), 27 Engel, Morris, 32, 34, 44 Expanded Cinema Festival, 73, 75, 119 Experimental Film Group, 24–25 Farber, Manny, 5 Fellini, Federico, 5, 86 Fenin, George, 33 film, 16 mm, 4, 23, 32, 59, 71, 122 Film Comment (magazine), 122 Film Council of America, 23, 41 Film Culture (magazine), 5, 8, 33–35, 74, 119, 143 Film-Makers’ Cinematheque, 43, 70, 74, 94 Film-Makers’ Cooperative, 43, 55, 59, 70, 74, 76, 94, 96, 114, 116, 119, 121, 124 Film-Makers’ Distributors Center, 94 Filmmakers Inc., 32, 35–36, 60 Films of the World (distributor), 41–42 Film Quarterly, 17, 35, 41 film societies, 3–4, 9, 18–21, 23–25, 40–41, 77, 85, 90, 112, 137. See also American Federation of Film Societies; London Film Society; New York Film Society; Pacific Film Society film studies, 10, 44, 51, 85–86, 89 Flaherty, Robert, 86 Ford, John, 111, 114 Ford Foundation, 6–7, 9, 12, 23, 28, 57–58, 64, 74, 76–77, 92–93, 96, 102, 115, 130, 137–38 Fordham University, 117

162

Forman, Milos, 68 Frampton, Hollis, 102–4, 119, 143 France, 34–35, 54, 59, 68, 72, 95 Frank, Robert, 2, 33, 40, 43, 96 Free Cinema (Britain), 34–35 Free Cinema Festival (Italy), 43 Frost, Robert, 141 Fulbright, 26 Galbraith, John K., 62 Gangi, James di, 37 Gelber, Jack, 36 Geldzahler, Henry, 76, 87 Genet, Jean, 61 George Eastman House, 87 Getz, Stan, 95 Gillin, Donald T., 38–39 Ginsberg, Allan, 39, 43 Godard, Jean-Luc, 34, 57 Goldwyn, Samuel, 52 Good Neighbour policies, 21. See also Office of the Coordinator of InterAmerican Affairs Graham, Marta, 55 Grant, Lee, 127–29 Great Society, 64–65, 87 Greaves, William, 55 Greenberg, Clement, 24, 27 Greystone Mansion, 113, 126, 130 Grierson, John, 19 Griffith, David W., 20, 78 Guerrilla Art Action Group, 104 Guggenheim, Charles, 54 Haag, Jan, 126–29 Hale, William, 55 Halprin, Ann, 117 Hancock, John D., 131 Handhardt, John, 122, 143 Hanks, Nancy, 80n30, 120, 123 Harrington, Curtis, 86 Harris, Hilary, 23, 43 Hawks, Howard, 5, 114 Herschenshon, Bruce, 54 Heston, Charlton, 54, 130

Index

Hetzel, Ralph, 53, 103, 106n3 Hill, Jerome, 34, 94, 119 Hindle, Will, 2 Hirsch, Storm de, 2, 59, 77, 95–96, 119 History of American Avant-Garde Cinema Exhibition, 143 Hitchcock, Adolf, 25 Hitler, Adolf, 57 Hogdon, Dana, 37 homosexuality, 4, 61, 78, 94, 117, 144 Hopper, Denis, 114 Houston, John, 86 Howard, Brice, 118 Hughes, Robert, 41 Hugo, Ian, 23, 86, 125 Humphrey, Hubert, 35 Hunter, Tim, 141 Independent Filmmakers Association, 23, 25, 29 Independent Filmmaker Program (IFP), 1, 2, 6, 9–13, 95–99, 102–6, 113, 116–17, 120–31, 136–40, 144 Independent Film Series (MoMA), 70–74, 100 India, 52, 100 Italy, 43 Ivens, Joris, 37 Jacobs, Henry, 29 Jacobs, Ken, 44, 78, 119 Jacobs, Lewis, 22–23, 78 Jacoby, Irving, 36 James, David, 11, 59, 98, 112, 115, 143 jazz, 7, 27, 29, 31, 33, 38, 42–43, 55 John Simon Memorial Foundation, 22 Johnson, Lyndon B., 1, 28, 64, 69, 94, 111 Johnston, Eric, 94 Jones, Janna, 10, 90 Jordan, Larry, 78, 109n57 Junker, Howard, 73, 75 Kadar, Jan, 68 Kael, Pauline, 93

Index

Kagan, Jeremy Paul, 113–14 Karlovy-Vary Film Festival, 52, 68 Kass, Peter, 44 Katz, Gloria, 113 Kauffman, Stanley, 96, 105 Kaye, Stanton, 11, 58, 82n56 Keaton, Buster, 25 Kellum Smith, James, 76 Kelman, Ken, 119 Kennedy, Jackie, 52 Kennedy, John F., 1, 6, 28, 35, 52–56, 62, 64–65, 67, 80n30, 137 Kent University, 116 Kerouac, Jack, 33 Khrushchev, 30, 57 Kidder, Margot, 127 King, Martin Luther, 54, 101 “Kitchen debates,” 30 Kitses, Jim, 122, 131 Klein, Howard, 132 Knight, Arthur, 85–86, 92, 96, 106n3 Knokke-Le-Zoute Experimental Film Festival, 61 Knowlton, Ken, 75 Kopple, Barbara, 1, 130 Korty, John, 1, 97, 113, 120, 124 KQED, 117, 125 Kramer, Robert, 1, 11, 97 Kramer, Stanley, 42, 52 Kreul, James, 41 Krim, Arthur, 126 Krim, Mathilde, 126 Kubelka, Peter, 119–20 Kubrick, Stanley, 86 Kuchar Brothers, 95, 104, 144 Kulla, Sam, 131 Kurosawa, Akira, 86 Latin America, 21–22, 30, 35, 54 Laughton, Charles, 54 Laurentis, Dino de, 140–41 Laurot, Edouard de, 33–34, 44 Lawder, Standish, 2, 77 Leacock, Richard, 32, 35, 70, 105 Ledoux, Jacques, 29

163

Leger, Fernand, 20 Leslie, Alfred, 33 Levitt, Helen, 70, 80n17 Lewis, Joseph H., 114, 141 Libra Films, 140 Library of Congress, 87 Liebman, Stuart, 143 Life (magazine), 35 Lika-Hunter, Lesli, 141 Lincoln Center for Performing Arts, 58, 85, 87 Living Theatre, 36, 59 London, Ephraim, 42 London Film Society, 17, 19 Loxton, David, 118 Lucas, George, 113 Lumet, Sidney, 33 Lye, Len, 19, 70 Lynch, David, 1, 13, 96–98, 114, 140–42 Lynch, Ed, 101, 130–31 MacDermott, John R., 58, 80n17 MacKenzie, Kent, 54–57, 80n17 Maddow, Ben, 77 Malick, Terrence, 13, 130, 140–42 Mancia, Adrienne, 69–70, 100, 102, 104 Mannas, James, 101 Manulis, Martin, 128 March of Time, 22, 37 Marcuse, Herbert, 61 Markle Foundation, 129, 132 Markopoulos, Gregory, 4, 82n56 Marshall Plan, 26 Mayers, Sidney, 115 Maysles, Albert, 32 McBride, Jim, 11, 113, 115, 120 McCarey, Leo, 114 McDonough, Tom, 102 McLaren, Norman, 86 McLuhan, Marshall, 65, 73, 75, 117–18 Mead, Taylor, 43 Mekas, Adolfas, 33, 59, 97

164

Index

Mekas, Jonas, 5, 8, 33–34, 40, 43–44, 55, 59, 61, 74, 76, 78, 82n56, 86, 94, 97, 119 Merrill, James, 23 Meyers, Sidney, 77 Michelson, Annete, 143 Minelli, Vicente, 114 Mingus, Charlie, 33 Mohonk Meeting, 132 Montreal Expo 1967, 69, 73 Moscow Film Festival, 52 Moscow World Fair, 31 Moskowitz, Gene, 39 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), 3, 7, 31, 39, 85, 87, 92–94, 101, 103, 106n3, 121, 130, 138, 142–43 Much, Walter, 113 Murrow, Ed, 52–54 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 6, 7, 10, 12, 19–27, 69–73, 77–78, 86–87, 100–104, 114, 119, 137 Myers, Richard, 2, 116 National Board of Review, 18 National Center for Experiments in Television, 118 National Center for Film and Video Preservation, 143 National Council on the Arts (NCA), 10, 12–13, 64–69, 76, 80n30, 86–89, 92, 117–18, 120, 122–23, 131, 139 National Cultural Development Act, 67 National Development Education Act (NDEA), 28, 64–66 National Educational Television, 85, 87 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), 7, 64, 92–93, 98, 117, 120, 124–25, 130, 134n17, 143–44 National Film Board of Canada, 54 National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities, 64–65, 69 Native Americans, 55, 76, 116 Nelson, Robert, 101

New American Cinema, 5–6, 11, 36, 40, 43, 70, 72–78, 94, 96, 119, 138 New Day Distributors, 121, 130 New Deal, 29 New Hollywood, 11, 111, 113–16, 139–40 Newsweek (magazine), 42, 93 New Wave cinemas, 34, 68, 72–73, 95, 111–12 New World Pictures, 140 New York, 4, 17–18, 23–25, 29, 31–33, 38, 40–43, 54, 61, 71, 74, 76–77, 87, 94–94, 100–101, 103, 118, 126, 129–30 New York Film and Photo League, 17, 32, 54 New York Times, 38, 42–43, 71, 97 New York University, 67, 91, 143 New York World Fair 1964, 73 Nichols, Mike, 111 Nin, Anaïs, 23 Niro, Robert de, 131 Nixon, Richard, 30, 111, 116, 120 Nolan, Kathleen, 127 non-theatrical distribution and exhibition, 4, 9–10, 12–13, 18–19, 21, 25, 36, 40–41, 65, 67, 89–92, 98–99, 103–4, 120–21, 123–24, 132, 137–39 Nykino, 29, 32 Office of the Coordinator of InterAmerican Affairs (OCIAA), 21–22, 29 Office of Education, 65–66, 69, 85 Office of War Information, 21, 23, 51 O’Grady, Gerald, 122, 131 Oldenburg, Claes, 55 Orlovsky, Peter, 39 Ornitz, Arthur J., 37–38 Osborne, Peter, 71 Ozu, Yazujiro, 25, 115 Pacific Film Society, 71 Paik, Nam June, 73, 118, 132

Index

Pakistan, 30, 52 Paramount, 42; Decision, 5, 31, 93, 116 Payne Fund, 18 Peck, Gregory, 66, 68, 87, 92, 96 Penley, Constance, 143 Penn, Arthur, 111 Pennebaker, Donn, 4, 29, 32, 35–36 Pepper, George, 38 Performing Arts report, 62, 64–65, 88, 120 Perry, Frank, 86 Peterson, Sidney, 4 Phillips, Julia, 128 Picker, Arnold, 52, 92, 116 Picker, David, 116, 129 Picker Firstenberg, Jean, 129 Picker Foundation, 116 Pitt, Suzan, 140 Poitier, Sidney, 92 Polanski, Roman, 25 Pollock, Jackson, 7, 24 pornography, 61 Porter, Edwin S., 20, 78 Potamkin, Harry Alan, 17 Preminger, Otto, 31, 38 preservation, 9, 11, 20, 41, 56, 66, 87, 116, 119, 138, 144 Primus, Pearl, 67 Production Code Administration (PCA), 5, 31, 93–94 propaganda, 1, 18, 21–22, 25, 27, 52, 54, 56–57, 67, 98 psychedelic culture, 4, 112 Public Media Panel, 66, 117, 122–23, 131, 139, 142 Quigley, Martin, Jr., 93 Quinn, Anthony, 114 ratings, 94, 101, 142 Rauschenberg, Robert, 55, 73 Ray, Satyajit, 57, 86 Reade, Walter, 39 Reagan, Ronald, 144 Real, Brian, 9

165

Redd, Freddie, 38 Renan, Sheldon, 71, 77–78, 122–23 Report on the Independent Film Community, 132 Report on the Status of Independent Film in the U.S., 123 Republicans, 8, 26, 111 Resnais, Alan, 25, 86 Rice, Ron, 43–44, 82n56 Richter, Hans, 23, 29 Riefenstahl, Leni, 86 Rivers, Larry, 55 Robbins, Matthew, 113–14 Rockefeller: Arts Program, 62–63, 73–79; Brothers Fund, 27–28, 62, 80n30; Communications Program, 18–21, 67; Directing Women Workshop, 126–29; Foundation (RF), 6, 8, 10, 12, 18, 23, 41, 57, 119, 137–38; and MoMA International Program, 7, 27; Nelson, 8, 21, 26; Television and Video, 118, 131–32 Rogosin, Lionel, 4–5, 32, 38, 40–41, 94 Romney, Henry, 74–75, 77 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 18, 21 Rosenberg, Harold, 27 Rossellini, Roberto, 31, 57, 86, 114 Rothschild, Amalie, 121, 129 Roud, Richard, 41 Rugoff, Don, 40 Russett, Robert, 96 Russia, 7, 26 Sabin, Mark, 96 Sanders, Terry, 54 San Francisco, 4, 22, 25, 29, 40, 43, 76–77, 113, 116, 118, 125. See also Bay Area Sarris, Andrew, 8, 33–34, 111, 114, 143 Schapiro, Meyer, 24 Schleshinger, Arthur, Jr., 92 Schneeman, Carole, 104 Schneider, Bert, 112 Schrader, Paul, 115 Scorsese, Martin, 113

166

Screen Actors Guild, 114, 127 Seaton, George, 114 Seidelman, Susan, 130 Seltzer, Leo, 52, 54 Sennet, Mack, 77 Serious Business Distributors, 121 Seven Arts, 112 Sharits, Paul, 1, 2, 102, 109n57, 119 Short Film Showcase, 142–43 Sica, Vittorio de, 86 Sitney, P. Adams, 8, 119–20, 143 Smith, Harry, 4, 82n56 Smith, Jack, 44, 61 Smith-Mundt Act, 54 Snow, Charles P., 62, 91 Snow, Michael, 143 Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, 22 Sontag, Susan, 61, 71–73 Soviet: films, 19, 86, 112; propaganda, 27, 52; regime, 7, 28, 100; Socialist realism, 7, 27. See also Russia Splet, Alan, 141 Standard Oil, 104 Stanford Research Institute (SRI) Report, 68–69, 86, 88, 92–93, 95, 113, 122 Steichen, Edward, 30 Stevens, George, 4, 51, 96 Stevens, George, Jr., 6, 12, 51–56, 65–69, 77, 92–93, 98, 106, 113–17, 120, 122–23, 127, 130, 138–39 Stevens, Roger, 66, 92 Stewart, David C., 85–87, 92, 122 Stone, David C., 59, 97 Straight, Michael, 123 Strand, Chick, 2, 77 Strick, Joseph, 77, 86 Strindberg, August, 129 Stulberg, Gordon, 124, 128 Sundance Institute, 144 Talbot, Don, 39 Tati, Jacques, 5 Thompson, Francis, 29–30 Time (magazine), 27, 57

Index

Time-Life, 35–36, 97, 123–24 Tomlin, Lily, 127 Truffaut, François, 34, 60 Trumbull, Leslie, 74 Twentieth Century Fox, 128 Two Decades of American Painting Exhibition, 100, 109n57 Tyler, Parker, 78 underground, 2, 5, 41, 43–44, 59, 61, 70–74, 77–78, 89, 94–95, 102–3, 111–12, 120, 140 Underground Cinema 12, 95 UNESCO, 58 United Artists, 31, 116, 126 United Nations, 32, 54 United States Information Agency (USIA), 26, 30, 52–56, 66–70, 93, 98, 100, 106, 138 Universal Marion Corporation, 115 University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), 35, 87, 91, 93, 112, 115 University of Minnesota Experimental Production Unit, 21 University of Southern California, 55, 90–91 Valenti, Jack, 69, 92, 94, 96, 103 Vancouver International Film Festival, 41 Vanderbeek, Stan, 2, 24, 43, 57, 70–75, 80n17, 82n56, 86, 95, 109n57, 118 Van Dyke, Willard, 29, 36, 69–74, 76–77, 86, 96, 100, 103–4, 122 Variety (magazine), 38–39, 86 Vellani, Antonio, 96, 114, 127, 139 Venice Film Festival, 52, 55, 59 video, 13, 65, 90, 115–19, 125, 127, 129, 132, 144–45 Vietnam War, 54, 102–4, 111, 113 Village Voice, 104 Vogel, Amos, 23, 40–41, 74, 78, 90 Walley, Jonathan, 125 Walsh, Raoul, 5, 54, 114

Index

Warhol, Andy, 55, 71–74, 78, 86, 94 Warner Brothers, 112–13, 141 Washington DC, 6, 54, 92, 116 Wassman, Lutrelle, 75 Wasson, Haidee, 3, 20 Wax, Steve, 113, 115 Weaver, Howard, 105–6 Weill, Claudia, 130 Welles, Orson, 34, 114–15 Wert, Peter, 129 Wexler, Haskell, 55 WGBH, 118 Whitney: Brothers, 22, 58, 119; John, 109n57, 143 Whitney, John Hay, 20, 22 Why Experimental Film? Series, 69 Wieland, Joyce, 103–4 Wilder, Billy, 111 Wilkerson, Tichi, 126

167

Williams, Oscar, 131 Wise, Howard, 74 Wiseman, Fred, 32, 60, 93 Women Make Movies, 130 World War II, 2, 7, 21, 51 Wright, Basil, 19 Wyler, William, 4 Yablans, John, 124 Young, Colin, 17, 35, 41, 58, 74, 86, 90, 106n3 Youngblood, Gene, 30, 143 Zimmer, Michael, 71 Zinnemann, Fred, 25, 52, 56 Zoetrope, 113–15 Zook, George F., 18–21 Zryd, Michael, 10, 144

About the Author

Gracia Ramirez is a senior lecturer in film and screen studies at University of the Arts London. She has taught extensively on the history and theory of film and other media and has published in Film History, Found Footage Magazine, and Moving Image Review and Art Journal.

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