A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

Text from McCall and Tyndall's

Argument

 (1978).

on itself too often, and it can't allow a program. Also, I remember that Scott and Beth B turned up at one of the final seminars. They were just starting to make Super-8 films. I remember them saying, 'Why do you insist on films being boring?' That was the only thing they said at one of these meetings, and of all the comments we heard, that one stuck with me, because it suggested to me that one response to our dilemma was to go back to storytelling.

McCall:

I don't think that was the dilemma they were responding to. I had many conversations with Scott years ago, because he used to be around this neighborhood quite a bit. I think he and Beth were part of the generation that was at art school when conceptual art was big, when it wasn't necessary to paint in order to be an artist. Any medium was OK and as good as any other. An enormous number of people came to New York at about that time from different art schools, all of them doing different creative things in different mediums. I think the Bs chose film because at the time when Super-8 became available, there was no longer any gallery space for all this conceptual art. There was room for only a few people, but there were hundreds of people who were trained as artists. Super-8 film proved to be a very useful way of getting work seen.

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It was a year or two later, January 1979, that Becky Johnston, James Nares, and Eric Mitchell founded the 'New Cinema' on Saint Mark's Place, which lasted one year. Every Saturday evening they showed what someone had made that week. Most of the films were shown as soon as they were done. I went to those screenings quite regularly. It wasn't that the work itself was so remarkable, but it made you think again about filmmaking. After seeing and hearing films in which people talked, there was no going back to silent minimal films, or abstract films.

Tyndall:

There's another factor. For a while, the only place where you could see X-rated movies was in an art environment. As a result, there was all sorts of audience subsidy for independent avant-garde film through the box office. You could mix your experimental films and foreign imports in the programming.

McCall:

In fact, Fuses was supposed to be shown as a short with

I Am Curious

(

Yellow

) [1968], though I believe the exhibitor got cold feet at the last minute. He didn't think he wanted two court cases on his hands. But that was a perfectly possible idea then. Once the law changed, what had been protected as part of the avant-garde suddenly vacated. I looked at some of the sixties films in the American New Wave show organized by Bruce Jenkins and the Walker Art Center, and I was struck by how time had changed their meaning. The sexuality that was exhibited freely in a lot of these films, which Jonas Mekas praised in his writing and was very important to a lot of people at the time, is no longer an issue; and so the films seem lame. Often they're structurally not very interesting. When you go back and read a lot of the writing on underground cinemawhether it's Jonas or Parker Tylerthere's a hymn to the freedom to talk about sex and to illustrate then illegal acts, such as homosexuality, on film. That was a major part of the importance of underground cinema. The avant-garde got busted a lot; it was like a testing ground. We were at a screening of Warhol's

I, a Man

[1967] at the Bleecker Street last year with Tom Baker. He was talking about how some of the Warhol films were made, quite consciously, to test the obscenity laws.

Tyndall:

So to jump back to 1976, '77, '78, what had happened was that the independent experimental cinema had split: one part went into a commercially viable industryhard coreand another went into relatively sanitized, relatively unexciting, relatively arty, government-funded showplaces, which mushroomed once the NEA was founded, and which dealt with independent film as another fine art.

McCall:

I think that's a little unfair. Certainly that was something of the flavor one got from Anthology, which for a number of years struggled to get a lot of films recognized that had actually been made earlier. But I think that was only one tendency.

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Tyndall:

I'm looking not at the kinds of films being made, but at the institutions. In my opinion, a lot of the places that show independent film nowadays exist because of the bureaucracies that have supported them in the past, rather than because they've got a vibrant audience that's supporting them through the box office. And it's a major question to ask about independent filmmaking: are you making films to please bureaucrats or to please people in the seats?

MacDonald:

Ironically,

Argument

seems more an analysis of content than of the spaces in which films are shown. From what you say, the idea of using

Argument

in a particular context was one of the main things that was new. But in the content of

Argument

that's not so clear. The film itself seems more about the ideology of commercial advertising and of the

New York Times

.

McCall:

We saw it as a political film with certain aims. The simple aim, as we said in our book [

Argument,

a pamphlet with statements and imagery from the film and with essays about the film and the issues it raised, was published in three editions in 197879], was to create a precondition whereby the problems that the film