New Novel / New Wave

The first two films for which Grove published screenplays were landmark collaborations between French writers already noted for their innovations of the New Novel and a director who became recognized, based on these two films, as a signal avatar of French New Wave cinema. Hiroshima mon amour, written by Marguerite Duras, and Last Year at Marienbad, written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, were both directed by Alain Resnais, previously known for his documentary shorts. Hiroshima mon amour, Resnais’s first feature-length film, won the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics Award and the New York Film Critics Circle Award and was nominated for the Palmes d’or at Cannes. Duras received an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay. Last Year at Marienbad also won the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics award, as well as the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. Robbe-Grillet was also nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay. Together these films foregrounded the relationship between the thematic and formal innovations of postwar French cinema and the French New Novel. Grove’s print editions made these relationships accessible to examination and analysis in a manner and to a degree not possible when viewing the films, particularly in an era before the videocassette and DVD. Both titles sold more than twenty-five thousand copies over the course of the 1960s.

In the round-table discussion of Hiroshima mon amour that appeared in Cahiers du cinéma in 1959, conveniently translated and excerpted in the Criterion Collection booklet, these relationships were of central concern. In response to Eric Rohmer’s opening gambit that “Hiroshima is a film about which you can say everything,” Jean-Luc Godard responded, “Let’s start by saying that it’s literature,” to which Rohmer added, “And a kind of literature that is a little dubious.”⁴ However, over the course of the discussion this “dubiousness” of the literary was qualified and, ultimately, disclaimed. Pierre Kast averred, “It’s indisputable that Hiroshima is a literary film. Now, the epithet ‘literary’ is the supreme insult in the everyday vocabulary of the cinema. What is so shattering about Hiroshima is its negation of this connotation of the word.”⁵ And Godard agreed, conceding, “I think Resnais has filmed the novel that the young French novelists are all trying to write, people like Butor, Robbe-Grillet, Bastide, and of course Marguerite Duras.” Ultimately, Rohmer concluded, “To sum up, it is no longer a reproach to say that this film is literary, since it happens that Hiroshima moves not in the wake of literature but well in advance of it,” effectively placing cinematic technique in the avant-garde of literary innovation.⁶

Grove’s Evergreen paperback version of the screenplay, translated from the French by Richard Seaver, confirms this film’s role in changing the connotations of the term “literary” as a descriptor for the postwar cinematic aesthetic (as well as affirming the term “cinematic” as a descriptor for the New Novel). Like the Gallimard version from which it is derived, it achieves this reevaluation partly in its very publication, which, by including Duras’s script as well as a preface, synopsis, and a set of appendices all written by her, presumes that the textual materials antecedent to the film’s production are also important to its reception. However, the Evergreen version goes further than the Gallimard version by including seventy illustrations, selected by Robert Hughes, which foreground the collaborative dynamic between writer and director in ways that are unique to this genre. Unlike either the script or the film alone, Grove’s Hiroshima mon amour allows the reader to examine in detail the relations between the two.

These relations are illustrated through the innovative design and layout of these paperback books. In her synopsis, Duras emphasizes that the purpose of the film’s famous opening sequence juxtaposing images of the two lovers with images of the Hiroshima museum and parade is to show how “every gesture, every word, takes an aura of meaning that transcends its literal meaning,” and this accretion of metaphorical meaning, achieved in the film through montage, is spatially reduplicated and, in essence, disarticulated, in the filmscript through the creative juxtaposition of image and text.⁷ The images, in particular, are distributed in such a way that the page, instead of functioning to delimit or restrict, becomes a space to explore and exploit. Many of the images are unframed and off center, running flush with the edge of the page, and their positions relative to each other and the text vary from page to page, encouraging the reader to stop and contemplate the variety of meanings enabled by these juxtapositions. For example, in an early scene we see the images from the hospital and the museum, flush with the left margin of the verso page, sandwiching the image of the lovers embrace, flush with the right margin of the verso page. This visual framing of the embrace is in turn juxtaposed with the corresponding section of Duras’s screenplay on the recto page:

(The hospital, hallways, stairs, patients, the camera coldly objective . . . Then we come back to the hand gripping—and not letting go of—the darker shoulder.)
he: You did not see the hospital in Hiroshima. You saw nothing in Hiroshima.
(Then the woman’s voice becomes more . . . more impersonal. Shots of the museum . . . ) ⁸

The typographical interplay between the descriptions of the shots, rendered parenthetically in italics, and the dialogue, set off by uppercase speech prefixes, is mirrored in the juxtaposition of the images on the facing page (Figure 37). This series of juxtapositions encourages the reader to understand the literary text as antecedent to the film, to see Duras’s words, which unfold with a certain poetic informality, as a set of instructions for the organization of Resnais’s shots. They also allow the reader to appreciate books as supplemental to films. This supplementation became a crucial component in the emerging academic study of film, which presumes that reading film criticism and theory in book form is necessary for a full appreciation of cinematic form and meaning.

Similar possibilities are presented by the film script for Last Year at Marienbad, this time with more direct implications for the relation between the New Novel’s predilection for description over narration and the New Wave’s preoccupation with tracking shots and depth of field. Roland Barthes had already established, in a foundational essay originally published in Critique in 1954, that “Robbe-Grillet requires only one mode of perception: the sense of sight.”⁹ Grove’s Evergreen Original version of Last Year at Marienbad provides a privileged venue through which the reader can evaluate such a claim. Translated by Richard Howard from the version published by Éditions de Minuit, Last Year at Marienbad features more than 140 illustrations, again selected by Hughes. The very first image, a photograph of Robbe-Grillet gazing through an open set of venetian blinds, was also used for the cover of the Black Cat repackaging of the two novels (Figures 38 and 39).

Figure 37. Layout of text and images in Hiroshima mon amour (1961, pp. 16–17).

These initial images of screenwriter and director confirm the degree to which Last Year at Marienbad was almost instantly canonized as a classic of collaboration. In the juxtaposition of Robbe-Grillet’s vaguely menacing gaze, directed outward toward the reader through the blinds that divide his face, and Resnais’s more relaxed pose, looking off to the left, we also see some of the tensions inherent in this collaboration, tensions Robbe-Grillet’s claim obscures in the introduction that follows these images: “Alain Resnais and I were able to collaborate only because we saw the film in the same way from the start.”¹⁰ As François Thomas affirms in his contribution to the Criterion Collection’s booklet, this introductory essay perpetuated a myth of “perfect harmony” that is belied by Resnais’s contemporaneous claim that, as Thomas notes, “Robbe-Grillet’s writing was so precise that a robot could have directed the film by itself.”¹¹ Grove’s screenplay allows the reader to see how obsessively detailed Robbe-Grillet’s writing was and how this descriptive detail, a hallmark of Robbe-Grillet’s novelistic method as well, translates so effectively into the long tracking shots that characterize the film.

Figure 38. Images of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Alain Resnais in the
Evergreen Original edition of Last Year at Marienbad (1962, p. 6).

Figure 39. Roy Kuhlman’s cover for the Black Cat edition
of Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet (1965).

As with Hiroshima mon amour, the illustrations Hughes selected for Last Year at Marienbad are creatively positioned within the space of the pages, provoking a fruitful engagement between image and text that is possible only in this hybrid form. Thus, in its rendering of the long opening shot of the immense chateau’s interior, we see Robbe-Grillet’s precise instructions for camera movement and shot length, interspersed with X’s lengthy description of the “silent deserted corridors overloaded with a dim, cold ornamentation of woodwork, stucco, moldings, marble, black mirrors, dark paintings, columns, heavy hangings,” in turn framed by images correlated to this descriptive detail running along the bottom of both pages and in the upper third of the recto page, flush with the edges of each page.¹² The arrangement of the images encourages an analogy between the interior of the chateau as rendered by the camera and its description as rendered by the text. The degree to which the obsessive descriptive detail of Robbe-Grillet’s novels can be correlated to the camera’s perspective as thematized in the formal innovations of postwar cinema, to which Robbe-Grillet was increasingly drawn in the 1960s, becomes abundantly evident in this book, which provides a rare opportunity to perceive the two in direct juxtaposition (Figure 40). This correlation is reduplicated and reinforced by the degree to which X’s opening narration, and indeed most of his dialogue, is itself obsessively descriptive and reads like instructions for the motion of the camera. Both Resnais and Robbe-Grillet claimed, in response to the many perplexed queries they received in the wake of the film’s release, that the meaning of the film requires audience participation; but the book confirms that the film’s form was almost tyrannically determined by Robbe-Grillet’s meticulously detailed script. By making Robbe-Grillet’s extensive instructions available to the reader, the Evergreen Original version of Last Year at Marienbad reveals how his innovations in narrative form achieve a certain apotheosis when they are translated into a cinematic language, but it also serves to remind the reader of the written text as, paradoxically, a verbal description that precedes the existence of the image it details.

Figure 40. Layout of text and images in the Evergreen Original edition of Last Year at Marienbad (1962, pp. 18–19).

Film

Though they were able to obtain scripts from Duras and Robbe-Grillet, as well as Pinter and Ionesco, in the end Evergreen Theater, Rosset’s second foray into film production, made a single film: Samuel Beckett’s short Film, for which the author made his only visit to the United States in the summer of 1964. While generally considered a minor work in the Beckett canon, Film was well received on the festival circuit, garnering the Film Critics Prize at the 1965 Venice Film Festival, the Special Jury Prize at the 1966 Tours Festival, and the Special Prize at the 1966 Oberhausen Festival.

Although Film lacks any dialogue—it features the silent film star Buster Keaton in his last role—the Evergreen Original, issued in 1969, nevertheless capitalizes on Beckett’s by-then uncontested stature as a literary auteur and provides a behind-the-scenes account of the film’s production that further builds on the concept of the necessary supplement developed in Grove’s earlier filmscripts. Beckett’s authorship and authority are emphatically emphasized by the design of the text. Kuhlman’s front cover features a pink-tinted photograph of Beckett gazing up through a strip of film (Figure 41), and the first illustration, opposite the copyright page, is of him sitting in the tiny room in which most of the film’s action takes place. The text includes his complete script, which is not as detailed as Robbe-Grillet’s for Last Year at Marienbad but is meticulous in its technical details (despite Beckett’s lack of experience in filmmaking) and includes instructions for portions of the film omitted from the final cut. The lavishly illustrated script, which, like Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad, creatively exploits the space of the page to juxtapose word and image, is followed by Beckett’s production notes, featuring a variety of technical diagrams specifying lines of sight, camera angles, and the disposition of figures within the room. These extensive technical details both emphasize Beckett as the auteur behind Film and establish his instructions as necessary for an understanding of its meaning. In particular, his specification of an “angle of immunity” beyond which the camera cannot move until the final scene provides a technical clue to the film’s meaning, which can only be inferred from watching it.¹³

Beckett’s notes are followed by an essay by Alan Schneider—already Beckett’s go-to director in the United States—“On Directing Film,” specifying his objective of achieving a “faithful translation of [Beckett’s] intention,” explaining why the initial exterior shots had to be omitted, and providing a detailed behind-the-scenes account of the film’s production.¹⁴ Schneider’s essay, which consistently refers to Beckett as “Sam,” is also illustrated with production shots that show Schneider, Beckett, and Keaton, as well as Rosset and Seaver, on the set. The final shot is of Keaton and Beckett standing side by side in the austere room, gazing at each other somewhat skeptically, Keaton with cigar in hand (Figure 42). These behind-the-scenes shots, along with the essay, illustrate the collaborative nature of filmmaking while simultaneously rendering it as secondary to the solitary act of writing. Placed as they are after Beckett’s scenario and notes, and grounded in Schneider’s stated philosophy of fidelity to Beckett’s intentions (according to Rosset, Schneider “was obsessed by trying to do precisely what Beckett wanted him to do”¹⁵), these images render the making of Film as a story in itself, one that illustrates the subordination of collective endeavor to singular intention. If, in the many festival screenings of Film, Keaton frequently displaced Beckett as the center of attention, the book of Film corrects this misperception, firmly establishing Beckett as the literary auteur behind the cinematic product.

Figure 41. Roy Kuhlman’s cover for the Evergreen Original
edition of Film (1969). (Photograph by Steve Schapiro)

Figure 42. Behind-the-scenes shot of Buster Keaton and Samuel Beckett
in the room set in Film (1969, p. 92). (Photograph by Frank Serjack)

From Seeing to Studying

In the same year that Grove published the filmscript for Film, Robert Hughes became general editor of a short-lived Black Cat series of film books. Each edition features a prefatory “note” that Hughes adapted to the specific film, and each note is preceded by an epigraph from Jean-Luc Godard: “The most fantastic thing you could film is people reading. I don’t see why no one’s done it . . . The movie you’d make would be a lot more interesting than most of them are.”¹⁶ While the quote recommends filming people as they read, the book promotes people reading film, with Godard providing the cultural imprimatur legitimating the intellectual seriousness of the endeavor.

Hughes’s groundbreaking series not only provided books about films but also revealed the degree to which the academic study of film would be predicated on a preference for the term “reading” over “viewing.” His note opens by clarifying how the historically specific need for the hybrid genre he’s producing illuminates this shift: “Making books from movies (apart from novelizations) is a relatively recent enterprise. But until everyone has inexpensive access to prints of his favorite movies and can ‘read’ them whenever he likes, this is one means toward understanding a particular film.”¹⁷ Not only does Hughes affirm that one cannot fully understand an avant-garde film through a single viewing at a theater but he further indicates that the form of attention required for such an understanding is analogous to reading a book.

However, these books are significantly different from the Evergreen Originals for Hiroshima mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad, which had fairly coherent and detailed scripts written by established novelists. For these books, “the principal text consists of a meticulous description of the significant action and a translation of the actual dialogue of the completed film rather than that of the ‘final’ (or original) shooting script, which often varies greatly from the final version of the film.”¹⁸ Furthermore, though Duras, Robbe-Grillet, and Beckett were all cinematic amateurs with little knowledge of the vocabulary of filmmaking, by 1969 the directors of these films were internationally recognized as masters and innovators of cinematic form, and Hughes in these books introduces a set of technical terms for camera position and movement, as well as specifies shot length in seconds. Finally, for each of these books Hughes hired a consulting editor—David Denby for The 400 Blows; Donald Richie for Rashomon; Pierre Billard for Masculin Féminin; and Georg Amberg for L’avventura—who figure as “experts” on the specific film. These consulting editors, most of whom worked in the emergent American field of cinema studies, selected the numerous frame enlargements and extensive supplemental materials that they saw as necessary to a full understanding and appreciation of each film.

The materials appended to The 400 Blows provide a scholarly introduction to the Cahiers du cinéma that was not only central to the genesis of this film and the career of its director but also to the methods and vocabulary of American film studies in its formative period. The script is followed by “A Collage from Cahiers du cinéma,” the first item of which is the journal’s obituary to André Bazin, followed by contributions from (and an interview with) Truffaut, Godard, Jacques Rivette, and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, interspersed with reproductions of the journal’s covers from the late 1950s. This section is followed by two additional interviews with Truffaut and a selection of American criticism. Both the order and the substance of the essays indicate the degree to which the American critics writing for Sight and Sound and Film Quarterly were taking their cues from Cahiers du cinéma, translations from which the Evergreen Review had exclusive rights during this period.

The form and content of these film books also illuminate how the auteurism associated with these directors altered literary models of creation and reception. The script for Masculin Féminin is followed by the two Maupassant short stories that Godard had been commissioned to adapt, but these stories are included only to affirm the degree to which Godard deviated from them, as illustrated by the selection of documents that follow: the first a contract between Argos Films and Robert Esmenard of the National Literary Fund, which owned the rights to Maupassant’s stories, specifying that “the name of the author must always be projected on the screen and incorporated in the publicity in normal and visible lettering”; and the last a letter from Esmenard conceding that the film differs from the two stories to the extent that “no allusion to Maupassant should be made in the screen credits for Masculin Féminin.”¹⁹ This passing of the proprietary torch is followed by selections from Godard’s “Script” (the scare quotes are in the text), the “working text” that he keeps in “a large sketch book with a blue cover.”²⁰ This meticulous attention to Godard’s written guidelines is further elaborated in the following accounts of Godard’s directing methods, which specify that “the only thing the rest of the crew has as a guide, as a sort of work plan, is a thin note-book of a dozen pages or so, divided into what they call ‘work sequences’ . . . but when the real shooting starts, Jean-Luc Godard gets out his big sketchbook (an 8" × 12" spiral notebook with a blue cover).”²¹

The last section, “Criticism: France, England, and the United States,” opens with a review by Georges Sadoul placing the film in its “proper literary category”: “It is not theater, it is not a novel . . . ; like Diderot’s work, it is much less a ‘satirical’ tale than an essay”;²² and it closes with Pauline Kael’s review for the New Republic, which comments on the degree to which the characters in the film are Americanized in a way that makes them part of “an international society; they have the beauty of youth which can endow Pop with poetry.”²³ There are thus two narrative arcs that structure the paratextual materials following the script of Masculin Féminin: one running from its literary antecedents to its cinematic results, and one running from its French to American critical reception. The two arcs form a larger story of what one might call, borrowing from Pascale Casanova, the littérisation of avant-garde cinema, which was a necessary precondition to its academic canonization. This Parisian littérisation is both illustrated and exemplified by these film books, a hybrid and transitional genre that provides a unique insight into the process whereby films were presented as texts that needed to be read both closely and repeatedly and whose difficulty requires reading other supplemental materials to be fully understood.

Though sales were modest, the series was nevertheless influential. Film Quarterly called the texts “the best recreations of films yet to be achieved in book form” (an accolade that Grove prominently displayed in its promotion of the series), adding that they “will probably be surpassed only when 8mm or EVR copies of films are available for home use and study.” Until then, the review concludes, they “should prove extremely useful in film classes and for scholars working on close studies of film style.”²⁴ For many scholars and students at the time, particularly those who didn’t live in major metropolitan centers, these books would have been their first contact with these films. As critic and film scholar Adrian Martin notes in his essay for the Criterion Collection booklet on Masculin Féminin, the film initially “existed entirely in my head—as a perfectly imaginary object, a little like the ideal movie that Paul (Léaud) himself ‘secretly wanted to live’—thanks to the fact that my only access to it at the time was through a gorgeous fetish object published by America’s Grove Press, in 1969, a transcription of the film accompanied by many luminous frame reproductions.”²⁵ Martin’s essay is followed by an excerpt from Philippe Labro’s “One Evening in a Small Café,” an account of Godard’s direction that also forms part of the Black Cat edition. Thus, the Black Cat film series anticipates both the form and function of the Criterion Collection DVDs with their special features and accompanying booklets. Indeed, the technology of the DVD itself, which enables the viewer to freeze individual frames and to move in and out of the film at any point and for any length of time, digitally realizes the form of “reading” to which Grove’s series aspires.

Mark Betz affirms that these books, and others like them, were “instrumental in shaping academic film studies as it was forming in North America and later on in Britain,” but he is mainly interested in how they “provided the mortar for film course organization” and less in how their physical design solicited ways of reading and reception that in effect Americanized the Parisian littérisation of avant-garde film during the heyday of auteurism.²⁶ Grove’s pioneering series provided a curriculum for film studies courses during this foundational period; it also helped establish the cinematic text as a legitimate object of close reading modeled on the formal analysis of literary texts. This literary legitimacy was crucial to the cultural consecration of these cinematic texts, as illustrated by their inclusion in the Criterion Collection canon, whose design clearly derives from the series that anticipated them. Though this literary legitimacy was initially established in Paris, it was mass-produced and made academically operational by Grove’s short-lived book series.

For Rosset, Grove’s film books were part of a larger plan to exploit and promote academic interest in contemporary cinema through rental and festival programs. Grove’s 1968 college catalog includes many films, and the suggested courses feature “imaginative combinations of books and films along interdisciplinary lines.”²⁷ Thus, the catalog suggests using William Klein’s Mr. Freedom and Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising in a course called “The Absurd as Reality”; Ousmane Sembene’s Mandabi and Lionel Rogosin’s Come Back Africa in “Africa—Culture and Myths”; Klein’s Float like a Butterfly, Sting like a Bee and Agnes Varda’s Black Panthers: A Report in “To Be Black in America”; and Yukio Mishima’s Rite of Love and Death and Nagisa Oshima’s Boy in “The New Japan.” To facilitate this interdisciplinary and multimedia vision, Grove offered discounted rental rates to educational institutions.

Grove also promoted campus film festivals as a way to get its rapidly expanding catalog screened outside New York City. In a prominent full-page ad in the December 1969 Evergreen Review featuring college students sporting a sign asking, “Why wait for Godard? We want him Now!,” readers are invited to “Bring Grove’s Film Festival to Antioch or Ann Arbor, Oberlin, you name it!” The copy continues, “Now you can have your own film festival, right on your own campus. With films like Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend, Susan Sontag’s Duet for Cannibals, Jaromil Jires’ The Joke, Glauber Rocha’s Antonio das Mortes, William Klein’s Mr. Freedom, Ousmane Sembene’s Mandabe. Films that have won awards in Cannes, Venice, and Berlin, and have brought audiences to their feet at the New York and San Francisco Film Festivals.”²⁸ Rosset hoped to achieve with the cinematic avant-garde what he had already accomplished with the literary avant-garde: disseminate it from the exclusive culture capitals of Europe and the United States into university towns across the country. But the logistics of film distribution were expensive, and they did not align with the circuits Grove had established for books; the film division ended up being both a distraction for Rosset and a significant drain on the company’s capital. As Kent Carroll affirms, the film division “was like a giant sponge soaking up everything, and detracting from the publishing side of the business.”²⁹

For Adults Only

In the end, Grove made money on a single film: Vilgot Sjoman’s I Am Curious, Yellow. Rosset had read about the film by the Ingmar Bergman protégé in the Manchester Guardian during his annual trip to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1967. Intrigued by its purported combination of sexual frankness and political critique, Rosset asked the president of the Swedish publisher Bonnier to put him in touch with the film’s producer. He then asked Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen, who were in Europe collecting materials for their International Exhibition of Erotic Art, to view it. After receiving a positive report from the Kronhausens, he went to see the film himself, liked it, and promptly purchased the rights to distribute it in the United States.³⁰ Sjoman had already released two controversial films in the United States: My Sister, My Love, a story of sibling incest promoted “for those who love and those who make love!”; and 491, based on Lars Gorling’s novel (published, of course, by Grove Press) about seven delinquent boys who agree, as part of a psychological experiment, to live alone in a condemned building. The film 491 was charged with and then exonerated of obscenity in 1966. I Am Curious, Yellow was seized by US Customs in January 1968, and Grove had to arrange for critics, including Bosley Crowther for the Times, Stanley Kauffman and Richard Gilman for the New Republic, Andrew Sarris for the Voice, and Amos Vogel for Lincoln Center, to view it at the United States Appraisers Stores in New York City under an agreement that they would not “publicize the contents.” These same critics, along with Norman Mailer, sociology professors Charles Winick and Ned Polsky, and Sjoman himself, were witnesses at the subsequent trial in May. A jury of seven men and five women found the film to be obscene, and while waiting for the case to be reviewed by the court of appeals, Grove issued a Black Cat paperback filmscript with more than 250 illustrations and extensive excerpts from the trial testimony. In February 1969, by which time the court of appeals had overturned the lower court’s decision, the Times listed the filmscript as having sold 160,000 copies in the prior year, indicating that it was an integral component of the campaign that precipitated the phenomenal popularity of the film, which for the rest of the year was shown to packed houses by reservation only at the Evergreen Theater on East 11th Street and generated lines around the block for its continuous showing (seven times a day) at the Cinema Rendezvous on 57th Street. The film was widely reviewed and discussed, and Rosset aggressively pursued screenings across the country, retaining De Grazia to supervise the numerous legal challenges, and at one point going so far as to purchase an entire theater in Minneapolis when he couldn’t find an exhibitor willing to show it. By September 1969, the film had made more than $5 million across the country, with Grove remunerating local civil liberties lawyers who defended against the numerous obscenity charges with a percentage of the box office receipts. In November 1969, it became the first foreign-language film to top Variety’s list of the top-grossing films. It ultimately earned more than $14 million.

Updating and interrogating the thematic tradition running back through Emma Bovary and Constance Chatterley, I Am Curious, Yellow focuses on the sexual experiences of a young woman, Lena Nyman, through the eyes of her older male creator, in this case the director Vilgot Sjoman. Both director and actress play themselves, providing the film with the self-reflexivity and ironic auto-commentary so common to avant-garde cinema and drama of the 1960s. Though tame by today’s standards, even for mainstream R-rated film, the movie’s sexual scenes, which included male full-frontal nudity, an extremely brief and fleeting kiss of a limp penis, and a number of simulated acts of intercourse in public places, including in front of Stockholm’s Royal Palace, generated extensive controversy. The film also attempts, in ways that were central to its defense at trial, to thematically and formally relate sexual to political revolution, interweaving Lena’s sexual experimentation with her political agitation against the Swedish class system and the war in Vietnam. In providing extensive testimony from the trial, Grove’s Black Cat version is clearly designed to establish that the political themes of the film provide the redeeming social value justifying the sex scenes at a time when the film itself was still working its way through the appeals process.

The sale of the book, as well as admission to the film, which had been rated “X” by Jack Valenti’s recently established Motion Picture Association of America, was limited to adults. I Am Curious, Yellow came out during, and in many ways was symptomatic of, the interregnum between the decline of the Production Code and the codification of the ratings system, an interregnum that also enabled the overlap between avant-garde and pornographic cinema exemplified by Grove’s catalog as a whole. As Jon Lewis establishes in Hollywood v. Hard Core, during the first years of the ratings system there was extensive debate about which films should be designated with an “X” rating, which in that same year was given to, or independently chosen for, such films as Lindsay Anderson’s If, Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider, and John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (which won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay in 1970).³¹ Eventually, Valenti’s decision not to copyright the “X” designation resulted in its appropriation by the emerging hard-core industry, eliminating the inchoate cultural zone these films occupied at the time.

Rosset anticipated, though he did not in the end profit from, this transition. As Albert Goldman reveals in his Life magazine profile of August 29, 1969, “The Old Smut Peddler,” Rosset foresaw the privatization of film viewing that would enable the pornographic market to consolidate legally:

It’s time to scale the movies down to human proportions. The moving picture camera today is just a very expensive typewriter. A Hollywood director can go home, like the young writer used to go home from the ad agency, and knock out a very good movie for $50,000. It’s possible to take that movie and squeeze it into a cassette videotape the size of a book. And then one evening, when the kids are in bed, you can slip that cassette into your TV set and, without getting dressed or driving the car, you can watch Tropic of Cancer or The Story of O right in your own living room—where the censor can’t go.³²

First anticipating and then capitalizing on the Supreme Court rulings in Stanley v. Georgia (1969), which had made it legal to view hard-core pornography in the privacy of one’s home, and in Ginsberg v. New York (1968), which had affirmed a lower legal threshold for determining obscenity with materials made available to minors, Rosset attempted to realize this vision through the nownotorious Evergreen Club. As with his forays into print pornography, Rosset cast a wide net, acquiring any and all erotic films he could find and offering them for sale and rental through the club. One promotional brochure trumpets, “Now you can have a nostalgic ‘blue film’ festival right in the privacy of your own den or living room!” Claiming to have “picked these films from the largest private collection of its kind,” Rosset offers in the brochure such titles as Broadway through a Keyhole, Sultan and Slaves, and Flaming Youth, claiming they can provide “a unique look at the customs and morals of a never to be forgotten time.”³³ Another letter promoting a film called L announces, “In the secret collections of Europe’s Millionaire Connoisseurs of Erotica, there are films so provocative, so incredibly earthy, the average collector can’t even begin to imagine what they are like.”³⁴ Yet another boasts that “the most famous actress of our time will ‘go all the way’ for you—in your own room!”³⁵ Grove deployed the same populist rhetoric with film as it did with print, advertising that materials previously reserved for wealthy elites were now being made available through legitimate mainstream channels.

These promotions anticipate with uncanny accuracy the direction the mainstream porn industry would take in the 1970s and 1980s, as videocassettes, DVDs, and then the Internet drove down the costs of production and enabled a privatization of consumption that made pornography into a legitimate industry leveraging the “X” rating to market its materials to an adult, and mostly male, audience. Indeed, Rosset’s forays into pornography—particularly cinematic pornography—generated a political backlash against Grove that helps account for how and why this industry autonomized in the 1970s, leaving Grove as a relic of a former era before the consolidation of a separate “adult” marketplace.