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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.