Peter Hoskin celebrates 50 years of American independent cinema
As so often, our story begins with Mickey Mouse and a child’s pliant mind. The child in this case was Amos Vogel, growing up in 1930s Vienna. His father had bought him a small hand-cranked film projector, and the kid Vogel used to sit there, winding the handle and watching Mickey, Krazy Kat and other cartoon characters dance across the walls. Only there was frequently something odd, something perverse, about their movements. You see, Vogel used to enjoy running the projector in reverse — making the films, and the characters, go backwards.
The experience must have tripped some wires in the young boy’s head. It surely can’t be an accident that he became one of the world’s most provocative, devoted and influential proponents of experimental cinema. And, 50 years ago, he proved it beyond doubt by arranging a landmark film screening which catalysed a change in how film lovers, artists and studio chiefs saw the medium.
Cut to 1959 and New York where, amid the optimism of the postwar years, things were really stirring. Madison Avenue was booming, the cityscape was getting taller and glassier, and the Cadillacs all had tail fins. But, behind the scenes, 10,000 men and women were working to subvert a culture which they believed had become sterile. There was the Beat Generation, scribbling their obscene odes and bashing out their spontaneous prose. There were the jazz musicians, who were taking bebop into ever more esoteric terrain. And there was Vogel himself, who had established a film society in the city over a decade earlier.
This was the legendary Cinema 16, and nothing was beyond its range, reach or ambition. From the avant-garde work of Kenneth Anger, to the latest Bollywood musicals, the idea was simply to screen films and expand horizons. And it certainly proved popular — at least in a cult kind of way. At its height, Cinema 16 had so many members that it regularly packed out the 1,600-seat Fashion Industries Auditorium on West 24th Street. What’s more, folk like Susan Sontag, Norman Mailer and Marlon Brando were paying to get in. This was the place to get an education in cinema.
Many in Vogel’s audience would have nodded in thoughtful agreement at a polemic that had appeared the previous year in Film Culture magazine. It was written by an actor and aspiring director, John Cassavetes, and it started with one hell of a bang: ‘Hollywood is not failing. It has failed.’ Specifically, he was troubled by the dishonesty and exclusivity of the American film industry. Hollywood made, packaged, mass-marketed and sold a dream which just didn’t ring true with Cassavetes — or the age itself. So he decided to combat the problem head-on. He decided to make his own feature.
Let’s skip the history of Cassavetes’s Shadows here; suffice it to say that there’s still controversy over the different cuts of the film: which version is more radical, which is truer, that kind of thing. But the fundamental point remains: that, from its Charles Mingus score to its final title card, Shadows is all about improvisation and spontaneity. Gone are the complicated set-ups of Product Hollywood; replaced with footage shot hastily, and cheaply, on the streets and in the bars of New York. And gone, too, is deliberate melodrama; replaced with a haphazard focus on the lives of three African–American siblings. In the end, it all looks authentic and unplanned. Whether or not it actually is — well, that’s a different question entirely.
Vogel caught on to Shadows early. He had been shown a print of the film by Cassavetes and immediately recognised its raw power. This was a new way of doing cinema, but one which needed a midwife to pull it wailing, loud and unstoppable, on to the cultural landscape. So Vogel duly handed over a $250 rental fee, and arranged for it to be screened at Cinema 16.
But that wasn’t the end of Vogel’s plan. Shadows may, in many ways, have been the best example of a new cinema of improvisation but it wasn’t the only one. Elsewhere in New York, the beats were dabbling in film, and with typically energetic results. The photographer Robert Frank (whose classic photo-study The Americans is also 50 years old this year) and the painter Arthur Leslie had just directed Pull My Daisy, based on the third act of an unpublished Jack Kerouac play. Plot was there none. But there were anarchic performances in front of camera by the poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky, as well as a syncopated narration from Kerouac himself, making poetic asides on bugs and metaphysics…It was exactly the sort of subversive fare that Cinema 16 was designed for. It would share a bill with Shadows.
And so we come to the night of 11 November 1959, and the world première of both Pull My Daisy and Shadows at Cinema 16. The audience was crammed with the noted and notorious of the New York art scene: Ginsberg, Kenneth Tynan, Paddy Chayevsky — the list goes on. They sat, watched and digested the new patterns forming on the screen. As Vogel put it, ‘There was a lot of electricity in the air.’ And, like most landmark artworks, the films drew an impassioned response. There was ‘outright booing and hissing’, along with a ‘long and pronounced ovation’. But it was the applause that resonated: in the aftermath of the screening, journals, magazines and newspapers hummed with discussion about the event, and Shadows was soon winning awards and being picked up for distribution deals. The film industry had received the psychic shock it needed.
It’s sad that we can only recreate that scene, that buzz, in our imaginations. Still, we’re fortunate to live in an age of availability, where we can double-bill Pull My Daisy and Shadows as often as we like, in our own homes. Both are out on DVD and also appear on YouTube, although Shadows is split into several parts.
Watching the films now, you can’t help but be struck by their vibrancy. They still live, breathe and excite in similar ways to, say, the music of John Coltrane or the novels of John Dos Passos. And you can see their spirit hovering over everything from the films of Martin Scorsese (who has said Shadows made him realise that ‘cinema could be made anywhere’); to the boom in American independent cinema; to the digital footage shot nowadays on mobile phones and camcorders.
As for Vogel, he brought Cinema 16 to an end in 1963, but has continued to project Mickey Mouse backwards, so to speak, ever since. Countless cinéastes owe him thanks for his programming at festivals, his lectures, his articles and his seminal book Film as a Subversive Art. But, above all, we should be grateful that he paired two particular films together on a November evening, 50 years ago.
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