A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

finds itself in the same circuit as other avant-garde filmexcept that it ends up in a different academic department.

Macdonald:

I came to one of the seminaars you held at the Collective when you were first presenting

Argument

and at the time I was struck by what seemed aparadox: The film was made for an audience that already knew a good deal abut the way in which information was constructed in film and what its impact on audiences was. the audience most likely to benefit from

Argument

(an academic audience, classes in communications) didn't see it, and the audiences that ded seemed to recent it.

McCall:

Looking back, I think we would locate the resentment at those early screenings not in what was being said by the film, but in the way the film was saying it. When I see and hear the film now, I find that it jars. Its tone is pretty strident and aaa bit smug. but I don't agree (although it's what people said; I remember Bill Brand saying it at the Collective seminar you were at) that everybody was familiar with all the issues the film raised. And even if the terms of the rgument were that organized a stuation where people could talk about them. I'm quite sure the resentment about the film was about the tone in which it spoke. You did geel assaulted, and with an incredibly dense amount of information. and it never let up, and it repeated itself, and it spoke very loudly. It didn't have very much light orl shadeit just kept talking.

Tyndall:

I think there were people on the Left who went one step further than Bill Brand. They said, OK we understand all these problems you have in the area of and independent filmmaking practice and the politics of ideology, bu where's your program? This film gets turned in

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Text from McCall and Tyndall's

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 (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

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