To independent filmmakers: Stephen Dwoskin and ‘the international free cinema’

Abstract

Filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin dedicated his 1975 book on underground cinema and experimental film, Film Is … The International Free Cinema , ‘To independent film-makers’. 1 Dwoskin’s highly personal paean to the ‘painters and poets who have become filmmakers’ constitutes a brisk and somewhat eccentric history of avant-garde film since the 1920s. In the first chapter, ‘Early history’, he moves breathlessly from Fernand Léger’s Le Ballet Mécanique (1924) to Robert Frank’s Pull My Daisy (1959) in under twenty-five pages, laying the foundation for a loose concept of independence based primarily on independence from the market and the mainstream film industry. Reading his introduction, and the following chapter, which profiles the ‘contemporary scene’ country by country, can feel a little like skimming over a list of significant filmmakers, with brief sketches of the conditions of production and distribution in each country. Dwoskin attempts to picture the scale of activity across the globe but is always frank about omissions – India and Latin America, he readily admits, are not well served by his whistle-stop survey. As a document of Dwoskin’s own personal travels, his expanding network at the mid-point of the decade, and as a snapshot of the emergence of a strong if labile international ‘independent’ film culture, it is invaluable.