Commercial Film Industry Research Articles

Home Movies of the Avant-Garde: Jonas Mekas and the New York Art World

The World of Avant-Garde Film. Jonas Mekas is a central figure in the consolidation of the postwar avant-garde film community. His life and work are dedicated to the establishment of film as an art form. In this endeavor, he has collaborated in the construction-of an art world, as defined by sociologist Howard Becker. In Worlds, Becker develops his institutional theory of art: Art worlds consist of all the people whose activities are necessary to the production of the characteristic works which that world, and perhaps others as well, define as art. Members of art worlds coordinate the activities by which work is produced by referring to a body of conventional understandings embodied in common practice and in frequently used artifacts. The same people often cooperate repeatedly, even routinely, in similar ways to produce similar works, so that we can think of an art world as an established network of cooperative links among participants.2 The avant-garde film community may be thought of as an art world, a subset of the larger contemporary art world in the United States. As a critic, journal editor, distributor, filmmaker, exhibitor, fundraiser, archivist, and teacher, Mekas has fought to place film on equal footing with the other arts of modernism. Through his writings, lectures, and films, Mekas has worked to build a community of filmmakers and a sophisticated audience receptive to their art. I will explore Mekas's contribution to the construction of an art world of avant-garde film in the institutional frameworks of production, distribution, exhibition, and criticism. Through these various avenues, Mekas has cultivated the appreciation of film as a fine art form. As editor-in-chief of Film Culture in the 1950s, Mekas promoted the politique des auteurs, or auteurism, advanced by the critics of the French journal Cahiers du cinema. Auteurism, as a theory of film criticism, prizes films, and especially Hollywood productions, to the extent that they may be seen as manifestations of an individual controlling sensibility, embodying the worldview of an author. Auteurism provides a framework for appreciating as art the products of the commercial film industry. As in the more traditional art forms

Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties.

From Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol to the underground cinema and political films, David James gives a thorough account of the growth, development, and decay of nonstudio film practices in the United States between the late fifties and the mid-seventies. Unlike other scholars who discuss these practices as totally separate from Hollywood, James argues that they were developed in various kinds of dialogue or negotiation with the commercial film industry. He also demonstrates that the formal properties of the films were determined not simply by aesthetic considerations but by the functions the films served in the various subcultures and dissident groups that produced them. After an opening chapter on film hermeneutics, the book gives detailed accounts of the contrary projects of two exemplary filmmakers: Stan Brakhage, who pioneered an artisanal, domestic film practice, and Andy Warhol, who redirected such a practice toward the film industry. James then discusses the beats and other idealist countercultures, the social groups that formed around civil rights and the Vietnam War, artists who shunned social involvement for pure film (structural film), and finally the women's movement.

Writers with Dirty Hands: Howard Brenton's A Sky Blue Life: Scenes after Maxim Gorki

The production in its main house by the Royal Court Theatre of Magnificence in July 1973 signalled the arrival in the established British theatre of a new generation of young political dramatists. The play's author, Howard Brenton, may in retrospect be seen as the figurehead of this second "new wave" of playwrights who have re-vitalised British theatre since '956; most important among the others are David Edgar, Trevor Griffiths, and David Hare. All emerged towards the end of the 1960s, producing work fired by contemporary political unrest and designed to reach new audiences through a Fringe theatre circuit of community halls, college venues and small avant-garde theatre spaces. Much of this early work - particularly that produced by Portable Theatre, a group founded by Hare with which all these dramatists, but especially Brenton, were associated - was fuelled by a determination to challenge the perceived assumptions and complacency of the established theatre with shows that were provocative and controversial in content and style alike. Yet each of these writers, albeit in differing ways and to some extent for differing reasons, followed Brenton into the mainstream of "official culture", working on the large public stages - subsidised and West End - or on television, or in the commercial film industry. For Brenton at least, the Fringe of the early '970S had become "a cultural cul-de-sac," the "new" audiences as sophisticated and as isolated from the rest of society as their West End counterparts. It was largely this perception that led him to turn to the large, subsidised, public theatre spaces: since '973, he has written regularly for the Royal Court, the RSC, and most significantly, for the National Theatre. For some, he has "sold out"; for others, he remains "the wolf within the gates" of the established theatre.

"Lili Marleen": Fascism and the Film Industry

Filmmaking in West Germany since the late 1960s has a complex background. Its current high productivity follows twenty-five exceptionally arid years, a moribund period for the country's commercial film industry. Hollywood's particularly ruthless exploitation policy as applied to the West German market meant the enforcement by distributors of block-booking and other nearmonopolistic practices. The Germans, unlike the French or British, were unable to protect their own private industry through legislation. Import quotas and the freezing of box-office receipts the two most frequently applied trade barriers of the 1950s and '60s proved politically unacceptable in the face of the massive lobbying undertaken by the U.S. State Department on behalf of the Motion Picture Export Association during the Adenauer era. The decline was slow since West Germany did grant subsidies to its ailing industry. A combination of fiscal measures (reduced entertainment tax on films of cultural value) and a levy on all box-office receipts sustained production. The industry remained undercapitalized, however, existing from hand to mouth, from film to film. The general slide into insignificance of other European film industries during the 1960s demonstrated the inadequacy of purely economic incentives. The Hollywood product was superior in almost every respect and the attempt to compete by means of exploitation pictures brought some producers shortterm profits but ruined the already volatile market. The loss of the popular audiences was followed by the disaffection of the more serious ones. It was perhaps the very thoroughness with which the Americans cleaned up in West Germany that opened the way for a different concept of filmmaking. How did Europe's most sophisticated and entangled system of government subsidized filmmaking come into existence? It derived partly from the defensive posture of the German industrial establishment in response to the postwar