Beyond the United States: Three Propositions Toward a History of New American Cinema's Multiplicity of Sites in the 1960s

Abstract

Beyond the United States:Three Propositions Toward a History of New American Cinema's Multiplicity of Sites in the 1960s Faye Corthésy (bio) At the end of a letter to Jonas Mekas written from Italy in 1964, young film critic P. Adams Sitney produces a collage of a photograph of his own head adorned with another one of the Vatican's buildings. A handwritten comic-strip-like speech bubble makes Sitney say "caio" [sic] to the receiver.1 That whimsical letter ornament presenting the author as a self-crowned pope of a new kind, and the wrongly spelled "ciao," is one of many traces of a transnational history of New American Cinema (NAC) and the New American Cinema Group (NACG) in the 1960s that I am researching. If NAC has been chiefly situated by film historians in a North American context, I argue that it came to play a central role in the historiographical narrative of avant-garde and experimental cinema through the circulation of films and discourses associated with the phrase mainly outside of the United States. Aside from a displacement from dominant historiographical discourse approaching NAC from the U.S., I use the term of displacement in its concrete meaning to analyze the movement and travelling (or lack thereof) of films—as representations and as objects, film copies—of discourses and of people that altogether worked to construct a, or maybe several, "New American Cinema(s)." These displacements, I argue, bring forth a perspective that is not peripheral and accessory, but actually central and crucial to an understanding of the impact of NAC until today. [End Page 137] New American Cinema on the Move It might sound counterintuitive to hear that NAC was mainly constructed outside of the U.S. Afterall, the NACG and the Filmmakers' Cooperative were founded in New York; there is a national affirmation in the name of the Group itself (NAmericanCG); members of the Cooperative were mostly living in the U.S., if not were American; and their films were made there. Moreover, in the "First Statement of the New American Cinema Group," written in 1960 and published in 1961 in the magazine Film Culture, the need to change the national film production and distribution system and film culture is put forward (from methods for financing films, issues of censorship, film exhibition, and the lack of film festivals in the U.S.).2 The "First Statement," however, already opens up that national scale by expressing a solidarity with other "new cinema" movements in the world, as well as by mentioning the circulation, or non-circulation, of films across borders. More evidence of the circulations of films, discourses, and persons related to NAC in the long 1960s can be found to outline a more mobile historical narrative. First, translations of the "First Statement of the Group" were published very early on, and sometimes at the same time as the American publication, in several magazines or anthologies, in Europe at least.3 Jumping across the decade, when looking for the first monographs published on NAC or featuring prominently NAC, we find not only the well-known An Introduction to the American Underground Film by Sheldon Renan and Visionary Film by P. Adams Sitney, which were published in the U.S.,4 but also Italian monographs that have had a much more limited reach than, for instance, Sitney's several times reissued work: New American Cinema by scholar and filmmaker Renato Tomasino in 19705 and Occhio mio dio: Il New American Cinema by filmmaker Alfredo Leonardi in 1971.6 This literature production in Europe, simultaneously as in the U.S., can be explained by the circulation of films, of filmmakers and critics, and of discourses throughout the 1960s (in Italy among other countries). This circulation was initiated and encouraged directly by the NACG, which built its own network, mainly outside "classical" networks such as the film festivals circuit. Indeed, the first large program of films gathered under the umbrella of "NAC" took place not in New York or the U.S. but in Europe, in the Italian city of Spoleto in Summer 1961, as part of the Festival of Two Worlds.7 This...