Camera And Action, page 5
A changing creative climate was also made possible by revolutionary technology. Tools for the trade added to filmmaking opportunity because the new portable cameras were light, high quality, moderately priced, and available to "anyone seriously motivated to finance and shoot his own film." Lighter equipment allowed filmmakers to go to the streets, and the more mobile and portable technology became, the more location-minded directors grew. Shedding the manacles of the studio setting with "hand-held cameras and airborne mini studios," filmmakers gained "a sense of fleetness and freedom - from shackling below the line costs as well as hobbling geographical limitations - not known before and not noticeably imagined until recently."59 New technology allowed screenwriters and directors to find their material in daily life on the campuses and in the streets of America.
Directors and their machines constructed a new Hollywood, but it was no simple task. The Zanucks, Warners, and Zukors who had invented the American film industry held tightly to the reigns of power, but before the end of the decade, poststudio filmmakers took their places as American directors. Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, Robert Altman, Stanley Kubrick, Peter Bogdanovich, Francis Ford Coppola, Warren Beatty, and George Lucas flourished in the industry as auteurs. Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Steven Spielberg, and others followed. By his filmmaking days, Spielberg could claim that "young people were allowed to come rushing in with all of their naivete and their wisdom and all of the privileges of youth," but they "had to wrest it away from [the older generation]." In Martin Scorsese's words, "You pushed here, and if it gave there, you slipped in. And as all that pushing and shoving was going on, the equipment was changing, getting smaller and easier to use. Then the Europeans emerged. Combine all those elements together, and suddenly by the mid-60s, you had a major explosion."60 Film pundit Peter Biskind pointed out that the studio heads who still wanted to produce the musical increasingly fell "out of touch with the vast baby boom audience that was coming of age in the '60s."61
American film artists took advantage of the relaxed, creative borders and film's potential for intervention and exploration. Those whose films were attracting large audiences - Kubrick, Cassavetes, Nichols, and others - dared to imitate Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini, and Antonioni with innovative narratives and filming styles. Filmmakers produced likeable nonheroes and experimented with new subject matter and language taboos. Feature films leaned toward a more adversarial view of modern life than the model pictures of The Sound of Music and My Fair Lady. From 1966, American cinema produced and consumed adversity. The popular film engaged in a more directly political purpose, with fewer features constructing narratives of social harmony and recycled convention, adding to the transformational equation of film's industrial life and cultural role. Undoubtedly, as Film Daily editor Vance King concluded, the artist with a new vision never "had it so good." Independents "are getting bookings which they never had before; they are getting terms (if they have merchandise that is sensationally exploitable) better than any of them ever got; and with good campaigns are getting better results than they ever had dreamed of." Indeed, new directors found in film a medium suitable to their aesthetic tastes and entrepreneurial desires and turned the 1960s and 1970s into the "director's decade[s]." As a group, they "enjoyed more power, prestige, and wealth than they ever had before" and more freedom to stylize film because they were unembarrassed ... to assume the mantle of the artist."62 The day of the "company film" had given over to the companies buying independent stock, making "the entire spectrum, from low-budget films to extravaganzas ... open."63 Categorically, budget demands still limited the choice of films to make. The high-grossing film, for example, required studio-distributor backing, but for those who had an idea that could attract a large number of viewers and the critics alike, the field had cleared considerably.
From onlooker Peter Biskind's perspective, it appeared that Hollywood changes in the mid-1960s meant that "everything old was bad, everything new was good. Nothing was sacred; everything was up for grabs." He declared, "it was, in fact, a cultural revolution, American style."64 Censorship renovation and the new emphasis on the director as artist complemented the changing social conditions of the 1960s. While Hollywood searched for new methods of production as well as distribution, the 1960s cultural and social milieu facilitated filmmakers' desires to press for the legitimacy of topics previously forbidden to the mainstream film. The 1967 Academy Awards proved that the industry's values had changed in favor of the filmmaker and the art of cinema with their endorsement of Virginia Woolf. Not only did a gritty Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.? receive thirteen nominations - more than any other movie that year - and win five, but a brash Elizabeth Taylor and a dramatic Sandy Dennis also took the best and supporting actress awards. The original singing ladies had competition from a bold Taylor who "enjoyed her finest hour to date as an actress."65 Hollywood, like it or not, had modernized. One film critic predicted "a technological and aesthetic revolution in movies which [would] inevitably restructure human consciousness and understanding."66 Maybe film failed to become that powerful, but the popularity of such upcoming pictures as The Graduate, Easy Rider, and Alice's Restaurant suggests something had at least been re-imagined.
Yet, the New Hollywood could not have emerged without a critical mass. A brash generation was on its way to influence the direction of the film industry. As consumers and producers, they acted in, directed and watched films; wrote screenplays; and studied movies on college campuses. Movies for the 1960s youth were what books were to their parents. Hollywood offspring Maurice Rapf grasped the association. "It's their medium," he remarked, "and they love it."67 Convention and generic formulas gave way to experimentation. Industry restructuring created new prospects for independent filmmakers. Exhibitors who wanted quality films on the order of the European or art film had to compete with studios for distribution. Updated visuals and hard social issues stimulated artistic experimentation in American mainstream film and gave film a new agency. To be sure, American auteurs never had it so good. If ever they could count on an admiring audience, it was then.
Great film-makers need great audiences.
- Bernard R. Kantor, "Film Study in Colleges"
The third dimension of a film is a thousand people, a thousand pairs of ears and eyes looking at it, not one pair.
-John Cassavetes, "Dialogue on Film"
What's new is the audience itself.
- Maurice Rapf, "Can Education Kill the Movies?"
While internal improvements preoccupied industry shapers, selective audiences who wished to raise the artistic bar for American film voiced their opinions at such box office surprises as A Room at the Top (1959) and Zorba the Greek (1964). Yet, this vibrant art film audience did not push Hollywood through its studio doors like another sector of viewers did. A generation of boomers, as if without warning, had grown up and, with impassioned enthusiasm for the artistic potential of American film, helped prod the moving picture toward new content and style.' For those filmmakers (mostly in their thirties or early forties) who aspired to deeper cinematic acclaim, the timing was right. The most experienced and educated American spectators of film to date emerged and widened the borders of Hollywood production formulas. Young people sought screen education on campuses and turned to something other than the time-honored big budget or latest blockbuster. Sophisticates interested in higher quality pictures organized or expanded film societies. At the same time, universities and colleges created academic film programs and helped advance film as an art. Moreover, these advocates contributed to the development of the American Film Institute, the first nationally funded center of its kind in the United States. Societies, campuses, and institutes - shaped by viewers with artistic eyes - gave directors a better chance to make art, money, and entertainment, all at the same time.
Despite attempts to take film into highbrow culture during the movie palace days, American cinema functioned largely as a commercial, popular form of entertainment. At the same time, an interested few professed film's artistic merit and formed societies or joined local clubs. By the 1960s, film society members met for screenings at libraries, schools, museums, churches, synagogues, homes, or even rented local theaters on off nights to acquaint the largest number of viewers with the "best" available films. The more aware of cinematic aesthetics audiences were, members argued, the better the chance for filmmakers to produce films of high intellectual value. Consequently, increased followings by mid-decade made it obvious that viewers found new resources for tailor-making their motion picture enjoyment.'
Early societies assembled to safeguard footage from the past, but the primary motivation for members remained the wish to challenge the Production Code that limited public choice, distribution, and production of motion pictures. Societies could access films unavailable through commercial distribution by forming film exchange co-ops and holding film festivals, or by merely meeting regularly to screen a picture and host a knowledgeable lecturer.' To further their goals, organizations such as the Film Society Caucus, the Film Council of America, and the Roosevelt College Film Society created the American Federation of Film Societies (AFFS) and drafted a constitution in 1955.4 The AFFS proposed to devote its total activities to assist in the development of a discriminating general film audience and to increase public consciousness of the film as a mature medium, by initiating and promoting, in cooperation with other commercial and non-commercial organizations, projects for the expansion of opportunities for the exhibition and intelligent presentation of significant films throughout the USA.5
Film society members described themselves as devoted to cinema conscientiously conveying an aesthetic experience. They were not just friends and fans of old films, or "FOOFS," as the acronym had it, but solemn aesthetes dedicated to studying, discussing, and advancing film as art.' Society members argued that though film had not yet warranted the level of sophistication awarded the great American novel, it could at least distinguish itself from the "tastelessness" of television. Devoted members gathered and distributed program and lecture notes to encourage the education of viewers and the AFFS published society material in the Film Society Primer, an annual publication of film information and related material.
Society enthusiasm coincided with increased interest in the art film by the early 1960s, but it did not necessarily mean that Hollywood listened to film societies. To the contrary, as Variety reported, Hollywood "unfortunately tends to be suspicious of film societies rather than enthusiastic about their progress and the general upgrading of tastes they engender." 7 As one AFFS director scolded, Hollywood refused to acknowledge audience sophistication in film societies. At the very least, he admonished, producers and filmmakers should have recognized members' love for film as art.' Despite the obvious need for "a counter force," as critic Hollis Alpert put it, "the commercial spirit has far too long dominated the American film."9 Ignoring film societies' insistence on diversity in film signaled Hollywood's commonplace disregard for changes in film taste.
Nonetheless, through alliances, caucuses, and published program notes, the Federation centralized efforts to place film on "the high, dry shores of art."10 Unfortunately, those high shores left societies a bit too dry and distanced them from their original function of making available more significant films or fine tuning the artistic eye of public audiences. To film expert Anthony Hodgkinson of Boston University, societies by the mid-1960s seemed overly traditional and self-absorbed. "Film," as he remarked, "has always been and still is a social art, a popular art." Hodgkinson further claimed "to take the viewpoint that `high culture' is a temple threatened by the invading barbarian hordes of Hollywood-corrupted `masses,' and calling for desperate defence [sic] by the enlightened, is as unreal an attitude as to fall into the value-less morass of the pop-cultists, who find witless response to any and every untutored screen-scribble of the `underground,' wherever it may locate itself."" The trend toward elitism suggested that with the Code break-up, film societies had served their original function and needed to change or dissolve.12
Film society problems ranged from internal disagreement on club goals to organizational challenges to lack of interest. Still, societies contributed to the dialogue concerning the place of film in American culture -what it is for and what the relationship among the audience, film, and the industry should be. They were an important cultural indicator of the changing tastes in audiences and part of the dynamic between the art and mainstream film while codes were in flux. Yet, societies' clearest contribution in developing critical opinion, audience sophistication, and film consciousness was by virtue of their involvement in the institutions of education. The AFFS's newly elected officers, by mid-decade, came primarily from college campuses. A select group of professors contributed to the AFFS's monthly publication, Film Society Review, to "keep the reading and the talking going."13 These film activists helped advance film education on campuses across the country while successfully organizing film conferences, safeguarding society program notes in libraries, and otherwise campaigning for the artistic merit of film.
Film advocacy from societies met with profound enthusiasm from students. One student organization, the United States National Student Association (USNSA), served approximately 1,200,000 students and offered the AFFS a way to create a nationwide film society program on campuses. Together the student group and AFFS contributed labor and information for creating college film societies. Film Society Review's editor, John Thomas, noted the addition of a student film advisory board. It "reflects USNSAs recent and growing interest in the field of film," Thomas remarked, "both as communication and art form."" Campus leadership typically consisted of graduate students, undergraduates, and professors from across the disciplines. At Dartmouth, for example, approximately one-fifth of the student body was involved in film society activity by 1967.15 Other groups, such as the Department of Fine Arts Productions at the University of California at Los Angeles and Delta Kappa at the University of Southern California, drew on the AFFS for the typical film series tailored to university schedules.16 By decade's end, approximately 90 percent of all film societies were campus affiliated.17 Members underscored their role in making audiences -"nurtured by film societies"- the "master keys to the progress of the art - to a fuller understanding and richer enjoyment today, to future films of even greater beauty, significance, and diversity than those we now cherish.""
General interest in film had long been fostered through regular film series provided by distributors to campuses. Students and faculty at Ohio State University enjoyed film series on campuses from the mid-thirties when Edgar Dal and F. W. Davis instituted The University Film Series and introduced audiences to foreign film. By the 1960s, campus screenings were part of most college offerings. A University of Utah student newspaper, for example, advertised enthusiastically: "variety, quality, and the ability of the film maker to involve his audience will characterize Union Movies this quarter, beginning this weekend with `The Golden Coach' directed by Jean Renoir."" Another film series organizer advocated the addition of alternative cinema to the regular film sequence. Saturday nights were set aside for new releases and mainstream cinema while Wednesday nights were reserved for the art film. Campuses thus channeled cinematic art for those interested.20
Soon, common allure mushroomed into pressure groups made up of students, professors, and society organizers who called for the sanction of film as an academic subject, like literature, to be taught, analyzed, and produced. To be sure, select universities already had film schools. USC's film production program dated to 1929 and its degree program in film was the first in the country. During the 1940s and 1950s, other campuses developed courses for the industrial function of film to train students as audio-visual directors for business, industry, and the medical field. Whether producing a project for the university or the outside community, students created countless feet of film every year for a third less than in the commercial field. Educators saw little value in training students for the entertainment industry, yet the foundational fact remained that film functioned above all as a popular medium, a form of entertainment. Robert Gessner of New York University understood the need for change in the technical emphasis in film programs and pointed out as early as the 1940s that film curriculum should gear itself to mass audiences. He introduced students to a new screen education, training them as "directors, prop men, film cutters, and camera crews" and encouraged them to produce "every thing from Westerns to variations of `Gone with the Wind. 11121 New approaches to film education were even suggested in Saturday Review, whose editor recognized "that film affects our thoughts, our attitudes, our activities."22 Generally, though, except for Gessner's pioneering efforts, the dozen-plus colleges offering film programs in the 1940s took a vocational approach. Not for another twenty years would film education become a likely academic subject in the college curriculum.
Key to that change was the arrival on campuses in the mid-1960s of the baby boom generation, born in the aftermath of World War II. Film as a social tool was simply "forced by student insistence and demand."23 By 1965, the college population had soared to 5 million students; by 1973, 10 million. This compares to the 3 million who attended state universities in 1960 and the 2-%2 million in 1950. One-half of eighteen- to twenty-year-olds entered college by 1969 and three-quarters of all college students attended state campuses. Before World War II no university was larger than 15,000, but in 1970 over fifty institutions enrolled 30,000 or more students.24 Clearly, as administrators reported, "no longer regarded as a `luxury,' posthigh-school education has become a standard part of life in America."25
The campus has always been an arena for debating social and political issues and a meeting place for experimental ideas, but from 1965 it became a new space for action and dis- sent.26 Campuses functioned as a central location for consciousness raising, but with the growth of the university system, students lobbied administrations for changes in dorm rules, lifting bans on speech restrictions, and allowing students more decision-making in campus life. Through manifestoes, flyers, political organizations, underground presses, marches, sitins, and speeches, students expressed their dissatisfaction with the system. Students, professors, and administrators debated the definition of a university. The college campus proved a legitimate site for germinating radicalism and a place to promote and protest an adversarial view of America.27 It would be difficult not to notice, as one observer commented, that "by the late 1960s ... a massive shift in attitudes and orientations toward traditional American values and support for traditional institutions had taken place on many American campuses, even if most young people did not perceive themselves as revolutionaries or even radicals."28 Uni versities approached film education in this climate of social unrest and demands for radical revision of the college curriculum.
