UNDERGROUND MANIFESTOS
Some revolutions seem to be eternal, with omnipotent protectors of the status quo never quite able to defeat the out-gunned rebel hordes, the true believers who live off the land and want to turn the whole system upside down. The battle waged by lone, independent filmmakers against the hegemonic power of Hollywood is one such battle. It pits Davey against Goliath, and it is a fight for the very soul of cinema.
Although the battlefield, in a technical and to some degree aesthetic sense, has changed over the years, the struggle to define film as a medium of personal expression instead of corporate claptrap continues to this day. The proliferation of ‘underground film festivals’ in various American cities (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Honolulu, et cetera), which began in the mid-1990s, is one such indication of the continuing need for opposition viewpoints, as is the continued viability of established independent festivals like Ann Arbor and Olympia. This spirit of independence is also manifest by the existence of gay and lesbian festivals outside the traditional bastions of San Francisco and New York, and by the establishment of foreign movements such as Dogme 95.
But the first shot in this holy war was fired across Hollywood’s bow over forty years ago, on 28 September 1960, when 23 independent filmmakers – among them Peter Bogdanovich and Emile de Antonio – gathered in New York to declare the formation of the New American Cinema group. They called the masses to arms with an angry nine-point manifesto published in Film Culture magazine in the summer of 1961, which declared ‘the official cinema’ to be dead: ‘We don’t want false, polished, slick films – we prefer them rough, unpolished, but alive: we don’t want rosy films – we want them the colour of blood.’
Point five took the following position:
We will take a stand against the present distribution-exhibition policies. There is something decidedly wrong with the whole system of film exhibition; it is time to blow the whole thing up. It’s not the audience that prevents films like Shadows or Come Back, Africa from being seen, but the distributors and theatre owners. It is a sad fact that our films have to open in London, Paris, or Tokyo before they can reach our own theaters.1
The good fight was on. Several theatres had pledged to exhibit their films and co-operation was also expected from The American Federation of Film Societies. The following year, The Filmmakers’ Co-operative was established by the group on Park Avenue South. It was an organisation run by and for filmmakers and it was designed to distribute their films in a ‘non-commercial’ manner. The Co-op soon took on a spiritual as well as a physical dimension and became a place where energies, ideas and visions were exchanged. As Paul Arthur, filmmaker and President of The Board of Directors for the Co-op in 1989, recalled:
The Co-op office was an ad-hoc dormitory for visiting artists. It functioned as the editorial space for Film Culture magazine. In a small back room, Gregory Markopoulos and Jonas Mekas, among others, edited their work. Itinerant political groups often found a safe haven for meetings. After The New York City police department shut down screenings at The Filmmaker’s Showcase, the Co-op took over the ‘unlicensed projection’ of new work. Part storage depot, part urban guerrilla headquarters, it was a quintessentially Sixties American dwelling.2
It was an age in America when movies still needed to be licensed and censorship was rampant. Shows could be raided by the police, prints seized and theatre staff hauled off to jail. Films were routinely confiscated at the border by US Customs agents. It was a time when a 16mm camera was potentially considered to be a weapon of provocation and subversion. In this setting, the Co-op functioned as a genuine liberation movement. Their actions on occasion took the form of pitched street battles, their members risked jail and their rhetoric was impassioned. They were not rebelling against the kind of entrenched social and political orders that people rebelled against in Europe, but rather were striking out at the omnipresent sense of conformity and complacency that was uniquely American. They were taking aim at the false values fabricated by the corporate mass media which dominated popular culture and which suppressed individual expression through commercial and legal mechanisms. That mass media also, of course, included the film industry.
In short, the Filmmaker’s Co-operative put the politics of the New American Cinema group into a functional form. Any filmmaker wishing to join did so simply by giving a print of his or her film to the Co-operative along with a synopsis which they wrote or otherwise supplied. They set their own rental prices and received 60 per cent of all income, with 40 per cent going to support the operation of the Co-op. No rights were purchased or assigned. It was a non-contractual agreement, and filmmakers were also encouraged to seek out additional avenues of distribution for their work with the catalogue itself listing many of these alternative sources of distribution.
The Co-op sought to put the democratic, egalitarian ideals of a true collective into practice in the normally aggressively commercial realm of film distribution. It was an approach that fit the times, since many of the avant-garde filmmakers of the day had come from other arts and their motivation was to explore the creative process on film, not to create a marketable product or launch their careers. Some of the films they made were in any case unmarketable to general audiences because they were, by orthodox standards, fairly incomprehensible. Many were experimental films. Others contained pornographic content. Furthermore, most of them were short films made on very low budgets, and it has always been tough to get short films screened in commercial theaters.
There was no official ideological slant to the Co-operative. While in practice it represented the works of the ‘underground’ movement, in theory any type of film could be given life at the Co-op. There were no ‘gatekeepers’ – nobody passed personal judgement on a film. The stance was adamantly non-selective. The Co-op also espoused non-promotion: no specific film was ever promoted over another, and they were listed in the catalogue in alphabetical order. Only the organisation of the Co-op as a whole could be promoted. No competition, no promotion and no value placed on profit: Co-ops proudly presented themselves as the antithesis of the commercial film industry.
The New York Filmmaker’s Co-operative served as an inspiration and basic model for the film co-op movement that spread across America and Europe through the 1960s. It gave exposure to some very obscure films and filmmakers who were never able or never wanted to make a career out of it. But it also gave a start to filmmakers who would go on to become better known. John Waters had films in the Co-op until he became a commercially viable commodity and withdrew them, turning them over to New Line Cinema to distribute. Paul Bartel and Paul Morrissey still have films from the early 1960s on deposit at the Co-op.
OTHER UNDERGROUND MODELS
In 1963, Bruce Baillie and a loose-knit group of fellow filmmakers founded Canyon Cinema in Berkeley, California. They staged free public screenings and edited the Canyon Cinema News. In 1966, Canyon moved to San Francisco and set up their own distribution on the co-op model. The London Filmmakers Co-op was also launched in 1966. Both were based on the New York Co-op formula, but each had its own distinct personality.
Malcolm Le Grice, a founding member of the Arts Laboratory Group, wrote in 1986 that:
The London Filmmakers’ Co-op drew heavily on the precedent of The Filmmaker’s Co-operative in New York, but, through its merger with The Arts Laboratory Group, took on a much wider set of objectives. Though it was not fully appreciated at the time, even by those of us most involved, as well as having more ambitious aims, it always had a more strongly developed set of social and political objectives than had motivated the New York Co-op.3
The Arts Lab, founded in 1966 by Jim Haynes, was a multi-purpose exhibition venue in Covent Garden where performances, film screenings, readings and ‘happenings’ took place. It served as a social axis for the two groups, and inspired the foundation of similar activist venues throughout Britain.
Back in San Francisco, Canyon was to pass through various stages of existence in different locations, but it always manifested the flamboyance and rebelliousness of The Bay Area. At one point in the early 1970s, a cadre associated with Canyon stormed the projection booth at The Cinematheque in The San Francisco Art Institute, ‘occupying’ it for days in an attempt to get more local films shown there. This group later formed The No-Nothing Cinema, a rough-hewn but technically fine venue in the China Basin neighbourhood. Out in the courtyard there was a basketball hoop and a barbecue pit, and in adjacent rooms one of the founders, Rock Ross, ran a film-titling lab. The cinema was eventually demolished to make way for the construction of a baseball stadium but recently re-emerged as the ‘New Nothing Cinema’ in a new location in the South-of-Market district. The No-Nothing did for exhibition what Canyon did for distribution: any person could theoretically screen any film in a non-commercial context (no admission was allowed to be charged). They were both part-and-parcel of the very activist San Francisco scene, which even today remains one of the most vital in the country.
Other Co-op distribution organisations were formed in Paris, Vienna, Hamburg, Rome, Amsterdam, Toronto (co-founded by a young David Cronenberg) and elsewhere. But in spite of all the noble talk about ‘non-promotion’ and ‘non-selection’, there were fundamental problems with this approach. Curious potential exhibitors had few clues as to what most of these films were like – films that in many cases really needed to be contextualised beyond the often-cryptic descriptions provided by the filmmakers themselves. And when presented with a huge catalogue listing thousands of films, choice by any definition became necessary. To discourage promotion of films seemed anti-movie and certainly anti-American, and appeared to hamper the most fundamental aims of the co-ops: to give films life.
The Filmmakers’ Co-operative in New York was the most rigid about non-promotion, and did not even print photos in its main catalogue, apparently in the belief that doing so would give certain films an edge. (Their 1993 and 1996 catalogue supplements, however, are full of pictures.) Length of film descriptions depended on whether a filmmaker was an ‘active’ member of the Co-op, and if a person left a film on deposit but no longer communicated (or contributed financially before a printing), only the title of the film was listed.
Co-ops are by nature passive rather than active distributors, and this leads to complaints from some filmmakers who argue that the places are just dead storage. Predictably, the famous underground film titles get rented a great deal more than the others. Canyon Cinema, for its part, publishes photos in its catalogue, encourages filmmakers to package their shorts into more bookable feature-length theme shows and has presented public screenings of its films sporadically over the years – all things that involve selection.
The London Filmmakers Co-op addressed the issue head-on at a meeting in 1989, and with rare accord voted to amend their non-promotion clause to ‘Promotion combined with active open access’. This meant, according to Tony Warcus, who headed the LFMC-distribution from 1989–1992, ‘encouraging filmmakers to assist LFMC distribution by providing preview videos, stills, and reviews of their work’.4 In other words, ideally, all films should be promoted and the spirit of equality would be preserved, at least in theory.
The issue of ‘non selection’ is more relevant today than ever amid predictions that soon all film will be transferred to and viewed on digital mediums, and that celluloid will cease to exist. But which films will be put on tape or disc and which will be passed by? Who will judge what is worth preserving, and, by extension, what should be left to perish? Who will the new gatekeepers be? Most people would not want someone else deciding for them what they should watch and it seems to go without saying that every individual should have the freedom and possibility to search out, to explore and to discover. In this respect, the philosophy of non-selection – or rather, selection by the individual – seems visionary rather than dogmatic.
AN UNDERGROUND UNDONE: NEW CHALLENGES TO EXHIBITION
Despite efforts to stay modern, changing times have effected all three co-ops in very different ways. For instance, in the mid-1990s, America’s politically driven controversy over public arts funding caught up with Canyon, and it had its NEA (National Endowment of the Arts) grant cut off over the alleged obscenity of one of the films it distributed. But a bigger threat to Canyon’s existence was the skyrocketing value of San Francisco real estate. Indeed, their impressive new catalogue comes complete with a letter explaining that ‘due to the rising costs of doing business in the San Francisco Bay Area, the rental fees on many films listed in the Canyon Cinema catalogue 2000 have risen in price.’ Yet they seem set to remain in their current location, an industrial loft space on 3rd Street by the inner harbour, for the foreseeable future.
The Filmmaker’s Co-operative until recently dwelt in a somewhat decrepit, reconverted residential building at 33rd Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, but lost its lease for that site, and in January 2001 relocated downtown to the P.S. (Public School) 1 Clock-tower lofts. Prior to that, on 15 December 2000, a benefit had been held at The Millennium screening space on the Lower East Side to help raise funds for the Co-op’s move. New acquisitions to the Co-op’s archive were screened and film equipment was raffled off. M. M. Serra, who has managed the Co-op for many years, says she actually likes the new site better, but it was not a voluntary move and the financial health of the Co-op remains as fragile as ever.
Fragile was an apt word to describe the very state of their existence on 11 September 2001, when the World Trade Center towers collapsed only blocks away. While not directly damaged, the Co-op found itself without fax, phone or e-mail and in a no-go zone for weeks. Today it is more or less back to normal as Serra and several interns once again take orders, send out films, and check, clean, and re-shelve incoming prints. Whether the Clock-tower lofts will finally afford the Co-op the screening space it wants to accompany its archive remains uncertain, but in any case benefit screenings seem to take place with some regularity, often at the Anthology Film Archives.
The London Filmmakers’ Co-op has recently found itself facing a very different set of challenges. Thanks to the funding that the National Lottery pumped into the arts in the UK in the mid-1990s, its future seemed assured. Prior to this the Co-op had experienced decades of revolving management (a policy that had logically enabled the most committed members to have the most input). It occupied a nomadic existence in a series of run down temporary-lease buildings on Robert Street, the Prince of Wales Dairy, Fitzroy Road and from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, on Gloucester Avenue. In September of 1997, the LFMC moved into the new Lux building in London’s Hoxton Square.
However, on 1 January 1999 the Co-op was forced to consolidate with its co-tenant, London Electronic Arts (LEA), at the direction of its state arts funding bodies, and ceased to exist as such. Now both entities were simply known as The Lux Centre. It turned out that Lottery money could only be spent on things, not people (wages et cetera), and ironically the Co-op found itself unable to afford its new site. The Co-op gained its own cinema, gallery and state-of-the-art post-production facilities in film and video through the merger, but lost its identity – though in fact its identity had always been in flux. Ongoing modifications to the rules of how Lottery funding could be applied raised hopes that the Co-op might resurface in the future as an autonomous organisation, but those hopes were dashed on 2 October 2001 when the Lux was suddenly and unceremoniously shut down and all the employees fired! It was a devastating blow to the London independent film scene. (Why this happened would require elaboration in a separate article.) At the time of publication it is unclear if and how the various groups housed in the Lux will rise from the ashes, but specifically regarding the Co-op, the archive still exists and maybe it is time for this organisation-in-limbo to return to its roots and find another rough space.
AN UNDERGROUND REMADE: NEW CONSOLIDATIONS AND DIRECTIONS
The ‘marketplace’ for short film exhibition has changed a lot since the 1960s, and the ramifications of this have been felt by the co-ops. Their traditional renters have grown scarce with art-house and repertory theatres closing down en masse or adopting more conservative booking policies. Many theatres that once showed 16mm films have dismantled their 16mm equipment, and some venues still willing to show 16mm film now charge the filmmaker upwards of $1,000 to install 16mm projection for a specific run. And, at least in America, bookings from university film societies and film clubs have fallen off significantly.
All traditional film co-ops struggle to function in a modern environment where short, independent work is increasingly shot and distributed on video, and where the public can now own copies of most films. While Canyon has attempted to a limited degree to distribute on video, the filmmakers often opt to handle this themselves by advertising over the Internet or via the plethora of filmmaker magazines and fanzines. Commercial distributors like Mystic Fire Video, for example, also play a roll in the distribution of independent short films and by extension compete with the co-ops. In any other business, such a realignment of the marketplace would simply put traditional suppliers out of business, but film co-ops cannot ‘go out of business’ precisely because they never were ‘in’ business, in the classic sense, to begin with.
Today short films and ‘underground films’ get most of their theatrical exposure on a loose circuit of festivals that include the aforementioned American underground festivals as well as the European, primarily German ‘Kurzfilm’ (short film) festivals in cities like Hamburg, Stuttgart, Weiterstadt, Oberhausen, et cetera. Technical, linguistic and cultural borders become blurred as these festivals screen the works of filmmakers from all over the world in all film and video formats. These festivals also rent films when presenting retrospectives of acclaimed filmmakers, and along with film museums and educational institutions, comprise the bulk of the business that co-ops do today.
Yet to a new generation of young filmmakers, the notion of film as a non-commercial form of personal expression seems hopelessly antiquated. All too often the short film is considered a mere ‘calling card’ by which to get one’s foot into a producer’s office. For their part, film schools, which did not exist in the early 1960s, are increasingly being geared to function as portals into ‘The Industry’. While there were some monumental ‘commercial breakthroughs’ in the underground 1960s (Warhol’s Chelsea Girls et cetera), today the gospel of the commercial breakthrough has become holy writ to a generation of young filmmakers trying to get into Sundance, repped by John Pierson and signed by Miramax or Fineline. As for the proliferation of glossy magazines aimed at independent filmmakers, they seem to offer little besides endless variations on how to assemble an effective press kit. It is hard to believe, but there was a time when ‘careerism’ was uncool. Today it is an epidemic.
Yet if the 1960s mindset out of which the co-ops sprang seems to be the stuff of nostalgia, the service they provide would appear to be more urgently needed than ever. More ‘underground films’ are being made today than ever before. As to whether ‘non-competitive’ distribution has any hope of survival in today’s environment, one should definitely hope so.
Much is at stake, as any perusal through the co-op catalogues or a stroll through their print archives will reveal. They are the preserve of a largely ‘secret cinema’ – a treasure trove of undiscovered jewels (and of course plenty of lard too) that will in essence be lost if they cease to exist. In this computer age, where the power of ‘personal access’ is worshipped seemingly above all else, they offer access to a body of work that is in large measure available nowhere else. In an ara when every new movie is pre-digested a hundred times in the print and broadcast media by journalists, pundits and television celebrity chat hosts, co-ops offer people the chance to discover something rare. Strangely enough, for all the technological obsolescence of the 16mm format, this ‘secret cinema’ constitutes a new frontier.