Page 6
Another historical trajectory implicit in the order of the eighteen interviews has to do with the types of critique developed from one decade to the next. Of course, the complexity of the history of North American independent cinema makes any simple chronology of ap- proaches impossible. Indeed, each decade of independent film production has been characterized by the simultaneous development of widely varying forms of critique. And yet, having said this, I would also argue that certain general changes in focus are discernible. One of these is the increasingly explicit political engagement of filmmakers. The films of Breer and Snow emphasize fundamental issues of perception, especially film perception. From time to time, one of their,' films reveals evidence of the filmmaker's awareness of the larger social/political developments of which their work is inevitably a part, but 'in general they focus on the cinematic worlds 'created by their films. The focus of the films of Mekas, Baillie, Ono, and McCall is broader: the worlds
in
'their films are some, What more directly engaged with social/political developments outside their work. In several of Mekas's major films, for example, the filmmaker's real homeland (Lithuania) is ultimately "replaced" by the creation of an "aesthetic homeland" that, exists within themselves and Within the social and institutional world documented by the films. Mekas may ''really lave only in my editing room" but his life there is, as his films make clear contextualized by the personal/ethnic/political history out of which this current "real life" developed.
With few exceptions, the remaining interviews in Volume 2 reveal a growing interest in national and global concerns. Some interviewees-Benning, for example, and Ross McElwee and Su Friedrich-makes films that reveal in some detail how their personal lives are affected by larger social and political developments; Friedrich, in particular, uses the process of filmmaking as a means of responding to these developments. Severson, Mulvey, Yvonne Rainer, and Trinh T. Minh-ha have used filmmaking to explore the gender politics that underlie contemporary life and thus inform much of the popular cinema, and Trinh and Rainer in particular relate the disenfranchisement implicit in these gender politics to other forms of disenfranchisement: to the undervaluing of ethnic heritages within the United States and of the cultural practices of "Third World" peoples. Godfrey Reggio and Peter Watkins explore the possibility of a global cinematic perspective, in films that attempt to demonstrate the interconnectedness of all cultures and their parallel problems and aspirations.
The other general organizational principle that informs
A Critical Cinema 2
is my arrangement of the interviews so that each successive pair of interviews (the mini-interviews with Severson, Mulvey, and Rainer are treated as a single piece) reveals a general type of response to