Distribution and exhibition of experimental film
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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- This article is about the distribution and exhibition of experimental cinema.
Finding an audience for experimental films has been just as difficult as making them. From 1947 to 1963, the New York-based Cinema 16 functioned as the primary exhibitor and distributor of experimental film in the United States. Under the leadership of Amos Vogel and Marcia Vogel, Cinema 16 flourished as a nonprofit membership society committed to the exhibition of documentary, avant-garde, scientific, educational, and performance films to ever-increasing audiences.
Vogel's selection did not please everyone. In 1962 Jonas Mekas (recent inductee to the Library of Congress' list of most influential and important films as well as long time Village Voice film contributor) and about 20 other film makers founded The Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York City. Soon similar artists cooperatives were formed in other cities: Canyon Cinema in San Francisco, the London Film-Maker's Co-op, and Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center. This strategy worked but remains questionable - is it art finding a venue, or is it simply vanity distributorship?
Several other organizations in both Europe and North America helped develop experimental film. These included Anthology Film Archives, The Millennium Film Workshop, the British Film Institute in London, the National Film Board of Canada and the Collective for Living Cinema.
Most of the self-organised and run distributors and collectives have been bought by large museums, such as the New York Museum of Modern Art, which bought New York Filmmaker's Co-Op and never offered any monetary incentives to the creators of the films. MOMA continues to distribute the films without paying the creators.
Some contemporary distributors of experimental film today include Light Cone in Paris, Canyon Cinema in San Francisco, Canadian Filmmaker's Distribution Centre, The Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York, and Lux in London. 16mm prints are still available through these organizations.
Experimental Film and the Academy
Many of the artists involved in these early movements remained outside of the mainstream commercial cinema and entertainment industry. They have become professors at universities such as the State Universities of New York, Bard College, and the Massachusetts College of Art, San Francisco Art Institute. Many of the structuralist practitioners of experimental film do not in fact possess college degrees themselves, although their showings are prestigious, which is even more of conundrum when considering their relationship to a supposed cognoscenti of academics. Further, many of the schools at which they teach, with a few exceptions, do not have large experimental film collections, if at all, causing one to wonder; what do they teach? (Bard Library, SUNY Library, Massachusetts College of Art Library) Or, more succinctly, is it art? Or even more of a contrarian point of view: most academic art is seen as a footnote, or outside of the art-world mainstream or historical zeitgeist. The very fact that these films are entrenched as academic, in some way points out the flaws in the structuralist reasoning that the experimental film is the "true way" of film, in which hidden truths are uncovered about the nature of the language of film by highlighting the ways in which the films are made. Those that do teach at these more traditional prestigious schools have mostly come from traditional film backgrounds, as graduates of "alternative" programs do not gel well with the academic model most of these schools fashion themselves under, and are not taken as seriously as academics having received the (art world preparatory) MFA degree rather than the Ph.D. degree (academic college teaching degree). It would seem the teaching of this practice is as problematic as the distribution and showing, leaving some to wonder if it isn't useful in some way, how good can it be? There have been no real substantial changes to the formula of experimental film since the structuralists. Many feel that identity politics is (charitably) its end-zone, (or rather less charitably) a cul-de-sac brought on a larger form by a small group of like-minded academics.
Reviews express this concern most dramatically:
A review of the structuralists appeared in a 2000 edition of the art journal "Art In America". The review was devastating: cold, a little alienated perhaps a product of it's time at the end of the Vietnam War, and in the midst of the Cold War, the work seemed dated, and perhaps too inward. it reflected a yearning for a simpler view of both communism and the U.S. The review examined the ways in which structural-formalism is actually quite a conservative philosophy of filmmaking. (Art In America.)
Exhibition
Following the model of Cinema 16, experimental films have been exhibited mainly outside of commercial theaters in small film societies, microcinemas, museums, art galleries, archives and film festivals.
Some of the more popular film festivals, such as Ann Arbor Film Festival, the New York Film Festival's "Views from the Avant-Garde" Side Bar and the International Film Festival Rotterdam have in the past prominently featured experimental works. Many of these, other than the New York Film Festival, espouse that they no longer really support this type of filmmaking.
The New York Underground Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, the LA Freewaves Experimental Media Arts Festival, MIX NYC, Toronto's Images Festival and the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film/Video Festival still support this work and provide venues for films which would not otherwise be seen. There is some dispute about whether "underground" and "avant-garde" truly mean the same thing and if challenging non-traditional cinema and fine arts cinema are actually fundamentally related.
Venues such as Anthology Film Archives in New York City, the [[San Francisco Cinematheque}} in San Francisco, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, CA, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris often include historically significant experimental films and contemporary works. Screening series no longer in New York that featured experimental work include The Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, Ocularis and The Collective for Living Cinema.
Recently Pacific Film Archive eliminated their experimental Tuesday night program. The new curator (since 2000) of the Whitney stated in a 2001 interview on Charlie Rose that he believed it was the responsibility of the Anthology Film Archives to show the work because the work is essentially unsellable and the Whitney was not interested in "renting" video art and films. He went on to intimate that it would fall out of favor in coming biennials. (PBS/Charlie Rose).
