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Making cinema anew: film criticism and the making of the new American cinema, 1959-1975.

Oudenhoven, James https://iro.uiowa.edu/discovery/delivery/01IOWA_INST:ResearchRepository/12782142050002771?l#13782142040002771

Oudenhoven, J. (2020). Making cinema anew: film criticism and the making of the new American cinema, 1959-1975 [University of Iowa]. https://doi.org/10.17077/etd.005341

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- Making Cinema Anew: Film Criticism and the Making of the New American Cinema, 1959- 1975

by

James Oudenhoven

A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree in American Studies in the Graduate College of The University of Iowa

May 2020

Thesis Committee: Lauren Rabinovitz, Thesis Supervisor Laura Rigal Steven Ungar Travis Vogan Deborah Whaley

Acknowledgements

This dissertation was supported by a CLAS Dissertation Writing Fellowship that provided me the time and financial support I needed to complete my research. I would like to acknowledge and thank my committee members, Laura Rigal, Steven Ungar, Travis

Vogan, and Deborah Whaley. Each member improved the quality of this dissertation, and I sincerely appreciate the time and effort they put into working on this project. I especially want to thank Lauren Rabinovitz. This project was inspired by her work, and she provided me needed support and encouragement. Lauren has read more of my work than anyone else, and her editorial voice will be with me for some time to come. I am grateful for her dedication to this project and proud that this is the last dissertation she directed.

I need to thank my friends and family who have supported me throughout this process. The friendship and support of Diann, Mike, and Justin was important to me throughout my time at Iowa. I want to thank my captious friend Andrew, whose unusual advice helped motivate me when I was feeling discouraged. I need to thank my loving and appreciative family. I was privileged to be raised by Betsy and Duane, who valued art, education, and the Green Bay Packers. They have always supported me, and they recognized my potential when I could not. I want to thank my sister, Mollie, who is both incredibly smart and hard-working. Finally, I need to thank my wife, Heather, and daughter, Violet. Heather provided me the love and support I need to finish – while providing a sympathetic ear throughout the process – and I will be forever thankful. Violet,

I hope you discover the sustaining joys of reading, writing, and watching films. I look forward to watching movies with you in the years to come.

ii Abstract

In postwar America, as Hollywood experienced profound economic and industrial changes, film critics Pauline Kael, Jonas, Mekas, and Parker Tyler helped Americans reassess the cinema’s value to American culture while demonstrating the political value of film criticism. This dissertation provides analysis of film critics Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler’s critique of the “New American Cinema” that accounted for the cultural and industrial changes that influenced American independent, experimental, and “New”

Hollywood cinema produced from 1959-71. In their criticism of the New American Cinema,

Kael, Mekas, and Tyler challenged proposed binaries between “high” and “low” culture, fine art and popular culture, and mainstream and marginal culture, and they moved American film criticism beyond aesthetic analysis that was motivated by anxieties about the cinema’s lack of cultural value. But crucially, Kael, Mekas, and Tyler used film criticism to analyze

American identity and social values in terms of class and taste, gender and cultural discourse, and sexuality and aesthetics. Pauline Kael challenged hierarchies of “high” and

“low” culture in her celebration of the “New Hollywood” as popular culture and populist art. Jonas Mekas promoted American independent and experimental cinema by challenging middle-class values of consumption and conformity. Parker Tyler provided analysis of experimental “underground” cinema’s representations of sexuality and appropriation of queer aesthetics. Ultimately, Kael, Mekas, and Tyler used their criticism of the New

American Cinema to change domestic reception of the cinema by disclosing the political value of film criticism and the cultural value of cinema.

iii Public Abstract

In the 1960s, film critics Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler changed how

Americans thought about the cinema. In responding to the American experimental, independent, and New Hollywood cinema that constituted the New American Cinema

(1959-71), Kael, Mekas, and Tyler used film criticism that appeared in mainstream publications like the New Yorker, alternative publications like the Village Voice, and specialized art and cinema magazines to demonstrate the cinema’s value to American culture and to analyze social issues through film writing. In their criticism of the New

American Cinema, Kael, Mekas, and Tyler created a political film criticism that analyzed

American identity in terms of class, gender, and sexuality, and they appealed to educated readers, who were interested in serious criticism that did more than promote Hollywood’s latest release. These critics also brought greater recognition to American experimental, independent, and “New” Hollywood cinema. In sum, Kael, Tyler, and Mekas changed

American film criticism by demonstrating the cultural value of the American cinema, initiating a greater awareness of American social and cultural issues through film writing, and they anticipated contemporary popular film reception that focuses on identity and alternative film reception that considers non-mainstream cinema.

iv Table of Contents

Introduction A “New” Sensibility: Film Criticism and Reception of the New 1 American Cinema

Chapter 1 Receiving the New American Cinema 34

Chapter 2 American Cinema as Popular Art: Pauline Kael and the New Hollywood 65

Chapter 3 Jonas Mekas’ Visionary Cinema: The New American Cinema And Cultural Renewal 95

Chapter 4 Against Propaganda: Parker Tyler’s Subcultural Criticism and the Underground 134

Conclusion Popular Culture is Political Culture: The Legacy of Critics of the New American Cinema 166

Bibliography 177

v Introduction

A “New” Sensibility: Film Criticism and Reception of the New American Cinema

Intellectuals have debated the American cinema’s cultural, aesthetic, and moral value since its early days of production. Silent cinema, produced in the early twentieth century, was popular with working-class and immigrant audiences, who appreciated its direct visual appeal, but intellectuals often dismissed this cinema as a “numbing, escapist drug for the masses.”1 At the end of the 1920s, Hollywood standardized production with the “studio system” and controlled exhibition and distribution until the dissolution of the system in 1948. While most Americans enjoyed the cinema as entertainment during this

“golden age” of the studio system, intellectuals continued to worry about the cinema’s deleterious effect on culture. During the Second World War, Marxist intellectual Theodor

Adorno, an émigré from Germany, argued that audiences who succumbed to the easy pleasure of cultural consumption like cinema spectatorship would be interpellated as subjects of mass ideology. Adorno failed to consider audience agency or resistance, but his arguments influenced a postwar generation of Marxist cultural analysis. In the 1940s and

50s, American art critics like Clement Greenberg embraced Adorno’s arguments about the dialectical opposition of art and popular culture, and, in his influential 1939 essay “Avant-

Garde and Kitsch,” Greenberg argues that “kitsch” like Hollywood cinema would allow

“totalitarian regimes to ingratiate themselves with subjects.”2

1 Qtd. In Phillip Lopate, introduction to American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now, ed. Phillip Lopate (New York: Library of America, 2008), xiv. 2 Clement Greenberg. “Avant-Garde and Kitsch.” In The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgements, 1939-44, ed. by John O’Brian (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 26.

1 By the 1950s, however, as Marxist intellectuals worried about the effects of popular culture, a pioneering generation of film critics initiated a different conversation about the

American cinema. Postwar film critics like James Agee and Otis Ferguson recognized the cultural value of Hollywood, which intellectuals continued to dismiss as disposable mass culture, but their reassessment of the cinema reflected a larger shift in how Americans perceived culture. During the early Cold War, Abstract Expressionism symbolized

American values of freedom and individuality, which contrasted with the authoritarian nature of Soviet communism, and an educated middle-class audience embraced this form of modernist art. Painter Jackson Pollack appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1949, and his paintings represented the ascendency of postwar American art. But as abstract expression was consumed by a middle-class audience, modernist cultural production that appealed to an intellectual elite was institutionalized in the academy and artistic developments like Minimalism responded to Abstract Expression’s popularity with formalist abstraction. However, a split between modernist “high” art, which was received by elites in art museums, symphony halls, and universities, and mainstream modernist art like Abstract Expressionism, which was popularized through publications consumed by a middle-class readership, created the space necessary for a serious reception of popular culture, and film critics looked to place film appreciation in this vacuum.

American attitudes about the cinema and popular culture continued to change during the 1960s in another direction as Americans embraced “art house” cinema and a new cultural sensibility. Writer Susan Sontag explains this “new sensibility” by considering how “the beauty of the machine, or of the solution to a mathematical problem, or a painting by Jasper Johns, or a film by Jean-Luc Godard, and of the personalities and music of the

2 Beatles [are all] equally accessible.”3 Sontag argues that cultural distinctions between popular culture and fine art collapsed as artists like Andy Warhol and Robert

Rauschenberg mixed “high” and “low” cultural forms, and as intellectuals began to take popular culture more seriously. Sontag’s film criticism also demonstrates how American intellectuals began to consider the cinema as an object of inquiry. In Against Interpretation, a collection of essays published in 1966, Sontag analyzes films by French directors Robert

Bresson, Alain Resnais, and Jean-Luc Godard, who were prominent art house directors, but she also considers popular American genre films. In her essay, “The imagination of disaster,” Sontag argues that American science-fiction and horror genre films reflect cultural anxieties about science, technology, and nuclear weapons; however, at the same time, Sontag considers these films representative of a “naïve and largely debased commercial art.”4 Despite Sontag’s forceful explication of a new sensibility that erased distinctions between fine art and popular culture, her film criticism was, ironically, rooted in an earlier paradigm that dismissed American popular culture.

As intellectuals embraced film criticism and scholars like Annette Michelson, founder of the journal October, contributed theoretical reviews to Artforum, Marxist intellectuals like Dwight Macdonald continued to review films throughout the 1960s by affirming the opposition between art and entertainment. However, both intellectuals new to criticism like Sontag and Michelson, and older critics like Macdonald, did not account for the changes in production, distribution, and reception, that resulted in the New American

3 Susan Sontag, “One culture and the new sensibility,” in Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 304. 4 “Susan Sontag, “The imagination of disaster,” in Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 224.

3 Cinema, which attempted to reform the commercial cinema and create viable alternative cinemas. This “new” cinema demanded a “new” reception, and the emergent film criticism of Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler was uniquely suited to the task. Unlike critics like Sontag or Renata Adler, who reviewed films for the New York Times in 1968, these critics were committed to both film writing and the cinema. The film writing of all three critics also appealed to an educated, middle-class readership that could understand and were interested in aesthetic and cultural analysis. Pauline Kael wrote for the educated, middle-class readership that consumed the New Yorker and produced influential compilations of her essays until retiring from criticism in 1991. Parker Tyler began reviewing films in the 1940s, but his criticism reached full maturity in his analysis of experimental “underground” cinema of the late 1960s. Jonas Mekas, who was a poet, filmmaker, exhibitor, and distributor, wrote criticism for the Village Voice that uniquely defined the New American Cinema for a younger, liberal readership. These critics demonstrated significant differences in their intentions, style, and interests but were united in their desire to provide the serious reception that the varieties of New American

Cinema demanded.

The New “American” Cinema may suggest a nationalist response to “new wave” cinemas and, like Abstract Expressionism before it, affirm American exceptionalism through a demonstration of artistic freedom. However, the New American Cinema was more of a response to industrial changes in the American cinema than a nationalist project, and critical responses to it were determined by domestic cultural changes that affected the discourse of film criticism. Mekas argued that experimental cinema could reform aspects of the American character, but this was an attempt to appeal to male “youth” audience that

4 wanted to signal cultural rebellion. Parker Tyler, who had been immersed in the avant- garde of the 1920s and 30s, turned to film criticism when modernism was commodified and coopted to promote American exceptionalism, and he used his criticism to challenge

American values rather than promote them. I also view Pauline Kael’s support of an

American populist art as less a means of promoting American exceptionalism than as an attempt to challenge “highbrow” critical attempts to elevate the cinema’s cultural status through a celebration of European art house cinema. Kael’s support of populist art was based in her working-class populist commitments, and she challenged European cinema in order to critique “highbrow” reception.

In fact, most importantly, Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler used their criticism of the New American Cinema to move film criticism beyond anxieties about the cinema’s value to a critical consideration of American social values and identity related to class, gender, and sexuality. Kael demonstrated that art and entertainment were not diametrically opposed, as critics like Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald suggested, and she valued the cinema as both populist art and popular culture. Mekas believed the “mass” audience yearned for art rather than entertainment, and he used film criticism to question

American values of consumption and conformity while arguing cinematic expression could lead to cultural renewal. Parker Tyler provided a subcultural analysis of the movies that subverted dominant social and sexual values by challenging heteronormativity. It is the goal of this dissertation, then, to put Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler into conversation in order to analyze the New American Cinema’s full complexity. Considering the film criticism of Kael, Mekas, and Tyler as a dialogue reveals how American popular culture of the 1960s represented a negotiation between the mainstream and margins and

5 suggests how arguments about the proposed dialectics of “art” and “entertainment,”

“Hollywood” and “experimental film,” and “high” and “low” culture, miss the complex interdependence of the period’s cultural production that would evolve in the following decades into postmodernism’s collapse of distinctions between “high” and “low” culture and fine art and popular culture.

Furthermore, film criticism has also been underexamined and underappreciated within academic film and media studies. While scholars may ignore journalist film criticism due to its lack of theoretical analysis or clear method, it is important to remember that scholars and film critics write for fundamentally different audiences. Scholars appeal to specialized readerships that demand rigorous analysis and a careful attention to context, and even the most intellectual film critic writes for a general readership. However, popular criticism has not been completely neglected in film studies, and I identify two primary focuses of the literature: scholars have focused on film criticism as a literary practice and a rhetorical genre of essayistic writing oriented around the critic’s performative voice; and scholars have focused on film criticism’s relationship to anxieties about film’s cultural status. These contributions are important to understanding popular critical reception, but scholars need to pay more consideration to the role that film criticism played in questioning and challenging dominant American social and political values, which the critical dialogue among Kael, Mekas, and Tyler illuminates. This dissertation, therefore, provides a valuable contribution to academic literature on film criticism by analyzing how

Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler collectively analyzed and critiqued the New

American Cinema in ways that supported or challenged normative aspects of American identity, in terms of class, sexuality, and gender, and these critics challenged dominant

6 ideologies related to heteronormativity, capitalist consumption, and class-based cultural hierarchies.

I also build on the work of cultural studies scholars Dick Hebdige and Sarah

Thornton to challenge Marxist arguments about popular culture’s support of dominant ideology and to provide a consideration of audience resistance and agency. Scholarship focused on criticism’s role in promoting the cinema as a form of “masscult” culture fails to distinguish between different audience segments or types of film production, but my focus on the critical reception of experimental cinema in the context of production, distribution, and exhibition resists conflating different cinematic forms and reveals how differences in a cinema’s circuit-of-culture lead to different types of reception. I also examine how the criticism of Kael, Mekas, and Tyler reflects how audience segments within the mainstream, and subcultures outside of it, assert agency and fight for cultural meaning.5 This dissertation, therefore, provides a valuable contribution to literature on the New American

Cinema by providing a detailed study of reception that demonstrates the complex intersection of mainstream and marginal filmmaking practices, and I complicate formalist accounts of the New American Cinema that treat experimental film production as an autonomous cultural practice. Finally, by extending it to the work of critics like Kael, Tyler, and Mekas, I expand on the work of scholars David E. James and Juan A. Suárez, who have provided detailed considerations of how changes in American popular culture of the 1960s influenced the development of the New American Cinema and the experimental

“underground” cinema.

5 See: Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital (Middletown, Wesleyan UP, 1996); Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 1988).

7 Film Criticism as a Literary Endeavor

Scholars focused on film criticism as a literary practice have focused on film critics’ prose and authorial voices, but this scholarship often fails to consider the ideological aspects of critical film writing. For instance, the anthology, American Movies Critics: An

Anthology from the Silents Until Now, edited by Philip Lopate, collects reviews and essays from the silent to contemporary cinema, and Lopate, who is a literary scholar and creative writer, considers this criticism as a “belletristic tradition.”6 Lopate explains film criticism’s transition from amateur to professional occupation, but he does not consider how critics of the 1960s also changed the discourse of film criticism by focusing on identity and American social values. For instance, after discussing the debate between Andrew Sarris and Pauline

Kael over the “auteur” theory, which argued the director was the “author” of the film,

Lopate contends that Kael “pushed American film criticism further into a new zone of essayistic headiness.” 7 Lopate’s focus on Kael’s prose provides an interesting consideration of film criticism as a genre of essayistic writing, but he ignores her fervent defense of

American film as populist art. Lopate also recognizes Parker Tyler’s focus of “sexuality and gender,”8 but he does not explain that Tyler inspired a critical shift to a greater analysis of the relationship between sexual politics and aesthetics in the 1970s.9 Finally, like most anthologies focused on Hollywood, Lopate considers Jonas Mekas a “proponent of experimental film” without considering his professed ambition to popularize this cinema.

6Phillip Lopate, introduction to American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now, ed. Philly Lopate (New York: Library of America, 2008), xiii. 7 Ibid, xvii. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid, xviii.

8 In an essay entitled “The Ghost of Pauline Kael,” Amanda Shubert focuses on the literary aspects of Kael’s criticism, which, Shubert contends, reflected a distinctly feminine aesthetic. Shubert explains, “Like much of the literature I loved, Kael’s work belonged to the past but came alive to me in the suspended present of the reading experience.”10 In focusing on Kael’s “voice,” Shubert argues that she created an “aesthetic of critical subjectivity [that] claimed a masculine authority [and was] unapologetically feminine.”11

An analysis of Kael’s relationship to a male-controlled discourse of film criticism is important, but Shubert’s claim that Kael’s aesthetic was “unapologetically feminine” is not supported by her film criticism. Shubert argues that Kael’s feminine aesthetic was reflected through her conversational style and incorporation of autobiography, but arguing these traits are uniquely “feminine” suggests gender stereotypes. Kael was not the only film critic to employ a conversational, self-referential style, and prominent male critics like James

Agee appealed to readers through conversational prose. Shubert also fails to account for the larger discourse of film criticism and does not consider how Kael’s populist support of

Hollywood responded to anxieties about film’s cultural status.

Prominent film scholar David Bordwell also considers the literary and cultural influence of pioneering American film critics of the 1940s. Bordwell’s The Rhapsodes: How

1940s Critics Changed American Culture provides analysis of critics Parker Tyler, Manny

Farber, Otis Ferguson and James Agee, and, like Lopate, Bordwell explains how these critics placed film criticism “into the world of letters.”12 Bordwell argues that these critics

10 Amanda Shubert, “The Ghost of Pauline Kael,” in Talking About Pauline Kael: Critics, Filmmakers, and Scholars Remember an Icon, ed. Wayne Stengel (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 160. 11 Ibid, 164. 12 David Bordwell, The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 1.

9 initiated a more serious analysis of the American cinema, but he does not place their criticism in conversation with Marxist intellectuals, who criticized popular culture, because, as he explains, “…all four critics finessed the mass culture controversy …[but]… didn’t fight on that terrain.”13 Bordwell, instead, provides close readings of each critic’s essays, reviews, and books and considers their prose and the performative aspects of their

“voices.” Nonetheless, Bordwell does consider the critics’ role in larger debates about film’s position vis-à-vis American culture. For instance, Bordwell explains how the “rhapsodes,” the term he uses to describe the film writing of Tyler, Farber, Ferguson, and Agee, were influenced by New Criticism, which emerged in the 1930s as a method of literary analysis based in close reading. He argues that despite the fact the “rhapsodes” were unable to screen films repeatedly, their careful attention to form, narrative, and character, was based in textual analysis that resembled the critical method of New Critics focused on literary texts.

Bordwell further devotes an entire chapter to Parker Tyler’s early-career film criticism. In a chapter focused on Tyler’s 1940’s output, which consists of three books on classical Hollywood,14 Bordwell explains the connection between Tyler’s criticism and reflectionism, which he defines as “the idea that popular culture in some manner reflects the state of society.”15 According to Bordwell, reflectionism takes a couple forms: a film can reflect a country’s national character or reveal a “society’s anxieties, concerns, and unresolved problems.”16 Yet, I would substitute “ideology” for “reflectionism” to address a

13 Ibid, 27. 14 The Hollywood Hallucination (New York: Creative Age Press, 1944); The Magic and Myth of the Movies (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1947); and Chaplin: Last of the Clowns (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1948). 15 David Bordwell, How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 114. 16 Ibid, 115.

10 common omission in scholarship about Tyler’s criticism on Hollywood: Bordwell does not discuss how Tyler’s writing challenged mainstream American social and sexual values.17 In fact, throughout the text, Bordwell portrays Tyler as a politically neutral aesthete with “no ax to grind,” but Tyler’s correspondence reveals his professed antipathy to a variety of postwar social movements even as he offered a critique of heteronormativity, which was radical and totally unique in the 1940s.18 Tyler’s queer criticism provided a challenge to norms of postwar American society rooted in the nuclear family, traditional gender roles, and compulsory heterosexuality that formed the basis of many Hollywood narratives. At the same time, his criticism was reactionary in its rejection of second-wave feminism, the

New Left, and the Black Power Movement.

Bordwell’s focus on Tyler, like his book as a whole, is primarily limited to the 1940s, but he does provide some consideration of Tyler’s late-career criticism. However, Bordwell focuses on Tyler’s late-1960’s criticism of the art house and ignores his study of postwar

American experimental film, Underground Film: A Critical History.19 At the time of publication in 1969, Underground Film was the only book to provide a sustained aesthetic and analysis of 1960s experimental “underground” cinema that consider this cinema’s social and sexual values. Bordwell’s brief analysis of Tyler’s relationship to experimental film production also ignores his critique of the underground’s sexual politics. Bordwell explains how “the motifs [Tyler] wrote about in Hollywood films became tropes of the

American avant-garde,” and “the narcissism, erotic symbolism, and camp lurking in the

17 Ibid, 118. 18 Ibid, 117; Tyler’s archive, located at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas, Austin, contains Tyler’s professional and personal correspondence, as well as original manuscripts of his published books. 19 See: Parker Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995).

11 crevices of 1940s studio films scampered into view in Underground films.” 20 There is no doubt that the films of Andy Warhol, George and Mike Kuchar, Jack Smith, and Kenneth

Anger used Hollywood tropes for creative re-invention, but Bordwell minimizes the political implications of experimental films that subverted the social values encoded in

Hollywood cinema. In contrast, I demonstrate how Tyler’s criticism of the underground went beyond aesthetics to address sexual politics and the underground’s appropriations of queer aesthetics.

“Middlebrows” and “Highbrows”

Scholarship on film criticism has also engaged with anxieties about film’s cultural and aesthetic value. This body of literature engages with Marxist critiques of popular culture and addresses how changes in American culture affected the reception of American film and the discourse of film criticism. By considering film criticism’s relationship to modernist art reception and a changing cultural sensibility, this literature provides an important starting point for my consideration of how Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, and

Parker Tyler’s focus on American social values and identity broadened the discourse of film criticism beyond its emphasis on aesthetics and debates about the cinema’s cultural value.

However, like scholarship focused on film criticism as a literary endeavor, this literature fails to account for criticism’s focus on the social and political issues related to American identity. This scholarship also affirms anxieties about film’s criticism’s “middlebrow” value, which is surprising when considering how cultural studies and American studies

20 Ibid, 136.

12 scholarship has long foregrounded the political and social value of “lowbrow” and

“middlebrow” cultural forms like television or romance novels.21

An anxiety about film criticism’s cultural worth likewise pervades Glenn Jellenik’s

2015 article, “The problem of Pauline Kael: a consideration of academic and mainstream criticism,” which argues that film criticism is inherently “mainstream” and “middlebrow.”

In assessing Pauline Kael’s criticism, Jellenik writes, “Kael’s auto-polemics are less self- contradiction than part and parcel of her central formula for the mainstream critic.”22

According to Jellenik’s analysis, mainstream critics are merely “weather vanes,” who lack an identifiable critical method, and denounce or support Hollywood as their whims and readers’ expectations dictate. In contrast, “the academic critic is basically bound to system.”23 Buried at the end of his essay, Jellenik offers a familiar complaint about popular culture: “This [mainstream] criticism, by its very nature and design exists to feed the gaping maw of consumption and consumerism. Mainstream critics regularly engage with many of the same issues as their academic counterparts, but these critics rarely possess the desire of incentive to expand critical concepts with sufficient force.”24 Jellenik’s reference to the “gaping maw of consumption” suggests Marxist arguments about popular culture’s ideological support of consumer capitalism and lack of aesthetic sophistication, but he fails to recognize how Kael’s populist appreciation of American films was a critical intervention into several debates of the period. Kael’s peers sought to elevate the cinema’s cultural

21 See: Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991); Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of the Month Club, Literary Taste and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Joan Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1992). 22 Glenn Jellenik, “The problem of Pauline Kael: a consideration of academic and mainstream criticism,” Post Script, Vol. 35, Issue 1, September 22, 2015, 2. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid, 5.

13 status through formalist analysis and an appreciation of art house cinema, but she defended the American cinema’s value as popular entertainment. Kael also defended genre filmmaking while maintaining consistent standards based in her belief that a filmmaker’s primary responsibility was to create compelling narratives. Finally, Kael regularly corresponded with scholars and teachers, who wrote to her seeking advice about how to properly understand and appreciate the cinema.25 This correspondence contradicts

Jellenik’s constructed binary of “mainstream criticism” versus “academic analysis,” which also fails to consider the complex nature of cultural reception that was not bound by clear demarcations of “high” and “low” culture.

In contrast to Jellenik’s dismissal of film criticism as a “middlebrow” endeavor,

Raymond Haberski Jr.’s It’s Only a Movie: Film and Critics in American Culture assesses how critics of the 1960s responded to cultural anxieties about the cinema’s status by simply elevating it from “lowbrow” culture to “masscult” object of appreciation for an educated middle-class audience. As Haberski explains, imports changed American conceptions of the movies by introducing audiences to filmmaking that departed from Hollywood’s aesthetic and social values. However, Haberski’s main contention is that criticism changed film’s cultural status by making it appealing to an educated middle class as the fine arts and literature turned to formalist abstraction, which had left a cultural vacuum that could be filled by popular culture. He argues that modernist art like Abstract Expressionism may have been used to promote American exceptionalism, but a middle-class audience wanted to consume sophisticated culture even if they lacked the knowledge, interest, or cultural capital to appreciate abstract fine art. Film critics, whom educated audiences looked to as

25 Pauline Kael’s archive at the Lily Library at Indiana University contains Kael’s papers and correspondence.

14 cultural authorities, understood this middle-class demand for accessible art and promoted film appreciation. As Haberski explains, “Moviegoing came to seem heroic because it was part of a larger movement in American culture to redefine what art meant and the role movies played in American life….The reason critics were important and spoke with authority…was because the idea of art still had relevance among the general public.”26

Further, art house cinema was more experimental than most Hollywood films of the early 1960s, and, as Haberski explains, “mass culture [like cinema] began to replace the fine arts as the most relevant and significant paradigm of the day.”27 Yet, Haberski reduces differences in the production, distribution, and exhibition of experimental, art house, and

Hollywood and considers them all forms of “mass” culture. This conflation fails to address how, for instance, the artisanal shorts of experimental New American Cinema did not resemble the Hollywood films that Marxist critics dismissed as “masscult” or “kitsch.”

Haberski also misses an opportunity to consider the relationship between experimental cinema and larger art movements of the 1960s. In describing Pop Art, Haberski writes,

“Pop Artists, it seems to me, had built on a trend clearly started by movie critics who took objects traditionally treated as one type of culture and, by placing them on a new cultural and epistemological environment [sic] had given movies new meaning.”28 Haberski argues that film criticism and Pop Art re-contextualized popular cultural forms that intellectuals had previously dismissed as “low” culture, but he ignores Andy Warhol, who was the most prominent Pop artist and the experimental filmmaker who actively connected the cinema

26 Raymond Haberski, It’s Only a Movie! Film and Critics in American Culture (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 4. 27 Ibid, 104. 28 Ibid, 148.

15 to the fine arts. I would argue that Warhol also placed experimental cinema into a different cultural context by approaching this filmmaking with an irreverence that belied the seriousness of avant-garde arts discourses and by promoting this cinema to a mainstream audience.

Finally, Haberski’s claims are oriented around reception of the art house, on the one hand, and Hollywood, on the other, but his consideration of the New American Cinema is relegated to a single paragraph that describes Jonas Mekas’ attempts “to place domestic filmmakers alongside their international counterparts.”29 Haberski argues that Mekas used

“New” American Cinema to signify a period of film production analogous to the European

New Waves for promotional purposes, but Mekas primarily viewed this cinema as an industrial challenge to Hollywood, which had dominated the American cinema since the

1930s. Ultimately, one of the problems of Haberski’s method is that he considers debates between critics without providing specific attention to their reviews and essays. For instance, his chapter on the debate between Pauline Kael and Andrew Sarris usefully outlines their argument over the auteur theory, but he ignores the complexity and often contradictory nature of Kael’s criticism. In assessing Kael’s position in the debate, Haberski reduces her position to the claim that “[s]he found the auteur theory detrimental to the success won over cultural conservatives and art snobs who had shunned movies for generations.”30 Here, Haberski notes Kael’s defense of film as popular culture, but he ignores her celebration of prominent auteurs. Careful attention to Kael’s reviews of the

New Hollywood reveals that Kael did not reject auteurism, as Haberski suggests, but

29 Ibid, 117. 30 Ibid, 129.

16 argued in opposition to Andrew Sarris that auteurism was not based in the director’s

“interiority” or use of mise-en-scène but in their revisions of genre filmmaking. Kael’s appreciation of auteurism confirmed the importance of populist cinema while placing this

“masscult” form into an arts discourse that celebrated the evolution of form and genre.

Scholar Greg Taylor, by contrast, focuses on Manny Farber and Parker Tyler’s

“vanguard criticism” to consider the relationship between modernism and popular culture.

Taylor argues that “vanguard” critics turned their attention to film in response to the popularization of modernist art like Abstract Expressionism. Taylor explains, “Here was an unsullied, authentic pop form that seemed positively refreshing next to the dull of mannerism of mainstream abstract expressionism.”31 Unlike critics Andrew Sarris and

Pauline Kael, who helped an educated middle-class audience appreciate film, Tyler and

Farber were not attempting to change film’s cultural status. In fact, Tyler’s “camp” criticism was a “connoisseurship of detritus”32 that was based in his wholesale reinterpretations of

Hollywood narratives.33 Taylor argues that unlike critics like James Agee who encouraged their readers to take film seriously, Tyler simply viewed the movies as material for his own creative invention, and his criticism represented the opposite impulse of Iris Barry’s Film

Library at the Museum of Modern Art: according to Taylor, Tyler affirmed his cultural superiority by demonstrating just how inane the movies actually were.34 By focusing on the aesthetic nature of camp, Taylor ignores the ideological aspects of Tyler’s criticism. Taylor concedes that camp provided marginalized viewers an opportunity to act as authorities but

31 Greg Taylor, Artists in the Audience: Cults, Camp, and American Film Criticism (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999), 28. 32 Ibid, 52. 33 Ibid, 51. 34 Ibid.

17 also confines camp to an “attitude toward kitsch.”35 In other words, camp actually maintained binaries of “high” and “low” by drawing attention to popular culture’s lack of aesthetic sophistication. However, this understanding of camp ignores its subversive potential and importance to queer aesthetics. Taylor also ignores how Tyler’s camp analysis critiqued the dominant social values encoded in Hollywood films. Tyler viewed studio-produced cinema as a commodified mass culture that was not characterized by authorial vision, and he critiqued Hollywood’s collective anxieties about homosexuality sublimated through a relentless emphasis on the nuclear family and heterosexual romance.

Like Haberski, Taylor further conflates different cinemas by considering them all as

“movies,” explaining how films “are a ‘mass art’ by default: they are part of mass culture, and we have desperately wanted to treat them as artworks.”36 Here, Taylor not only ignores differences in production, distribution, exhibition, and artistic intent, but his use of

“middlebrow” and “vanguard” also becomes confused in his discussion of critical debates between Tyler and Mekas. Taylor argues that Tyler’s late-career embrace of aesthetic analysis, which contradicted his earlier dismissal of film’s aesthetic value, was an attempt to remain in the “vanguard” as Jonas Mekas embraced a promotional criticism. And yet,

Taylor insists Mekas maintained his “vanguard” status despite his attempts to popularize experimental cinema and integrate this cinema into a wider popular culture. The problem with Taylor’s use of terms like “middlebrow” and “vanguard” is that these terms fail to account for cultural, subcultural, and audience negotiation between popular culture and fine art. Cultural Studies scholars have demonstrated how culture can be used for resistant

35 Ibid, 52. 36 Ibid, 150.

18 purposes, but Taylor dismisses their insights and ignores how audiences assert agency by resisting “highbrow” attempts to control meaning. 37

Cultural Exchange and the New American Cinema

Other scholarly accounts of the New American Cinema privileged formal analysis but did not consider how culture’s new sensibility, political concerns, or the shifting discourse about the cinema’s value informed a reception necessary for American independent and experimental cinema. Formalist accounts typically fail to consider how experimental film reflected a negotiation between popular culture and fine art, and this scholarship often reinscribed distinctions between “high” and “low” culture by positioning experimental film as dialectically opposed to Hollywood. For instance, P. Adams Sitney’s study of postwar American experimental film, Visionary Cinema: The American Avant-

Garde, provided formalist textual analysis of experimental film, but Sitney’s focus on aesthetics and expressions of the filmmaker’s subjectivity suggested this cinema was not influenced by a larger cultural context.38 Sitney’s formalist approach also informed his introduction to an anthology of film criticism from Film Culture, an influential film journal established by Jonas and Adolfas Mekas in 1954. Rather than focusing on the socio-cultural changes that created a different reception of the cinema, and helped publications like Film

Culture find readers, Sitney devotes his introduction to the development of “graphic” and

“subjective” film, focusing solely on the aesthetic aspects of experimental film.39 In his discussion of the New American Cinema, Sitney explains how this cinema combined

37 Ibid, 152; Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979) is an important cultural studies book that demonstrates how working-class culture can be a site of resistance against dominant cultural values. 38 See: Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-1978 (New York: Oxford UP, 1979). 39 P. Adams Sitney, “A Reader’s Guide to the American Avant-Garde Film,” in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), 5.

19 aesthetic aspects of “social documentary and the avant-garde psychodrama,” but he fails to provide further explanation of the industrial changes that allowed for new types of filmmaking that influenced these developments.40 Sitney’s formalist refusal to contextualize experimental film production and explain how the New American Cinema was a multi-layered response to industrial and cultural changes also ignores how this cinema represented a negotiation between popular culture and marginal filmmaking practices like second-wave experimental cinema of the 1940s. Finally, Sitney ignores the ideological aspects of Mekas’ criticism such as his response to a “crisis of masculinity,” which argued that artisanal filmmaking could lead to cultural renewal by providing a medium for free expression.41

In another vein, scholars have argued that the New American Cinema represented an altogether alternative cinema that existed apart from the mainstream. Jeffrey K. Ruoff’s

1991 article, “Home Movies of the Avant-Garde: Jonas Mekas and the New York Art World,” published in Cinema Journal, argues that Mekas created an alternative cinema that constituted an “artworld” and describes how Mekas was “dedicated to the establishment of film as an art form.”42 However, Ruoff ignores Mekas’ professed desire to integrate the New

American Cinema into popular culture by connecting this cinema to other challenges to the

Vietnam-era status-quo. Ruoff also contends that the home video aesthetic of Mekas’ films represented the close-knit New York artworld and interpellated the viewer as a member of

40Ibid, 9. 41 Instead, Sitney notes that Mekas has “has been most at home in his discussions of informal Zen-oriented works.” See: “A Reader’s Guide to the American Avant-Garde Film,” in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), 9. 42 Jeffrey K. Ruoff, “Home Movies of the Avant-Garde: Jonas Mekas and the New York Art World,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Spring, 1991), 6.

20 it.43 Here, Ruoff’s analysis is reminiscent of David E. James’ argument that film “allegorizes” and encodes its mode of production; but, at the same time, Ruoff contends that Mekas’ criticism was essential to his efforts to create a subcultural cinema.44 This claim ignores that “an art world of avant-garde film” existed as early as the 1920s, and Ruoff attributes to

Mekas’ criticism an insularity that belies his attempts to reach a mainstream audience.

Rather than “establish” an isolated artworld, Mekas used promotional film criticism to reach the widest possible audience.

In contrast to Ruoff’s claim that Mekas attempted to create a cinema that existed apart from the mainstream, David E. James acknowledges Mekas’ desire to reform “the mass-market studio-produced feature film.”45 In Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the

Sixties, James provides a detailed consideration of the cultural and industrial changes that influenced the development of American cinema of the 1960s while analyzing the complex intersections between popular and marginal filmmaking practices that influenced the New

American Cinema. Scholars following Sitney have also focused on issues of identity in terms of gender, examining how experimental cinema was supported by an arts discourses that affirmed the superiority of male artists. Lauren Rabinovitz encourages scholars to adopt a

“new historical orientation [that] would purposely show how avant-garde cinema has been inscribed as a social site for, rather than a knowable object of, active cultural conflicts over language, power, and resistance.”46 These scholars provide valuable analysis that I expand

43 Ibid, 15. 44 Ibid, 22; In Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties, David E. James argues that cinema encodes and “allegorizes” its mode of production. 45 David E. James, Introduction to To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground, ed. David E. James (Princeton: Princeton UP 1992), 8. 46 Lauren Rabinovitz, “Wearing the Critic’s Hat” in To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground, ed. David E. James (Princeton: Princeton UP 1992), 270; Furthermore, Rabinovitz’s Points of

21 upon by focusing on the role film critics played in accounting for the unique industrial and cultural changes that produced the New American Cinema, and I build on Rabinovitz’s scholarship through my focus on ideology and identity.

Finally, this dissertation is influenced by Juan A. Suárez’s Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground

Cinema, which analyzes how underground cinema was influenced by a cultural exchange between popular culture and fine art and focuses on the political nature of queer cinema.47

Suárez challenges the idea posited by Parker Tyler that the underground was simply an

“echo” of an earlier avant-garde and explains how it was “strongly influenced by…contemporary cultural and aesthetic currents.”48 In Suárez’s account, underground cinema reflected a “new sensibility” by using popular culture such as comics books and

Hollywood films for queer reinvention. Suárez explains how the filmmaking of Jack Smith,

Andy Warhol, Bruce Conner, and George and Mike Kuchar used “images from commercial culture” to construct abstract experimental films that challenged “borderlines between high and low.”49 At the same time, he notes how the formal experimentation of Bruce

Conner and structuralist cinema that emerged at mid-decade responded to avant-garde developments like Minimalism. This mixture of high and low, of popular culture and fine

Resistance: Women, Power, and Politics in the New York Avant-garde Cinema, 1943-1971 provides an ideological and social analysis of avant-garde cinema. 47 Although I view the “underground” as a subset of the New American Cinema, which I explain in the first chapter, Suárez views the New American Cinema as “the direct predecessor of the underground.” Suárez explains that, in contrast to the narrative films of the early New American Cinema that recalled the French New Wave, the “’underground’ had great critical fortune, due to its descriptive power and its cultural history, which pointed to both the modernist and the avant-gardist components of the movement.” See: Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1996), 74, 81. 48Juan, A. Suárez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1996), xvi. 49 Ibid, xvii.

22 art, demonstrates how the underground did not belong solely to the artworld or popular culture but represented a cultural negotiation reflective of a new sensibility. In decentering the text, Suárez also demonstrates how filmmakers used popular culture to explore sexual identity. His focus on his “case studies,” analyzing how films by Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, and Andy Warhol appropriated popular culture as source material for their films, demonstrates how experimental filmmakers used popular culture to create a queer cinema.

Suárez further analyzes how popular culture’s “new sensibility” of the 1960s posed a problem for critics whose views were rooted in an earlier critical paradigm. He explains,

“the irruption of pop forms into 1960s experimental American film presented an interpretive problem for reviewers schooled in the ideologies of postwar modernism, which stressed clear-cut cultural divisions.”50 In making this argument, Suárez links the criticism of Dwight Macdonald, Amos Vogel, and Parker Tyler on the grounds of their shared antipathy to the underground: “advocates of the underground conflated the film’s social and political agendas and their aesthetic merits.”51 As Suárez explains, for modernist critics, “this attitude was too close to the tendentious ideological criticism practiced by

Communist Party intellectuals in the 1930s.”52 Here, however, I find his conflation of

Macdonald and Tyler misleading. Tyler’s published criticism and archived correspondence reveal that he never believed in the political commitments of modernism and was not involved in, for example, debates about art’s relationship to Stalinism or the Popular Front.

Rather, Tyler demonstrated an inchoate sense of anarchic subversion rooted in his aesthetic commitment to Surrealism. But what is more surprising is that Suárez ignores

50 Ibid, 91. 51 Ibid, 92. 52 Ibid, 93.

23 Tyler’s role in providing a needed reception of queer cinema and does not consider how

Tyler’s criticism used popular culture for subcultural purposes. Suárez also marginalizes film criticism as “the avant-garde’s most important epiphenomenon,” but I emphasize the essential role film criticism played in creating a more serious understanding of cinema’s ideological value and subcultural address to multiple audiences.53 As I recognize, a queer cinema could not succeed without a reception that was willing to engage with its challenges to normative American values. Despite these lacunae in Suárez’s arguments, which this dissertation addresses, his monograph provides an important analysis of how experimental filmmakers mixed fine art and popular culture through camp and pastiche to create a queer cinema that challenged heteronormativity.

Building on the Role Film Criticism Has Played in Film Studies: A ‘New’ Sensibility

The four chapters of this dissertation ultimately build on film studies interrogations into film criticism and reception by foregrounding three major film critics’ importance to the reception and complex negotiation among the independent, experimental, and

Hollywood cinema, that from 1959-75, constituted the “New American Cinema.” The film criticism of Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler considered the social, cultural, and industrial changes that produced the New American Cinema, and this dissertation puts their criticism into a dialogue to better understand how American film production blended popular culture and fine art, and “high” and “low” culture, to create a “new” cinema. This dissertation also challenges formalist accounts of experimental cinema that place the New

American Cinema in opposition to Hollywood or consider it an autonomous form of cultural production: I include the “New Hollywood” as part of the New American Cinema to

53 Ibid, 71.

24 challenge a simple dialectic between mainstream and marginal film production.54 Finally, the film criticism of Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler challenged an aesthetic film criticism, which was influenced by anxieties about film’s cultural status, by expanding its focus to include analysis of American identity and social values related to the relationships of class and taste, gender and cultural discourse, and sexual politics and aesthetics.

My first chapter, entitled ”Receiving the New American Cinema,” provides an overview of changes in the postwar American film industry that allowed for the creation of the New American Cinema. Although some scholarship on the New American Cinema is primarily focused on cinema’s formal aspects, it is important to understand how changes in production, distribution, exhibition, and reception created the space necessary for new types of cinema. Hollywood’s declining power in the postwar U.S. fragmented a film culture it had controlled under the studio system, while, in the 1950s, the “art house” introduced

Americans to innovative filmmaking that influenced independent directors who combined art house aesthetic qualities with aspects of social documentary to create the New

American Cinema in 1959. It is in the context that, between 1959-75, Pauline Kael, Jonas

Mekas, and Parker Tyler crystallized the industrial and cultural differences that produced the New American Cinema while providing definition to a heterogenous array of filmmaking that ranged from handmade experimental shorts to studio-produced narrative features. Critics like Gregory Battcock and Jonas Mekas defined this new cinema in terms of

54 The New Hollywood consisted of auteur-driven commercial cinema produced by the Hollywood studios from 1967-75.

25 its rejection of classical film grammar and greater social commitment as “New American

Cinema.”

This chapter also intervenes in scholarly literature that primarily considers independent features and experimental shorts as constitutive of the New American Cinema by including the “New Hollywood.” New Hollywood refers to auteur-driven studio filmmaking produced in the U.S. after 1967, as part of the New American Cinema. It is clear that studio directors were influenced by the increased visibility of experimental cinema because they incorporated its formal innovations into their films. Beginning in 1967,

Hollywood filmmakers began to create more experimental work and explore taboo social themes, but the industry’s period of experimentation ended with the success of “high concept” in the mid-1970s. However, it is my contention that auteurist New Hollywood filmmaking from 1967-75 shared a spirit of aesthetic and social experimentation with the independent and experimental filmmaking best associated with the New American Cinema.

By promoting auteurism and placing film into a larger cultural conversation, critics erased some of the differences in production that distinguished expensive studio productions from handmade experimental shorts. Films were now personal expressions of their creators rather than commodities. All three critics I consider – Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, and

Parker Tyler – helped initiate a more serious discussion of cinema that made audiences consider cinema as an important and layered cultural expression that explored serious social issues.

In the second chapter, entitled “American Cinema as Populist Art: Pauline Kael and the New Hollywood,” I consider Pauline Kael’s role in popularizing the New Hollywood for an educated audience and her defense of cinema as populist art. Kael’s review of Bonnie

26 and Clyde in the New Yorker provided a critical reconsideration of the film that helped it find an audience and become a landmark of the New Hollywood. In her review, Kael argued that Bonnie and Clyde was based in a tradition of American tragedy, and her defense of the film as populist art challenged arguments that film should aspire to become fine art. Kael also used close textual reading that suggested the influence of New Criticism’s literary analysis, but without dismissing film’s entertainment value. Here, I challenge assessments of Kael as a capricious antagonist, who challenged either “highbrow” critics or the tastes of mass audiences as her whims dictated. Instead, I argue that Kael’s criticism blended aspects of “high” and “low” cultural tastes but consistently respected aspects like performance and narrative that made cinema accessible, and she recognized how the cinema belonged to uniquely American cultural tradition that resisted the highbrow or aspirational pretensions of European art.

However, Kael also explained how the New Hollywood represented an evolution of commercial filmmaking, and she provided a model for teachers, students, and professional adults for how to appreciate this cinema. In contrast to Jonas Mekas, Kael did not advocate for an alternative cinema; but she appreciated how the New Hollywood updated genre filmmaking through greater formal and narrative sophistication. Despite her spat with

Andrew Sarris over the auteur theory, Kael championed her own set of auteurs, including

Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, and Steven Spielberg, who synthesized Hollywood genre films to create a new type of Hollywood film. Kael’s literary and essayistic style made her compelling to teachers and educated readers, who were interested in culture but new to film appreciation. Apart from her published essays, Kael’s wealth of correspondence demonstrates how her readers became interested in the cinema through her film writing

27 and illustrates how her criticism filled a gap between institutionalized film studies and

“consumer’s guide” reviews found in newspapers and magazines. Finally, Kael’s criticism of the New Hollywood represents a moment when educated audiences took Hollywood seriously, and she was instrumental in cultivating in her readers a sense of film appreciation rooted in a greater appreciation of Hollywood’s history.

My third chapter, entitled “Jonas Mekas’ ‘Visionary Cinema’: The New American

Cinema and Cultural Renewal,” considers Jonas Mekas’ “Movie Journal” columns, published in The Village Voice. Mekas was instrumental in popularizing the New American Cinema through his production, distribution, and exhibition efforts, but his criticism deserves far more attention than it has received. In this chapter, I provide a comprehensive analysis of his “Movie Journals,” between 1959 and 1971, which span the reception period of the New

American Cinema. Mekas’ criticism celebrated an artisanal, experimental cinema based mostly in themes of cultural renewal while challenging Marxist arguments that the cinema was merely part of a culture industry that supported capitalism. Mekas hoped the New

American Cinema could become a viable alternative to Hollywood, and his promotional film writing spoke to a youth audience, looking to challenge the Vietnam-era status-quo. In the process, he argued that the American cinema could challenge a culture of consumption and conformity, and he sought to align the New American Cinema with contemporaneous

Bebop and Beat literature, which posed a parallel cultural challenge to the political and sexual Cold War conformities.

Although Lauren Rabinovitz has focused on how the avant-garde’s critical discourse marginalized women filmmakers, little attention has been paid to how Mekas’ film

28 “revolution” contributed to an arts discourse that privileged male artists.55 Like the Beat writers who inspired him, Mekas explicitly characterized his revolution in terms of male cultural renewal, and, like other discourses related to a “crisis of masculinity,” Mekas argued that personal expression could provide American men freedom from political and economic conformity – while ignoring the repressive gender norms that made women feel equally stifled. Mekas also championed male filmmakers, who he argued were uniquely able to diagnosis and confront a culture in crisis. In his support of filmmaker Stan

Brakhage, whom Mekas considered the paradigmatic artist, Mekas evoked Romantic notions of the artist, working in isolation to create transcendent works of art. Despite the ostensibly radical nature of Mekas’ versions of the New American Cinema, he expressed an ambivalence about homosexuality. In this chapter, my attention to the conservative aspects of Makes’ criticism challenges attempts to represent him as simply a counterculture avatar.

At the same time, Mekas, like Kael, should be recognized for integrating film criticism into a larger cultural conversation, although Mekas’ advocacy of the cinema as an agent of cultural change made his criticism unique.

My fourth chapter, “Against Propaganda: Parker Tyler’s Subcultural Criticism and the Underground,” considers Parker Tyler’s late-career criticism of experimental

“underground” cinema. Tyler’s Underground Film: A Critical History is one of the first evaluative studies of experimental New American Cinema celebrated by Mekas from 1959-

71, but his criticism also challenged extant critical paradigms by providing a specifically radical queer, subcultural assessment of the movies. Scholars like David Bordwell have

55 See: Lauren Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance: Women, Power, and Politics in the New York Avant-garde Cinema, 1943-1971 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991).

29 considered how Tyler’s early work on Hollywood blended aspects of “high” and “low” by using a playful avant-garde sensibility, but they ignore his longstanding commitment to experimental cinema, separating his criticism into his early work on Hollywood and later work on the experimental underground. However, my investigation into Tyler’s archive provides a wealth of correspondence that demonstrates his close connection to experimental cinema, dating back to the 1930s. Tyler’s relationship to the avant-garde informed a critical ethos that challenged mainstream values while upholding strict aesthetic standards, and his belief in critical objectivity made him resist the “partisan” support of Mekas or of writers like P. Adams Sitney, who were involved in the production, distribution, and exhibition of experimental New American Cinema.

Tyler’s critical objectivity also provided him the freedom to critically analyze the

New American Cinema’s sexual politics, which writers elided or too easily considered an expression of radical difference. Crucially, Tyler’s queer sensibility allowed him to understand how the experimental underground exploited a queer aesthetic to appeal to a youth audience that wanted to be shocked by a “radical” cinema, and Tyler analyzed how

Andy Warhol used camp to create a comic queer aesthetic that denied its political import.

Yet, Tyler avoided an essentialist support of queer cinema, and he was generally opposed to social movements. Despite his love-hate relationship with the queer aesthetics like camp,

Tyler’s critical, queer sensibility made his criticism subcultural while his criticism also anticipates the political and cultural studies turn that both alternative and academic film criticism would take in the coming decades. While his contemporaries like Dwight

Macdonald debated the cinema’s cultural status, Tyler placed film criticism in an aesthetic arts discourse while providing analysis of the cinema’s role in maintaining the status-quo.

30 Tyler was a pioneering queer critic, who crystallized the reception of an emergent queer cinema, and his published output more closely resembles contemporary academics, who publish in academic film journals and focus on ideology, than his peers like Dwight

Macdonald and Clement Greenberg who debated the cinema’s cultural status in newspapers and magazines.

My conclusion, entitled “Popular Culture is Political Culture: The Legacy of Critics of the New American,” considers how Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler changed

American film criticism by asserting the critic’s authority and by challenging distinctions between art and popular culture. Hollywood had long controlled reception of the American cinema, but its postwar economic decline allowed critics working outside of the film industry an opportunity to influence discourse about the cinema. As a consequence, critics began to review America independent and experimental cinema, which allowed them to demonstrate the complex negotiation between mainstream and marginal culture. Jonas

Mekas considered serious experimental filmmakers like Stan Brakhage alongside popular culture. Pauline Kael’s reviews of New Hollywood explained how American popular culture could be both innovative and socially committed. Parker Tyler used “high” modernist criticism to analyze “low” commercial cinema, and he recognized how underground cinema took inspiration from fine art and popular culture. Finally, Kael, Mekas, and Tyler wrote for

New York City-based magazines that associated their film writing with the city’s cultural authority. Kael’s reviews in the New Yorker placed cinema in the context of downtown New

York culture, and the bohemian ethos and counterculture politics of the Village Voice and

Evergreen Review helped legitimize Mekas’ and Tyler’s critiques of middle-class, suburban values while placing cinema in the context of vanguard American art and fiction.

31 Contemporary criticism of the American cinema that provides analysis in terms of

American identity and social values owes a debt to the pioneering criticism of Pauline Kael,

Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler. By putting these critics in conversation, this dissertation reveals the nuanced and complex cultural negotiation between “high” and “low” culture, popular culture and fine art, and mainstream and marginal filmmaking production that the

New American Cinema represents. The critical dialogue of Kael, Mekas, and Tyler further reveals the social dimensions of the New American Cinema related to the relationships between class and taste, gender and cultural discourse, and sexuality and aesthetics. In criticism that accounted for the cultural and industrial changes that changed the American cinema in the 1960s, Kael, Mekas, and Tyler changed film criticism by challenging a critical paradigm based in anxieties about the cinema’s lack of culture value, and they have influenced American film criticism that analyzes how the cinema informs understandings of what it means to be American.

However, to properly understand how Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler changed American film criticism by asserting the critic’s authority and moving American film criticism beyond anxieties about the cinema’s worth, it is important to understand how the industrial changes that affected the postwar American film industry, and the cultural changes that affected American reception of the cinema, provided critics a greater level of influence over how Americans understood the cinema in the 1960s. Hollywood’s postwar decline in the 1940s and 50s created the space necessary for alternative independent and experimental film production, but critics played a valuable role in receiving this cinema. In addition, postwar cultural changes such as the popularity of art house cinema, the increase in alternative exhibition spaces, and the segmentation of the American film audience

32 further changed how Americans understood the cinema by asserting the value of cinema as culture and by creating an audience that would be receptive of challenging independent, experimental, and “New” Hollywood cinema. Critics Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, and Parker

Tyler gave definition to the heterogenous array of filmmaking that constituted this New

American Cinema by considering the unique cultural and industrial changes that produced it, and they “created” the New American Cinema in their criticism.

33 Chapter 1

Receiving the New American Cinema

The 1960s marked a period of profound social and cultural change in American society that was defined by a dual sense of anxiety and possibility. As film scholar David E.

James explains, “Modernism collapsed no less decisively in the arts than in society, and as it did so American literature, painting, dance, and music all leapt from the ruins, breaking into what appeared to be entirely new concatenations of priorities, methods, aspirations, and social functions.”1 The decline of previous cultural forms and the energy of social activism changed American popular culture, as James explains, but conservative aspects of an earlier postwar culture remained. Americans elected Richard Nixon, and the horror of

Vietnam subtended and threatened to overshadow counterculture expressions of peace and love. Yet, the decade’s profound social change was also concurrent with an artistic efflorescence that produced the New American Painting, the New American Poetry, and the

New American Cinema. While Americans seemingly had a viable domestic alternative cinema produced by independent and experimental filmmakers, Hollywood responded with innovative, auteur-driven cinema at decade’s end. In the course of a decade, the

American cinema, which Hollywood had rigorously defined and controlled for the previous four decades, changed to include a dizzying array of films produced both in and outside of the studios. In analyzing the changes the American cinema underwent in the 1960s, critics created the “New” American Cinema in their essays and reviews by synthesizing the unique industrial and cultural changes that produced this cinema.

1 David E. James, Allegories of Cinema: American Film in the Sixties (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989), 4.

34 The industrial changes that produced the New American Cinema and the cultural changes that affected reception of the American cinema also provided the right conditions for Pauline Kael, Parker Tyler, and Jonas Mekas to expand film criticism beyond an aesthetic analysis motivated by anxieties about the cinema’s cultural status. In expanding the focus of critical film writing, Kael, Mekas, and Tyler demonstrated how criticism could provide a powerful tool for political and social analysis of American society, and they provided a necessary reception of the American cinema that emerged after Hollywood’s postwar decline. Film critics were no longer beholden to Hollywood, and they wrote about art house cinema, independent features, and hand-made experimental shorts. In criticism that considered the changes in production, distribution, and exhibition that produced the

New American Cinema, Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler changed American film criticism by considering American identity and social values in terms of class and taste, gender and cultural discourse, and aesthetics and sexuality, and they demonstrated how the New American Cinema mixed “high” and “low” culture, popular culture and fine art, and marginal and mainstream cinemas. Pauline Kael defended commercial American cinema as popular culture and populist art. Jonas Mekas argued that artisanal experimental cinema could lead to cultural reformation by challenging middle-class values of social conformity and capitalist consumption. Parker Tyler provided a queer and subcultural reception of the

1960’s experimental “underground” that critiqued its sexual politics and appropriation of queer aesthetics.

Definition of the New American Cinema

The “New American Cinema” encompasses independent, experimental, and “New”

Hollywood films produced from 1959-1975, but its artistic heterogeneity and differences in

35 production, distribution, and exhibition makes it a contested, mutable term that describes a period of American film history in transition. Critics’ definitions of the New American

Cinema revealed the type of cinema they privileged in formal or aesthetic terms or hoped would replace the industrial status-quo that had been established by the studio system. In fact, the American cinema changed on so many levels in the 1960s that debates about the

New American Cinema always reflected larger debates about the American cinema.

Therefore, “New American Cinema” is less a definitional term than a polemical attempt by critics and writers to privilege specific types of filmmaking and their production contexts within a cinema undergoing rapid change. Definitions of the New American Cinema were also positioned vis-à-vis Hollywood. Supporters of independent and experimental cinema positioned these cinemas in opposition to Hollywood to challenge its aesthetic and industrial hegemony and to assert the artistic superiority of non-commercial cinema.

However, more often than not, the complete refutation of Hollywood was a rhetorical tactic, and most critics viewed Hollywood with a level of ambivalence.

Industrial Changes

The New American Cinema was made possible by the profound economic and industrial changes that affected postwar Hollywood. Prior to 1948, the vertically-integrated

Hollywood studios controlled the production, distribution, and exhibition of the vast majority of American films. Actors, directors, and writers signed restrictive contracts with the major studios, which included MGM, Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros, and RKO, colloquially known as the “Big Five.” The studios owned and controlled the sets, lights, cameras, and other means of production. Hollywood filmmaking was run like an assembly line, and the studios controlled all aspects of production to reduce costs and maximize

36 profits. Beyond production, the studios controlled distribution and owned the theaters responsible for exhibition. Studio films were then sold in packages that required exhibitors to purchase less desirable films in order to exhibit popular “A” films. This monopolistic system ended when the 1948 United States v. Paramount Pictures Supreme Court case forced studios to divest from theatrical exhibition. While most of the studios survived the collapse, Hollywood entered a period of economic decline, and losses were especially pronounced in the late 1960s. For instance, Hollywood experienced significant losses from

1968-71 that “exceeded $500 million.”2

In the 1960s, Hollywood experienced the first wave of corporate consolidations, which changed how films were produced, distributed, and exhibited. The studios cut the number of productions but spent more per film, and Hollywood attempted to make theatrical exhibitions “events” through limited-run screenings of prestige pictures. This practice of “roadshowing” relied on higher ticket prices, reserved seating, and exhibitions with intermissions. As film scholar Justin Wyatt explains, roadshow exhibition attempted to make theatrical exhibition “bigger, grander, and more spectacular than television.”3 But, as

Hollywood spent more per film, its production model became risky. Hollywood enjoyed postwar hits like Quo Vadis (1951), The Robe (1953) The Ten Commandments (1956),

Spartacus (1960), West Side Story (1961), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), My Fair Lady (1964), and The Sound of Music (1967) but suffered economic failures like Cleopatra (1963) The

Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), and Doctor Doolittle (1967), leading to a cycle of boom-or-

2 Justin Wyatt, “Marketing / Distribution Innovations,” in The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), 61. 3 Ibid, 65.

37 bust.4 What the above list also demonstrates is the degree to which Hollywood began expending significant money and resources on lavish epics and musicals with the potential of financial failure.

In 1975, Hollywood’s economic fortunes began to reverse. The industry enjoyed an era-defining hit with Jaws (1975), followed by the successes of Rocky (1976) and Star Wars:

A New Hope (1977), all examples of “high-concept” cinema. Simply defined, “high concept” films feature clear narratives that can be summarized in advertising taglines. Hollywood also began funneling more resources into advertising and promotion for potential blockbusters. As Justin Wyatt explains, “The studios looked to tent pole films, a single one which on its own could support a studio’s yearly distribution schedule.”5 Under the studio system, the studios had produced a large number of films, looking to profit on each film, but they now sought to recoup their yearly expenses with a single hit. As film scholar Timothy

Corrigan explains, the studios abandoned a “fairly lucid logic of profitable investment” in favor of gambling on blockbusters.6 The success of Star Wars revealed Hollywood’s new reliance on cross-promotion and synergistic marketing. George Lucas licensed Star Wars’ characters and content to variety of products and services, marking the beginning of the blockbuster film as a multi-marketing, multi-media event.

Star Wars’ success encouraged Hollywood’s “blockbuster syndrome,” but the risk inherent in producing expensive blockbuster films forced the studios to seek guaranteed revenue streams. In the “corporate-era” of the 1980s, the studios became part of corporate

4 The film’s box office grosses made it one of the top grossing films of 1963, but the film's incredibly high production costs ultimately made it a financial failure. 5 Wyatt, “Marketing / Distribution Innovations,” 83. 6 Timothy Corrigan “Auteurs and the New Hollywood,” in The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), 46.

38 portfolios alongside cable channels, magazines, and other media platforms. Hollywood again embraced monopolistic control but replaced the vertically-integrated system with corporate synergy. The success of the blockbuster in the mid-1970s ultimately allowed

Hollywood to reassert control of the American cinema, and the independent and experimental cinema that was an important to the New American Cinema was pushed back to the margins. Hollywood’s control and consolidation of the American cinema, which only increased in the 1990s, also affected American film criticism. In the midst of the New

American Cinema, longform critics like Kael achieved mainstream success and recognition, but the rise of the blockbuster minimized the influence of critics who considered challenging Hollywood filmmaking or critics like Tyler and Mekas who wrote about independent and experimental cinema.

Hollywood’s economic difficulties, which created the space necessary for the new types of cinema that constituted the New American Cinema, was precipitated by the rise and popularity of television. Televisions entered urban and suburban homes in the 1950s, and the consequences for the film industry were almost immediate. Warner Brothers experienced dramatic losses with “net profits falling from a record $22 million in 1947 to

$2.9 million in 1953 – a decline of nearly ninety percent in just six years.”7 Yet, Hollywood saw potential in this new market. The new television networks needed programming, and the studios were able to produce it quickly and cheaply. According to Christopher

Anderson, television allowed Hollywood to realize “ambitions that the industry had harbored for decades,” and executives attempted to refashion the studios into multi-media

7 Christopher Anderson, Hollywood TV: The Studio System in the Fifties (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1994), 2.

39 conglomerates.8 In addition to producing new programming, the studios licensed their extensive back catalogs to the networks, providing them an important revenue stream.

Licensing films to television also created an entirely new type of film consumer. Film went from an ephemeral commodity to something that could be studied and re-watched. As a consequence, the next generation of filmmakers and viewers was more visually literate and aware of film history.

Television changed reception of the cinema by allowing viewers to re-watch films and identify key aspects of a director’s style. Consequently, critics began to consider the director as a film’s “author,” which would influence reception of the “New” Hollywood oriented around auteurs. In his study of the relationship between television and the

Hollywood studios, Christopher Anderson further demarcates the “old” Hollywood from the “new” by the differences in their production models. Anderson explains that the “old”

Hollywood consisted of the vertically-integrated studios, but the “new” Hollywood was defined by the studios’ reorganization into “subsidiaries of transnational media and leisure conglomerates.”9 But it is also important to consider how production is articulated to a larger reception context, and even the “auteur theory” can be related to production. The auteur theory defines film production as the product of a singular creative vision and challenges the fact that Hollywood cinema was produced through an industrial production model. However, as film scholar Timothy Corrigan explains, even the auteur theory needs to be understood “within contemporary industrial and commercial trajectories.”10 “Auteur” directors became celebrities, and, as Andrew Sarris, who adopted the auteur theory for

8 Ibid, 21. 9 Ibid, 5. 10 Corrigan “Auteurs and the New Hollywood,” 47.

40 American readers, argues, “[the auteur theory] helped push more directors up to the first paragraph of a review even ahead of the plot synopsis.”11

In another way, television changed reception by bolstering perceptions of film as

“art” in certain contexts. This may seem counterintuitive since television is a form of commercial mass culture, and critics argued it required passive viewership. For instance, art critics like Clement Greenberg, who dismissed cinema as debased and academicized simulacrum of genuine culture,” now thought of television as an appropriate medium for film exhibition, because it required passive viewership.12 In contrast to Greenberg, Pauline

Kael valued cinema as an artform, and she argues that television made theatrical exhibition more important. In “Movies on Television,” published in the June 3, 1967 issue of the New

Yorker, Kael criticizes the poor synchronization and the distortion of the film image, but her larger critique is that television presents films without context.13 Television lumped films together without providing appropriate links between aesthetic styles and periods of film history.”14 Showing movies on television made film viewership too passive, which only affirmed Marxist critiques of popular culture. But, at the same time, television’s distortion of film’s visual aspects demonstrated the importance of theatrical exhibition. In order to appreciate visually-sophisticated films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), audiences still had to attend a theatre to see film properly exhibited, and theatrical exhibition provided audiences a social experience that contrasted with the isolation of watching films at home.

11 Andrew Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Praeger, 1970), 130. 12 Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 1: Perceptions and Judgements, 1939-44, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 12 13 Pauline Kael, “Movies on Television, New Yorker, June 3, 1967, 122. 14 Ibid, 120.

41 Art Houses and Imports

Hollywood’s postwar decline provided new opportunities for foreign imports and art house cinema that changed how Americans understood the cinema. Jonas Mekas took inspiration from the art house, which he appreciated as innovative cinema that remained commercially viable, and Pauline Kael celebrated New Hollywood cinema that was inspired by the French New Wave.15 But, most importantly, art house cinema that challenged

Americans’ expectations of the cinema’s social and aesthetic qualities created an audience that would be receptive of challenging independent, experimental, and New Hollywood cinema in the next decade. The popularity of art house cinema was made possible by the industrial changes caused by the Paramount case, which mandated that the studios divest from exhibition. As Hollywood produced fewer films and lost control of exhibition, the studios raised rental prices, pricing out smaller theatres operating on tight margins, and theatres looked to exhibit different kinds of cinema. The art houses that emerged in the

1950s are associated with foreign cinema, but, as film historian Barbara Wilinsky explains,

“The art film industry defined its films against classical Hollywood product and potentially offered alternatives to mainstream film institutions through production companies, distribution firms, exhibition sites and film societies.”16 Art house theatres further differentiated themselves from mainstream theatres by relying on “notions of art and prestige.”17 This prestige could be signified by formalist cinema without commercial

15 Parker Tyler also produced a book about European cinema. See: Classics of the Foreign Film: A Pictorial Treasury (Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1962). 16 Barbara Wilinsky, Sure Seaters: The Emergence of Art House Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 12. 17 Ibid, 79.

42 ambition, but art houses signified prestige through promotional materials and in their theatrical spaces.

Writers noted the differences between art house and mainstream theatres. A Time magazine article issue from a 1963 issue dedicated to “Cinema as an International Art” contrasts an art house with a conventional theatre: “It wasn’t the sort of place people usually see a movie in. No boorish Moorish architecture, no chewing gum under the seats.”18 Here, the author compares the elaborate movie palaces of classical Hollywood with an art house theatre that was understated and architecturally modernist. Art house theatres also signified “prestige” in other ways. Rather than offering candy and popcorn, art house concessions served coffee and pastries, and theatres provided programs notes that emphasized the cinema’s value as an artform. Of course, art houses also had different programming than mainstream theatres. Art houses were important exhibition spaces for documentaries, independent cinema, experimental shorts, and educational features, and this programming emphasized the cinema’s “intellectually active and participatory nature.”19 Crucially, this “active” sense met the highbrow requirement that “art” require thoughtful engagement rather than passive amusement.

Despite their varied programming, art houses were the most important exhibition spaces for imported cinema in the 1950s, and these theatres helped initiate a more serious reception of the cinema by introducing Americans to innovative cinema. While Hollywood struggled in the postwar period, national cinemas in Europe flourished. The economic havoc caused by World War II forced European countries to decrease spending on

18 “A Religion of Film,” Time Magazine, Sept. 20, 1963, 78. 19 Wilinsky, Sure Seaters, 89.

43 imported products like American films, and European countries invested resources into the development of their own national cinemas. Immediately following the War, the most popular imports with American audiences were British films produced by Arthur Rank and

Italian neorealist films, notably Rome, Open City (1945) and The Bicycle Thief (1948).20 The

Italian films, in particular, surprised Americans because of their frank depictions of violence and social hardship, and neorealism’s use of documentary methods introduced

Americans to a greater sense of cinematic realism in narrative features. However, France produced the most popular films. In the 1950s, French cinema had been popular with

American college students, who appreciated its sex appeal, and the popularity of French stars like Brigitte Bardot created a familiarity with French cinema that bolstered the popularity of the New Wave that began in 1959. Film historian Tino Balio explains: “Since

Bardot virtually personified the youth of the 1950s and was especially popular with college students, her films set the stage for the reception of the French New Wave.”21 In the early

1960s, critics-turned-filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut made formally ambitious films appreciated by an art house audience and inaugurated a French “New

Wave” that challenged a “tradition of quality” based in literary adaptations. The films of the

French New Wave were well-received by American film critics but were only one part of the foreign art film market. Foreign auteurs from outside of Europe like Akira Kurosawa or

Satyajit Ray broadened Americans’ view of the cinema through films that remain

20 Notable Rank films: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948). 21 Tino Balio, The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 1946-1973 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 9.

44 touchstones of classroom curriculum and repertory screenings, but the French New Wave was the most influential on the filmmakers who produced the New American Cinema.22

Art house cinema compelled educated Americans to reconsider the cinema’s cultural value by providing an alternative to Hollywood. Although “foreign” art cinema included a range of styles, genres, and production contexts, Tino Balio argues that the “only generalizations one could make about the style of these films is that they departed more or less from Hollywood narrative norms.”23 Film historian Rick Worland also explains how

European cinema differed from Hollywood: “European film sought to confront the world’s most intractable social, political psychological dilemmas, while Hollywood seemingly retreated into technicolor fantasy and diversion.”24 The art house exposed audiences to cinema that departed from classical Hollywood in formal and narrative terms, and foreign cinema challenged American expectations about sex and violence by presenting more lenient depictions. Hollywood had been subject to rigid censorship through the Production

Code, also known as the Hay’s Code, that provided “moral” guidelines about what could be depicted onscreen, which both prohibited filmmakers from confronting taboo social issues like homosexuality and directly representing sex. While foreign films were still subject to censorship, they were more sexually explicit and frank in their depictions of violence than most American films.

Exhibitors emphasized foreign art film’s lurid or prurient elements, suggesting these elements in advertisements even if they were absent in the actual films. Tino Balio

22 Notable French New Wave films: Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), Breathless (1959), and The 400 Blows (1959). 23 Balio, The Foreign Film Renaissance on American Screens, 6. 24 Rick Worland, Searching for New Frontiers: Hollywood Films in the 1960s (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2018), 114.

45 explains how “foreign film distributors understood that sex sold films and freely borrowed techniques from the exploitation market to ‘sex up’ film titles and advertising to lure customers.”25 “Sex appeal” was instrumental to the success of foreign film in America.

Distributors and exhibitors operated with small promotion budgets, and it was difficult to advertise films that lacked stars or were presented in different languages. In order to appeal to American audiences, exhibitors used promotional materials that drew from the exploitation market and conflated art and adult films. For upscale audiences, this conflation likely engendered a sense of anxiety, but art houses were not the only theatres to emphasize sex in theatrical promotion. Barbara Wilinsky describes how the “increasing sexual emphasis of mainstream film advertising certainly influenced the boundaries set by film advertisers.”26 Of course, film critics played an important role in affirming the cultural value of art house cinema, distinguishing it from adult or exploitation films.

Alternative Exhibition

Exhibition of American cinema that existed outside of Hollywood’s control was essential to the success of the New American Cinema in the 1960s. Experimental and independent filmmakers needed spaces to exhibit their work, but alternative exhibition spaces also influenced reception of the cinema by treating it as an artform that required thoughtful attention. In the 1920s and 30s, experimental cinema screened at ciné clubs and

“little” theaters, and postwar audiences viewed it at travelling exhibitions, festivals, colleges, universities, and independent theatres. In the 1940s, experimental filmmakers like Maya Deren, who held screenings at the Provincetown Playhouse, exhibited their own

25 Balio, The Foreign Film Renaissance, 8. 26 Wilinsky, Sure Seaters, 127.

46 work, demonstrating an independent ethos that challenged Hollywood’s commercialism.

However, art museums provided an especially important venue for the exhibition of non- commercial cinema. In 1935, the Film Library at the Museum of Modern Art in New York

City helped change American film reception. The Library, initially curated by Iris Barry, sought to preserve and exhibit important cinema to help audiences appreciate cinema as an artform. Film scholar Haidee Wasson explains: “MoMa’s was a then-unfamiliar exercise that laid an enduring foundation that helped create a common sense about cinema: film is an art with a history that matters.”27 By placing film in the museum, MoMa challenged the notion that film was mainly entertainment and disposable popular culture, and Barry instructed audiences, who could be loud and boisterous during screenings at commercial theatres, in the practice of thoughtful appreciation. Cinema thus became more than entertainment: it became an artform to contemplate and appreciate. In the process, MoMa played an essential role in creating “an emergent sensibility for a new kind of cinema” that took cinema seriously.28

Across in the country in the Bay Area, Frank Stauffacher presented “Art in Cinema” at the San Francisco Museum of Art from 1946 to 1954. Stauffacher and Foster explain the philosophy behind “Art in Cinema” in their first series announcement: “We hope that this series will accomplish several purposes: that it will show the relation between the film and the other art media – sculpture, painting, poetry: that it will stimulate interest in the film as a creative art medium in itself, requiring more of an effort of participation on the part of the audience than the Hollywood fantasies, before which an audience sits passively and

27 Haidee Wasson, Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema (Berkeley, University of California, 2005), 5. 28 Ibid, 188.

47 uncreatively; and that it will give assistance to those contemporary artists who labor in obscurity in America no distribution channels for their work.”29 The statement articulates how exhibitors in art institutions uniquely conceptualized film’s role in American culture.

First, Stauffacher and Foster, like Barry, link cinema to fine art associated with “high” culture, and they challenge arguments that cinema was simply disposable low culture.

Second, by conceptualizing viewers as “active” participants, Stauffacher and Foster counter

Marxist critiques that cinema was a product that audiences passively consumed. Instead, they argue that cinema could require an active engagement that encouraged an awareness of aesthetics and ideology. In their programing, Stauffacher and Foster also recognized the constraints noncommercial filmmakers faced, and they wanted to provide a circuit-of- culture that would support alternative cinema. Like MoMa, the “Art in Cinema” screened both commercial and experimental cinema, and Stauffacher, who produced films, was interested in helping audiences see new films that were not widely available while serving a broader educational mandate.

In New York City, Cinema 16 began screenings in 1947, one year after “Art in

Cinema,” and became an important exhibition site for documentary, scientific films, and experimental film until closing in 1963. Cinema 16 existed outside of the institutional structures like MoMa but was run as a non-profit theater for members who paid annual dues. Cinema 16’s non-profit status also helped it avoid strict censorship and provided

Vogel a sense of programming freedom.30 Vogel, like Barry and Stauffacher, viewed his

29 Frank Stauffacher qtd. in Scott MacDonald introduction to Art in Cinema: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society, eds. Scott MacDonald and Frank Stauffacher (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2006), 2. 30 Cinema 16’s non-profit status was essential to its ability to screen films that would have been subject to censorship like Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947) and Stan Brakhage’s Loving (1957).

48 programming as educational but demonstrated a political approach. Film historian Scott

MacDonald explains, “Instead of accepting moviegoing as an entertaining escape from real life, Vogel and his colleagues saw themselves as a special breed of educator, using an exploration of cinema history and current practice not only to develop a more complete sense of the myriad experiences cinema makes possible, but to invigorate the potential of citizenship in democracy.”31 Vogel viewed the cinema as a democratizing medium that could lead to social change, but, unlike Iris Barry, he did not impose bourgeois notions of art appreciation that required quiet reception. Cinema 16 was an important social venue, where audiences would “vociferously demonstrate their approval or disapproval while films played.”32 Yet, Cinema 16’s audience still attentively listened to lectures by critics and filmmakers and engaged in debate and discussion about screenings.

Vogel also influenced Jonas Mekas’ distribution efforts and promotional film criticism. In 1948, Cinema 16 began listing films available for rental in its program notes, and the theater quickly became an influential distributor of experimental cinema.

MacDonald explains, “While some of the films Vogel chose to distribute are no longer widely known…others were to become landmarks in the postwar explosion of avant-garde filmmaking.”33 Despite Vogel’s success in distributing experimental cinema, Mekas formed the Film-Maker’s Cooperative to distribute American cinema Vogel ignored. The Co-op’s rentals cut into Vogel’s bottom line, but Vogel’s celebration of personal expression and arguments about the cinema’s democratizing potential influenced Mekas’ belief that cinema

31 Scott MacDonald, introduction to Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society, ed. Scott MacDonald (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002), 1. 32 Ibid, 14. 33 Ibid, 16.

49 could be an agent of cultural reformation.34 Cinema 16’s failure, which was hastened by inadequate promotion, convinced Mekas that the New American Cinema would need adequate promotion to be successful.35 In 1963, as Cinema 16 faced increased costs, and competition from other exhibition spaces, Hollywood, and television, the theatre’s lack of promotion exacerbated the financial difficulties that eventually forced it to close.36 Mekas learned a valuable lesson from Cinema 16’s closure, and he decided to promote the films he distributed through his own film writing.

Reception

Shifts in production and exhibition led to new reception contexts for the American cinema. Critics were especially important to the art market, because art house audiences were educated and likely to consult professional reviewers, and a changing cultural discourse about the cinema’s value encouraged intellectuals to take film seriously. Beyond journalistic newspaper and magazine reviewers, intellectuals like Siegfried Kracauer wrote book-length works that considered the relationship between the cinema and politics, and

Americans began to reassess the value of Hollywood cinema. As David Bordwell explains, postwar American critics reevaluated classical Hollywood cinema, initiating an “aesthetic approach to American film that recognized ‘something deeply artful was at the base of studio cinema.’”37 Andrew Sarris’ adoption of the “auteur theory” from French critics in a

1962 Film Culture essay further changed how Americans thought about the cinema. Sarris visualized the auteur theory as a model of concentric circles: the outer circle represented

34 Ibid, 9. 35 Ibid, 5. 36 Ibid, 6. 37 David Bordwell, The Rhapsodes: How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 140.

50 technique; the next circle represented personal style; and the final circle represented

“interior meaning.” The most important of these circles was the final one. Sarris writes,

“The third and ultimate premise of the auteur theory is concerned with interior meaning, the ultimate glory of the cinema as an art. Interior meaning is extrapolated from the tension between a director’s personality and his material.”38 The auteur theory provided audiences an easy way to “read” and understand films. Hollywood directors like Orson

Welles and John Huston were now auteurs, whose personal visions differentiated their films from the mass of anonymous studio productions, and this theory influenced American reception of foreign cinema. Directors Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, and

Ingmar Bergman became celebrities, and their films were less associated with the national cinemas than with the director’s personal trademark. The auteur theory was ultimately important to American film reception, because audiences now identified cinema with marquee directors rather than with the industrial context of the Hollywood studios, which created a discourse about cinema that considered it artistic rather than commercial.

Shifts in reception encouraged Hollywood to produce films for different market segments, which created a more variegated American film audience. Under the studio system, the American film audience was relatively monolithic, because Hollywood produced films for a general audience. However, Hollywood’s postwar decline forced it to produce films for specific audience segments like the youth market, and this audience segmentation was important to the New American Cinema, which would never appeal to a mass audience. In the 1950s, Hollywood’s financial decline forced the studios to seek new markets, and they began producing films for teenagers. Postwar prosperity had created a

38 Sarris, “Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962,” 133.

51 youth culture centered around music, fashion, magazines, and movies, and American teenagers had time and money that businesses sought to exploit. As American studies scholar Thomas Doherty explains, the teen years became an “autonomous and in most cases a privileged period in an individual’s life.”39 Although these “privileged” teen years were primarily limited to white suburban youth, this market was large and affluent, and

Hollywood targeted it with films about generational conflict. Notable juvenile films like

Rebel Without A Cause (1955) were set in a familiar middle-class milieu but explored youth rebellion.40 Youth films like Blackboard Jungle (1955) were likewise centered around themes of teenage angst and generational distrust, but films like the The Wild One (1953) and Rock Around the Clock (1956) featured youth culture through motorcycles and rock n’ roll. Doherty argues that Hollywood’s focus on the youth market marked the end of film’s universal appeal, but the American film audience of the 1960s segmented into the adult art house, juvenile, and mainstream adult markets. Nonetheless, Hollywood’s focus on the youth market initiated a cultural shift that would allow the New Hollywood in the next decade to appeal to a younger, liberal audience.

The New American Cinema

The industrial and cultural changes that changed the American cinema made educated Americans open to the independent, experimental, and New Hollywood Cinema that challenged the conventions of the classical Hollywood film. The art house had changed

American’s perceptions of the movies, and alternative exhibition spaces had compelled

Americans to appreciate the cinema as art, but Americans looked to critics to understand a

39 Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002), 34. 40Ibid, 83.

52 cinema in transition. Critics and writers would, therefore, attempt to provide definition to the “New American Cinema,” which encompasses cinema ranging from well-financed studio features to handmade experimental shorts. While this cinema resists easy definition, scholars like P. Adams Sitney and writers like Gregory Battcock define the New American

Cinema as consisting of experimental shorts produced from 1959-71 that rejected the

Hollywood film. In contrast, the New Hollywood, the commercial subset of the New

American Cinema, consists of studio-produced films and cinema with significant studio distribution. The New Hollywood, which begins in 1967 with The Graduate (1967) and

Bonnie and Clyde (1967), extends into the mid-1970s but concludes with Hollywood’s shift to the “blockbuster,” following the success of Jaws (1975). Independent New American

Cinema includes experimental and narrative cinema, but New Hollywood cinema consists solely of narrative features. Writers like Sheldon Renan further explain that the New York

“underground” was an important subset of the New American Cinema, but it is important to remember that the New American Cinema was produced across the country even if it is associated with New York City because of Mekas’ influence and the sheer number of experimental films that emerged from its film community. 41 Yet, this association may also be a rhetorical attempt by writers to position the New American Cinema as an antithesis to

Hollywood.

In Mekas’ periodization, the two films that mark the beginning of the New American

Cinema are Shadows and Pull My Daisy, both produced in 1959. These independent films used episodic structures, improvisation, and formal techniques drawn from neorealism, cinéma-vérité, and docudramas like Lionel Rogosin’s On The Bowery (1956). Shadows and

41 The Bay Area, in particular, was an important site of experimental film production and distribution.

53 Pull My Daisy were narrative, but most films from the New American Cinema’s first period

(1960-5) were experimental shorts that explored subjective “vision” through cinematic form. Filmmakers Ken Jacobs, Ron Rice, Bruce Baillie, Jonas Mekas, and Stan Brakhage produced personal cinema that explored some aspect of their identity. P. Adams Sitney considers this cinema “lyrical film,” which “postulates the film-maker behind the camera as the first-person protagonist.”42 In its second period (1966-71), the New American Cinema shifted to structuralist and “expanded” cinema, which initiated a “divorce [from] the cinematic metaphor of consciousness from that of eyesight” to an exploration of cinematic form.43 The structuralist cinema of Tony Conrad, Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, and Paul

Sharits was concerned with form and temporality, and Andy Warhol’s use of three-screens in Chelsea Girls (1966) further anticipated the multi-media aspects of expanded cinema that included intermedia works, films with multiple screens and projectors, and performance elements. Expanded cinema made cinema an immersive multi-media event, but, as film scholar Gene Youngblood describes, this cinema continued to prioritize personal expression: “Some are seeking those new facts, those new experiences, through the synesthetic research of expanded cinema.”44

The New York “underground,” which includes the filmmakers, distributors, and exhibitors that supported New York’s experimental and independent cinema, was an influential subset of the New American Cinema. Underground cinema was formally experimental and strongly associated with queer politics and transgressive content.45

42 P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-1978 (New York: Oxford UP, 1979), 142. 43 Ibid, 370. 44 Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., Inc., 1970), 68. 45 The films of Kenneth Anger are, perhaps, most representative of queer experimental film. Anger lived in Los Angeles. However, Gregory Markopoulos was also an important queer filmmaker.

54 Filmmakers Jack Smith and Andy Warhol shocked audiences with sexually graphic films that explored queer desire and challenged bourgeois social conventions. Beyond its formal experimentation and transgressive value, underground cinema documented New York’s experimental cinema community and represented the city. Warhol cast actors from his professional and social circle, experimental filmmakers appeared in each other’s work, and underground cinema was produced in the city, exhibited at Cinema 16, the Charles, and

Film Forum, and distributed by the Film-Makers Cooperative. Finally, underground cinema explored aspects of New York City and urban life. For example, Chelsea Girls represented downtown bohemia, and Shirley Clarke’s The Connection (1961) and Cool World (1963) depicted the lives of marginalized New Yorkers. Underground cinema also made New York its subject in the tradition of modernist films that explored cities. Marie Menken’s Go! Go!

Go! (1962-4) used aerial shots and footage from streets in rapidly edited sequences to represent the frenetic pace of urban life.

Writers further used “underground” to encompass all third-wave American experimental cinema. In Introduction to the American Underground Film, Sheldon Renan examines the underground cinema’s characteristics and provides a general history of experimental film production. In many ways, Renan’s historical focus most closely anticipates Parker Tyler’s Underground: A Critical History. Renan attempts to define the characteristics of experimental “underground" cinema: “The Underground film is a certain kind of film. It is a film conceived and made essentially by one person and is a personal statement by that period. It is a film that dissents radically in form, or in technique, or in content, or perhaps all three. It is usually made for very little money…and its exhibition is

55 outside commercial channels.46 Renan’s definition is vague, but, like Mekas, he contrasts the underground’s personal and artisanal qualities with Hollywood’s factory-like productions. The underground’s opposition to Hollywood is clearest in terms of Renan’s acknowledgement of production constraints and the importance of alternative exhibition channels, but his aesthetic analysis is less specific, and he concedes, “…it is also true today there are few techniques exclusive to the underground.”47

Renan also examines the meaning of “New American Cinema, which emerges from the “New American Cinema Group.” Renan explains how the New American Cinema rejected Hollywood and American commercial culture: “The New American Cinema takes in the underground film, but is broader than it. It is the total rebellion in the United States against the domination of film by Hollywood and other commercial factors.”48 It was a common tactic of writers to contrast experimental cinema with Hollywood, but Renan’s definition provides more confusion than clarity. In fact, Renan argues that the New

American Cinema both embraced and rejected “commercial factors”: “[i]n underground films, as in commercial films, the fate of a particular work may rest more on elements of business and publicity than on a film’s actual virtue.”49 Renan explains that the underground formed its “own establishment,” but he is never clear about the political import of this cinema: was this subset of the New American Cinema a radical alternative to

Hollywood? Or simply a viable commercial alternative? Renan’s inability to clearly define the New American Cinema forces him, instead, to consider the New American Cinema’s

46 Sheldon Renan, An Introduction to the American Underground Film (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co, 1967), 17, emphasis org. 47 Ibid, 36. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid, 209.

56 social characteristics in terms of its representations of sex, inchoate sense of social protest, and interest in the magic and occult. But, elsewhere, Renan gives up at specificity: “Many of the major works, like [Stan] Brakhage’s Dog Star Man, Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, [Ken]

Jacobs’ Blonde Cobra, and [Ron] Rice’s Chulmlum, do not fit specific molds. They have a calculated effect. They have things to say.”50 Therefore, Renan, like Mekas, would resort to defining the New American Cinema in vague spiritual terms: “Just as the avant-garde films of the twenties came out of a climate of riotous anarchy, the underground films have issued from a volatile environment. In this case it is the climate of the new man.”51

The difficulty in consolidating a diffuse range of cinema under a single term compelled writers to celebrate the New American Cinema’s sense of artistic possibility.

However, if that failed, they could simply compare it to Hollywood. In the edited collection,

The New American Cinema, Gregory Battcock explains, “The New American Cinema is a term sufficiently elastic to embrace an extraordinary variety of artistically and sometimes technically amateurish ambitious productions that have recently attracted critical attention to New York City and elsewhere.”52 Battcock acknowledges the New American Cinema’s

“technically amateurish” quality, but, like Renan and Mekas, celebrates the New American

Cinema’s individual expression: “The entire, and only purpose of every production is to express the artistic intention of its maker.”53 Elsewhere in the collection, Andrew Sarris emphasizes the New American Cinema’s ability to offend bourgeois sensibilities: “[o]utrage is not only one of the historic functions of the avant-garde; it is the only advantage the

50 Ibid, 35. 51 Ibid, 42. 52 Gregory Battcock, introduction to The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton Co, 1967), 12. 53 Ibid.

57 outsider possesses against the superior resources of the insider. Ultimately the most insidious enemy of art is good taste.”54 Sarris’s demarcation of “insider” and “outsider” supported a dialectic between Hollywood and experimental cinema that moved beyond industrial differences to consider taste and cultural identity. Sarris concludes with a warning, “If the avant-garde faces any threat all, it is simply that squares are becoming more hip than hipsters, that commercial movies are more salacious than underground movies, and that suburbia is more audacious than bohemia.”55

Like Sarris, P. Adams Sitney rejected any relationship of interdependence between the commercial and experimental cinemas. Instead, in Sitney’s view, the New American

Cinema took influence from artistic practices like modernist painting and avant-garde literature. This argument is consistent with Sitney’s support of cultural demarcations between art and entertainment, and he treats experimental film as an autonomous cultural production. Sitney’s belief in experimental cinema’s artistic autonomy is best reflected in

Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-78, which provides extensive formal analysis of postwar American experimental film. Sitney categorizes cinema according to his analysis of the filmmakers’ “theoretical” intention, and he is primarily influenced by literary and fine art criticism. Sitney explains, “Just as the chief works of French film theory must be seen in the light of Cubist and Surrealist thought…the preoccupations of the

American avant-garde film-makers coincide with those of our post-Romantic poets and

Abstract Expressionist painters.”56 Sitney further rejects any relationship or negotiation

54 Andrew Sarris, “The Independent Cinema” in The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton Co, 1967), 54. 55 Ibid, 55. 56 Sitney, Visionary Film, ix.

58 between the experimental and commercial cinemas: “The precise relationship of the avant- garde cinema to American commercial film is one of radical otherness. They operate in different realms with next to significant influence on each other.”57 Yet, even critics like

Annette Michelson, who studied experimental cinema, rejected Sitney’s argument that cinema existed apart from the society in which it was produced. Michelson explains that an

“aesthetic of autonomy…[by]no means violates or excludes their critical view of society.”58

In contrast to Sitney, film scholar David E. James explains the complex dialogue between American experimental cinema and Hollywood. In Allegories of Cinema: American

Film in the Sixties, James argues that film’s “mode of production” is allegorized by the text and “remains the central interpretative strategy.”59 While film production is encoded,

James emphasizes the importance of intertextuality by considering how “the underground’s opposition to Hollywood was accompanied by dialogues with it.”60 Here,

James explains how the underground’s attempts to subvert Hollywood’s formal and ideological aspects represents a dialogue between mainstream and marginal cinema. This dialogue challenges arguments that experimental cinema is an autonomous cultural production, which, is, at best, a utopic notion and, at worst, an elitist refutation of popular culture that upholds distinctions between “high” and “low” culture. Although James heralds the “expropriation of the apparatus from the corporation...[as] the signal achievement of underground film,” his emphasis on intertextuality suggests that 1960’s experimental

57 Ibid, viii. 58 Annette Michelson “Film and the Radical Aspiration” in The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton Co, 1967), 96. 59 James, Allegories of Cinema, 11. 60 Ibid, 141.

59 underground cinema demonstrated a formal synthesis or a subcultural mutation of dominant codes.61

James compares Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Stan

Brakhage’s Mothlight (1963) to further demonstrate how Hollywood and American experimental cinema produced in the 1960s challenged the “limits” of their respective modes of production. Stan Brakhage’s film, Mothlight, is an artisanal short composed of moth wings, seeds, and other natural objects adhered to filmstrip. Mothlight is a meticulously produced film, and its emphasis on the natural world, hand-made aspects, and emphasis on the cinematic image make it a kind of “pure” cinema. In contrast, Stanley

Kubrick’s space epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, is an expensive Hollywood production that uses elaborate set design and extensive post-production. But Kubrick’s focus on cinematic form and attention to every detail of the mise-en-scène likewise creates a “pure” cinema.

Comparing these nominally “experimental” films, separated by insuperable differences in their resources, provides an instance in which pure formal ambition suggests an ability to contain industrial differences. As James acknowledges, these films are “atypical” in their relative purity,62 but, due to profound economic and structural instability, Hollywood cinema of the late-1960s became sites of “alternative production possibilities.”63

Consequently, as James argues, New Hollywood films would suggest “some metaphorical relation to their own manufacture” by allegorizing a commercial cinema in flux.64

61 Ibid. 62 Ibid, 12. 63 Ibid. 14; This sense of confusion led Hollywood to support films like Easy Rider (1969), which James describes as a “35 mm ersatz underground film.” 64 Ibid.

60 The New Hollywood

“New American Cinema” is associated with primarily associated with independent and experimental cinema, but I include the “New” Hollywood as a subset of the New

American Cinema to recognize how American film production of the 1960s represented a negotiation between mainstream and marginal film practices and to challenge proposed binaries between mainstream and experimental cinema. Scholars have also considered the

New Hollywood, which describes auteur-driven Hollywood films produced from 1967-75, part of the New American Cinema, because this term synthesizes the industrial and cultural factors that changed the American commercial film industry. Film scholar Jon Lewis explains how industrial and social changes informed his understanding of the New

American Cinema: “I first began to use the title ‘The New American Cinema’ for a course I introduced back in 1983. At the time I was interested in the apparent decline of one new

American cinema – the so-called auteur renaissance, that took shape after the studios adopted the MPAA Ratings System in 1968.”65 Lewis articulates the rise of auteurism to a loosening of censorship, but marks the start of the New Hollywood one year after my periodization, which begins with Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Graduate (1967).

Changes in reception and critical discourse also levelled differences between mainstream and marginal cinemas. For instance, the auteur theory changed reception by persuading

Americans to think of cinema in terms of authorship, which relegated production to a lesser consideration. As a result, the “auteur” could move between different production contexts as long as they maintained a legible style, and auteurs synthesized and borrowed from classical Hollywood films, art house imports, and experimental cinema.

65 Jon Lewis, introduction to The New American Cinema, ed. Jon Lewis (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), 1.

61 The New Hollywood was also influenced by the French New Wave, which provided a model for ambitious cinema that retained a commercial viability. American directors like

Arthur Penn were inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s formal innovations, and New Hollywood directors responded to French New Wave cinema that updated American genre films.

Importantly, as Pauline Kael recognized, the New Wave’s influence on the New Hollywood represented the influence of Hollywood coming full circle. French directors François

Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard took inspiration from Hollywood auteurs like John Huston and Howard Hawks while drawing inspiration from American “B” and films, and French directors updated “lowbrow” American genre films through innovative, auteurist cinema.

Jean-Pierre Melville updated the American noir with Le Samouraï (1967) and Le Cercle rouge (1970), and Godard created a unique science-fiction film, Alphaville (1965). In recognizing the dialogue between Hollywood and auteurist New Wave cinema, it is clear that critical celebrations of the art house or auteurism that reject Hollywood demonstrate a lack of historical awareness. It is likewise important to recognize how the New Wave inspired the generation who created the New Hollywood toward a greater formal ambition.

Finally, the establishment of the MPAA ratings in 1968 and a desire to attract younger audiences compelled Hollywood to a new level of realism and social engagement.

Younger, liberal audiences tolerated representations of sex and violence that older generations would not. For instance, The Graduate (1967), Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice

(1969), and Midnight Cowboy (1969) presented honest discussions and representations of sex, and Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch (1969), A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Taxi

Driver (1976) all featured scenes of graphic violence. The New Hollywood was also influenced by the social upheaval of the sixties, and filmmakers embraced a generational

62 distrust the “establishment’s” authority. Generational conflict subtended many New

Hollywood films, and this conflict could be subtext that required reading the violence of the

Wild Bunch as a commentary on the Vietnam War, or explicit, as it was in Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970), which featured protagonists who rejected mainstream

American society. Ultimately, the New Hollywood’s formal ambitions and social commitment shared a cultural and aesthetic sensibility with experimental and independent

New American Cinema and reveals how mainstream and marginal film production of the

1960s was never as opposed as some critics liked to suggest.

Receiving the New American Cinema

While the New American Cinema encompasses a period of flux in American film culture that existed for nearly fifteen years before Hollywood re-asserted control with the blockbuster, film critics became particularly mainstream because they helped American audiences appreciate and understand a changing film culture. Under the studio system,

American audiences had less choice about the types of films they could see due to

Hollywood’s control of exhibition and the lack of cinematic alternatives. Yet, with more options, film critics helped American audiences understand foreign imports, independent cinema, and “New” Hollywood cinema. Industrial changes also engendered a reconsideration of film’s role in culture and compelled writers to take film more seriously.

What Marxist critics considered “passive” entertainment during Hollywood’s “golden age” became regarded by educated Americans as an artform in the postwar period, and critics of the 1950s helped change the reception of the American cinema. James Agee popularized a straight-forward form of criticism informed with a literary sensibility. Manny Farber considered film in aesthetic terms, and Siegfried Kracauer’s “psychological history” of

63 German film provided an ideological analysis that explored how film influenced the rise of

Nazism.66

Yet, Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler’s film writing expanded American criticism beyond a focus on Hollywood cinema, and they provided a critical reception of

American independent, experimental, and “New” Hollywood cinema that was made possible by the commercial film industry’s postwar decline. These critics also responded to the industrial and cultural changes that produced the New American Cinema, and their essayistic film criticism compelled educated Americans to take cinema seriously. As innovative cinema and a serious reception challenged Marxist arguments about the cinema’s role as passive entertainment, Americans reassessed the cinema’s value and embraced a new sensibility that challenged cultural distinctions between popular culture and fine art. In responding to a demand for film criticism about formally innovative and socially-committed cinema, Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler used criticism of the New American Cinema to initiate a greater consideration of American identity and social values related to class, gender, and sexuality. In expanding the purview and focus of critical film writing beyond aesthetic analysis and an anxiety about the cinema’s cultural worth, Kael, Mekas, and Tyler demonstrated how film criticism could be a powerful tool for political and social analysis of American society.

66 See: David Bordwell, How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 4.

64 Chapter 2

American Cinema as Populist Art: Pauline Kael and the New Hollywood

On Dec. 29, 1969, George Shelps, “working in a new field called ‘communication’” at

Temple University, wrote Pauline Kael a letter. Shelps begins, “Before someone does a PhD dissertation on the film criticism of Pauline Kael, I’d just like to make a few comments.1

Shelp’s letter encourages Kael to “disentangle aesthetic judgements from purely social- communicative [ones],” but implicit in his reference to a Ph.D. dissertation was a belief that film criticism did not warrant serious study. However, at the moment Shelps was writing,

American film culture was undergoing important changes. Film studies were entering college and university classrooms, and Americans were reassessing the value of popular culture like cinema. In writing for an educated readership, looking to understand and appreciate the cinema, Pauline Kael’s reception of the “New Hollywood” challenged

“highbrow” film criticism that dismissed a “low” American cinema and celebrated a “high”

European art cinema. In contrast to her contemporaries, Kael appreciated Hollywood as popular culture and populist art, and she valued the New Hollywood as artistic and entertaining cinema that updated the classical Hollywood film.

Pauline Kael, film critic at the New Yorker from 1968-91, wrote for a readership interested in high culture that wanted to signal their social status and education through good taste and knowledge of cinema, but Kael’s focus on narrative and character made her criticism accessible for readers new to film appreciation.2 While Kael’s writing was

1 Correspondence from George Shelps to Pauline Kael. 29 December 1969, Box 9, Pauline Kael Archive, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. 2 Mary Corey explains how the New Yorkers’ popularity in postwar America was related to “the exceptional increase in the number of educated, middle-class liberals,” and she provides survey data from 1949 that

65 considered “sociological,” she was not ideological like Parker Tyler or Siegfried Kracauer.3

In fact, Kael particularly disliked Kracauer, whom she accused of preferring “’unfortunate social conditions” to entertainment.4 Unlike Jonas Mekas, who promoted an alternative cinema that challenged the status-quo, Kael celebrated the New Hollywood as part of a larger tradition of American cinema. Kael argued that the best American cinema was based in “American tragedy,” rooted in comedy and violence, and she appreciated the cinema’s role as entertainment for immigrant and working-class audiences. Kael also celebrated mainstream film genres like the musical,5 western, and gangster film at time when critics embraced formalist cinema and “auteurism.”6 Thus, Kael celebrated the New Hollywood for its connection to a populist cultural past that her contemporaries rejected to celebrate the radical or alternative aspects of the “New” American Cinema.

By the time Kael was hired at the New Yorker in 1968, readers had accepted that film was more than mass-produced entertainment, and Kael’s insistent focus on the American

reveals that “most [readers] had attended college…[and] Three quarters of the magazine’s subscribers had an annual income of over $5,000 a year, at a time when the national average family income hovered around $1,900.” See: Mary Corey, The world through a monocle: the New Yorker at midcentury (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1999); 2, 12; Kael’s correspondence, archived at the Lilly Library at Indiana University at Bloomington, further demonstrates the affluence and high education level of her readers. Many of her adult readers were college-educated professionals, including doctors, lawyers, and college professors, and they revealed their education through repeated references to fine art and literature. In addition, letter writers demonstrated an eagerness to become knowledgeable about the cinema in order to be culturally literate. 3 William Johnston Jr, writing from the Claremont Graduate School on Feb. 10, 1967, accuses Kael of only being “secondarily interested in movies as an art form and primarily concerned with their potentialities for reflecting sociological truths and untruths.” He concludes, “She is a social critic.” See: Correspondence from William Johnston Jr. to Pauline Kael. 10 February 1967, Box 9, Pauline Kael Archive, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. 4 Pauline Kael, I Lost it at the Movies (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1965), 284. 5 Kael used her review of Fiddler on the Roof (1971) to defend the musical as an important film genre. While Fiddler offered the “pleasure of big bold strokes,” Kael worried snobbish audiences would ignore a popular musical. See: Pauline Kael, I Lost it at the Movies (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1965), 138. 6 Kael criticized the auteur theory and Andrew Sarris. In “Circles and Squares,” published in Film Quarterly in 1973, Kael explained the importance of writers and crew members besides the director who made Hollywood films successful. In the late 1960s, as critics criticized Hollywood, Kael continued to celebrate the “genius of the system.”

66 cinema’s populist origins demonstrates the degree to which critics of the 1960s accepted film-as-art. What further distinguishes Kael’s criticism was her support of film as commercial entertainment. This is not to say that Kael did not criticize Hollywood’s profit motive; she did so repeatedly and often. Kael was especially concerned with Hollywood’s profligate financial waste and shift to corporate control, but she continuously defended it as an institution. Compared to critics like Jonas Mekas and Parker Tyler, Kael was politically conservative. Unlike Mekas, who demanded the cinema challenge values of social conformity and capitalist consumption, Kael rarely mentions civil rights, second-wave feminism, the Vietnam War, student activism, and other political issues in her criticism.

Kael’s criticism was also less overtly political than Tyler’s criticism of the New American

Cinema. Tyler created a radical, queer criticism that challenged dominant American social and sexual values, but Kael was more focused on challenging cultural hierarchies that demarcated “high” and “low” culture.

Kael first became popular after the publication of a best-selling book, I Lost it At the

Movies, which compelled editor William Shawn to hire her as a New Yorker staff writer.

Instead of appealing to readers through an overt political sensibility, the New Yorker appealed to readers’ interests in fine art and “high” culture while promoting an excessive level of consumerism. For instance, the June 3, 1967 issue that published Kael’s first article,

“Movies on Television,” promoted exotic vacations, “executive furniture,” and champagne in the margins that bordered her prose.7 Literary scholar Tom Perrin has argued that modernist art critical of capitalist excess was “seemingly conspicuous from its absence” in order not to contradict or challenge the New Yorker’s focus on consumption or offend its

7 The New Yorker, June 3, 1967, 120-34.

67 advertisers.8 While Kael’s reviews of films by Jean-Luc Godard and Luis Buñuel did inject modernism into the magazine to some degree, they did little to counteract the New Yorker’s cosmopolitan consumerism. In contrast to the New Yorker, counterculture publications like the Village Voice provided a better platform for criticism of transgressive cinema.

In writing for a readership that included educated professionals, college students, and socially-mobile readers, looking to appreciate cinema in greater depth and detail,

Kael’s New Yorker film reviews and essays modelled a film appreciation that celebrated

New Hollywood as an evolution of classical Hollywood cinema.9 Consequently, Kael critiqued “radical” new cinema that her contemporaries like Mekas celebrated, and she was critical of films with pretensions towards “art.” But crucially, Kael wanted the educated segment of her readership, who may have been inclined to dismiss commercial American cinema as “low” culture, to appreciate how Hollywood’s enduring role as a popular entertainment enriched supposedly more artistic cinema. In this regard, Kael challenged critics who embraced formalist criticism or who celebrated the artistic superiority of “high”

European art house cinema. In her review of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), which helped establish the film as a landmark of the New Hollywood, Kael focused on how Arthur Penn employed aspects of American tragedy in new ways. She would likewise demonstrate how

New Hollywood directors like Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman updated generic tropes or aspects of classical Hollywood filmmaking. Above all, Kael’s criticism emphasized the

8 Tom Perrin, “On Blustering: Dwight Macdonald, Modernism and the New Yorker,” in Writing for the New Yorker: Critical Essays on an American Periodical, ed. Fiona Green (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP 2015), 229. 9 Kael regularly corresponded with younger college students, who lacked an understanding of film history, and many of these younger readers aspired to become writers and critics.

68 importance of American populist artistic tradition, and she rejected the wholesale embrace of the “new” that characterized Mekas’ promotional criticism.

Kael’s readers engaged with her in frequent correspondence that complicates generalizations about the mainstream film audience and challenges arguments that the

New Hollywood simply appealed to a liberal youth audience. It is important to consider the complex nature of the “mainstream,” which suggests a homogeneity that belies its variegated nature. As Sarah Thornton argues, the mainstream is actually a collection of subcultures, and “[r]eferences to the mainstream are often a way of deflecting issues related to the definition and representation of empirical social groups.”10 The social groups within the “mainstream” film audience can be theorized as a spectrum with upper and lower registers. An upper-middle-class film audience sought to reproduce their social position through film appreciation. As in life, they would rely on their education and discrimination to signal their social status and differentiate themselves from lower-class segments of the general film audience. Audience segments were separated by class, education, and geography, and “taste” was the manifestation of their socio-economic differences. In general, audiences who appreciated film as “art” tended to be wealthier, better educated, or aspired to class mobility based on an assessment of the publications that targeted this demographic with upscale advertising. Kael wrote specifically for a readership that wanted to appreciate the cinema for its artistic value and may have lacked an understanding or appreciation of film’s history as a populist cultural form.

10 Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital (Middletown, Wesleyan UP, 1996), 114.

69 In echoing her appreciation of film as form of popular culture, Kael’s correspondence further demonstrates how critics of the 1960s were uniquely able to shape reception of the American cinema. Hollywood and its advertising had controlled reception and discourse about the American cinema for decades, but, in the 1960s, readers looked to critics like Kael to understand the cinema. Letters demonstrate how Kael’s readers perceived her as an authority on the cinema while suggesting her importance to the emergent field of film studies. In particular, teachers and instructors wrote Kael to ask for her advice in how to implement film studies into their curriculum. Kael’s literary approach made her a good model for instructors looking to integrate cinema into English courses, but her emphasis on narrative and character, which privileged content over form, supported the aspects of cinema that made it an accessible form of popular culture. Kael’s criticism, which analyzed social issues related to sex and violence, also challenged critics who privileged formal aspects. However, Kael’s readers echoed her appreciation of the New

Hollywood as American populist art, and, like Kael, writers focused on narrative and character rather than aesthetic aspects. This reciprocation of Kael’s “populist” criticism is a testament to her efficacy as a critic and demonstrates how critics of the New American

Cinema were uniquely able to shape discourse about the American cinema.

“American tragedy”

Kael’s 1967 review of Bonnie and Clyde argues that Arthur Penn’s film remained steeped in a larger tradition of American tragedy and the genre filmmaking of classical

Hollywood despite its stylistic borrowings from the New Wave and appeals to a younger generation’s sensibility. Bonnie and Clyde was an early New Hollywood film that mixed

Hollywood storytelling with the French New Wave’s formal innovations. In fact, the film’s

70 subject matter, the robberies perpetuated by its titular characters, had been a source of several earlier Hollywood films.11 But Bonnie and Clyde’s writers, David Newman and

Robert Brenton, were so influenced by the French New Wave that they asked François

Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard to direct.12 Both refused, but Arthur Penn, who ultimately directed the film, employed a sense of pastiche, including slapstick allusions to the

Keystone Kops and jump cuts reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1959). Although

Bonnie and Clyde’s scenes of graphic violence and sexual innuendo generated controversy, its use of irony and formal innovations appealed to younger viewers. The film’s bluegrass score, played by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, along with its faded, sepia tone also provided a knowing wink to audiences familiar with America’s past.

Kael distrusted expressions of youth rebellion, but she considers Bonnie and Clyde the “most excitingly American [sic] American movie” for using elements of American tragedy and Hollywood cinema from the past.13 While popular with younger audiences, conservative critics disliked Bonnie and Clyde despite its familiar genre aspects. Bosley

Crowther, chief film critic at the New York Times from 1940-1967,14 acknowledges how some viewers believe the film “achieves some sort of meaningful statements for times in which we live,” but he argues that the film’s violence and dishonesty obviated any meaningful statement that Penn was trying to make.15 Crowther concludes that Bonnie and

11 Other versions of Bonnie and Clyde: You Only Live Once (1937), They Live By Night (1948) and Gun Crazy (1950). 12 Kael considered Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937) to be the best version. 13 Kael, “Bonnie and Clyde,” New Yorker, Oct. 21, 1967, 147. 14 In a letter, one of Kael’s readers informs her: “If nothing else you have taught me there more to film criticism than Bosley Crowther.” See: Correspondence to Pauline Kael. Oct. 21, 1968, Box 9. Pauline Kael Archive, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. 15 Bosley Crowther, “Run, Bonnie and Clyde,” New York Times, September 3, 1967, 57.

71 Clyde fails to represent either the “thinking of our times or as wholesome entertainment.”16

Penn clearly tried to make Bonnie and Clyde entertaining, which is evident in the action scenes, car chases, and shoot-outs, but he was also trying to make a statement. Yet,

Crowther’s complaints were centered on the film’s lack of historical verisimilitude, and he was upset about the film’s evident cynicism. By manipulating the story of Bonnie and Clyde to represent to the cynicism of the late 1960’s youth culture, Crowther argues that Penn had succumbed to a faddish desire to depict American society as the enemy, but he ignores how Penn playfully updated genre tropes from gangster films that had always provided a critique of mainstream American values however implicit.

Bonnie and Clyde also divided the critics at the New Yorker. Like Crowther, Penelope

Gilliatt, who reviewed Bonnie and Clyde upon its initial release, thought the film cynically appealed to the younger generation. Gilliatt argues that the film is more artifice than art:

“The movie is full of scenes of giggling and showoff, but the moods belong to the characters, not to the film.”17 She concludes that Bonnie and Clyde is made for television fans willing to accept glib representations of violence: “Like the kids of the present TV generation, Bonnie and Clyde unconsciously assume that blood is makeup and that bang-bang-you’re dead will be over by the next installment.”18 In contrast to Crowther and Gilliatt, Jacob Brackman dissented, viewing it as an appropriate reflection of the time. Brackman explains, “[Bonnie and Clyde] lays claim to our feeling of desperation and inescapable failure.”19 In Brackman’s view, the film reflected the despair caused by the social unrest of the 1960s, but the lack of

16 Ibid, 66. 17 Penelope Gilliatt, “The Current Cinema: The Party,” New Yorker, August 19, 1967, 77. 18 Ibid, 79. 19 Jacob Brackman, “The Graduate,” New Yorker, July 27, 1968, 60.

72 critical consensus reflects the degree to which Bonnie and Clyde was rife for interpretation.

Critics like Brackman interpreted the film’s cynicism as an appropriate statement of social discontent while status-quo critics like Crowther saw it as a dishonest statement of naive opposition.

In previous essays, Kael had criticized European filmmakers for self-indulgent films that expressed cultural ennui and bored audiences, but Kael explains why Bonnie and Clyde inspires strong reactions: “To ask why people react so angrily to the best movies and have so little negative reaction to poor ones is to imply they are so unused to experience of art in movies they fight it.”20 Bonnie and Clyde also evoked a uniquely American mix of innocence and danger but was remarkable for its “absence of sadism.” As Kael explains, “The brutality that comes out of this innocence is far more shocking than the calculated brutalities of mean killers,” and Clyde’s ineptitude made his paroxysms of violence surprising. 21 Kael concludes that the film’s “romance,” Penn’s portrayal of Clyde as bumbling and incompetent, and the film’s use of violence mixed the conventions of comedy and gangster genre films in new ways to provide a counterpoint to ”art” cinema steeped in a nihilistic cynicism. In contrast, as Kael explains, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) “ridiculed everything and everybody it showed, but concealed its own liberal pieties, thus protecting itself from ridicule.”22

Kael appreciated Bonnie and Clyde because it was steeped in a larger American artistic tradition, and she argues that popular culture like cinema was unique because it lacked

“high” culture pretensions. In Bonnie and Clyde, Kael locates the essential elements of

20 Kael, “Bonnie and Clyde, 154. 21 Ibid, 158. 22 Ibid, 170, emphasis org.

73 American tragedy: “the toughness about what [Americans] have come out of and what we’ve been through – the honesty to see ourselves as the Yahoo children of yokels – is a good part of American popular art.”23 While her contemporaries produced criticism that was motivated by cultural anxieties, Kael argues that the American cinema should draw from a rich American dramatic tradition, and she explains how Bonnie and Clyde’s mixture of comedy and pathos demonstrates, “If there is such thing as American tragedy, it must be funny.”24 American “tragedy” also encompassed popular culture that represented difficult periods of American history. In her review, Kael explains how she spent time with her friends recounting their families’ experiences during the Depression, and a reader responded, “…we were the dispossessed Dust Bowl refugees of the day and felt pretty much like failures, because I guess we thought our fathers had failed.”25 Bonnie and Clyde rekindled the tragedy of the Depression and, like a palimpsest, layered on the contemporary despair of the late-1960s.

By placing Bonnie and Clyde in a larger tradition of American populist art and cinema,

Kael reminds her readers that the New Hollywood did not represent a radical break but was the next step in Hollywood’s evolution. Bonnie and Clyde was influenced by gangster genre films but represented Hollywood’s influence coming full-circle: Hollywood had influenced European New Wave cinema, which now influenced contemporary Hollywood.

In recognizing this relationship, Kael challenges criticism that dismissed the American commercial cinema by celebrating the artistic superiority of the European art house.

23 Ibid, 159. 24 Ibid. 25 Correspondence from Thomas Ludwig to Pauline Kael 12 December 1968. Box 10, Pauline Kael Archive, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

74 However, the New Hollywood was also well suited to an educated readership new to film appreciation. Bonnie and Clyde was artistic but still accessible, and Kael instructs her readers to “read” the film in relation to a history of Hollywood cinema and American tragedy. Kael further argues that, by understanding Bonnie and Clyde’s use of genre conventions, the New Yorker readership could appreciate the “art” of cinema through a recognition of its evolution. In contrast to her peers who dismissed Hollywood as “low” culture, Kael demonstrates how Americans were producing artistic and entertaining cinema in an overtly commercial context.

One of Kael’s recurring concerns was the relationship between taste and art, which she explored in one of her clearest statements of critical intention, “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” published in the February 1969 issue of Harpers.26 The article’s thesis further supports of

Kael’s argument in her Bonnie and Clyde review: film was a form of popular entertainment that was most vital when it resisted bourgeois notions of “high” culture and fine art. As Kael explains, part of the joy of watching films, as Roger Corman’s low-budget American

International Pictures reminds her, is that we “don’t have to take [movies] seriously.”27 In fact, for middle-class audiences, the movies could provide a “breather, a vacation from proper behavior and good taste and required responses.”28 Kael critiques film criticism overly focused on technique, bolstering her decision to focus on acting and narrative, which made film entertaining and accessible popular culture. In contrast, technique was only worth considering for how it helped express a story, and Kael explains that “to talk about a

26 In Kael’s early career as a staff writer at the New Yorker, she alternated every six months with Penelope Gilliatt. As a result, she often wrote for publications other than the New Yorker. 27 Kael, “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” 89. 28 Ibid, 92.

75 movie like ‘The Graduate’ in terms of movie technique is really a bad joke.29 Here, Kael rejects attempts to elevate film’s cultural status, and she argues that cinema was important precisely because it allowed audiences to escape the social norms of middle-class life.

Kael continued to prefer films like Bonnie and Clyde rooted in American popular culture, and she explains how the American cinema expressed an important sense of national identity. As Kael writes, American movies took influence “not from the desiccated imitation of European high culture, but from the peep show, the Wild West show, the music hall, the comic strip – from what was coarse and common.”30 It may appear that Kael is supporting American exceptionalism by relating Bonnie and Clyde to uniquely American forms of popular culture, but she is responding to critics who affirmed cultural hierarchies that dismissed “low” American popular cinema by celebrating “high” European art cinema.

Kael also rejects arguments that the cinema became art when it reflected elements of what audiences appreciated in high literature or fine painting. In contrast, what made the

American cinema unique was its ability to include past cultural forms – the Wild West show, the music hall, the comic strip – and create new meanings from those forms. These films could be rich and nuanced while remaining populist in orientation.

In celebrating cinema as popular culture, Kael argues that the “single most intense pleasure of moviegoing” to be the escape from American middle-class social norms.”31

Cinematic pleasure could lead to aesthetic appreciation, but, as Kael explains, the

“responsibility to pay attention” and treat film as a serious artform hindered real

29 Ibid, 97. 30 Ibid, 103. 31 Ibid, 104.

76 appreciation.32 Kael encourages her readers to appreciate the “art” of their popular commercial cinema, explaining how “it’s easier for us, as Americans, to see art in foreign films than in our own, because of how we, as Americans, think of art.”33 Americans were taught that art is “civilized and refined, cultivated and serious, cultural, beautiful, European,

Oriental: it’s what America isn’t and its especially what American movies are not.”34 In this conception of culture, “good taste” was predicated on an aspirational engagement with fine art and “high” culture, but Kael argues that this understanding of culture denied the

American cinema’s past. The American cinema was popular because of immigrant and working-class audiences, and Kael worries that receiving cinema like fine art would take

“movies back into the approved culture of the school room – into gentility.”35 This transition might make cinema respectable and alleviate the anxieties of “highbrow” critics, but it would limit film’s appeal and negate what made the American cinema unique.

A Film Renaissance

In the preface to her sixth book of criticism, Reeling, Kael compares the New Hollywood to the American literary renaissance of the late-19th century: “A few decades hence, these years may appear to be the closest our movies had come to the tangled, bitter flowering of

American letters in the early 1850s.”36 Kael’s early career at the New Yorker had coincided with an important period of American cinema that produced important documentaries,

32 Ibid. 33 Ibid, 105, emphasis org. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid, 106; There is an evident irony to this comment considering Kael’s readers wrote to her seeking assistance in bringing film into the classroom. 36 Pauline Kael, foreword to Reeling (New York: Warner Books, 1976), 17; This remark recalls high school teacher Donald Ringler’s comparison of New Hollywood to American literary renaissance authors like Herman Melville and Mark Twain.

77 independent films, and studio films, but her focus remained on Hollywood.37 Looking back during the rise of High Concept cinema in the mid-1970s, which was concurrent with

Reeling’s publication, Kael expressed a romantic appreciation for a unique period of

Hollywood cinema that critics who had advocated for an alternative cinema missed or outright ignored. At the same time that critics like Jonas Mekas advocated for a cinematic

“revolution” that rejected the American cinema’s past, and Parker Tyler used criticism to critique the social and sexual ideologies encoded in the American cinema, Kael celebrated an American film renaissance, or revival, of a populist cultural tradition.

Kael’s celebration of Hollywood could seem at odds with her celebration of European auteurs, but she foregrounded Hollywood’s influence on the art cinema that “highbrow” critics celebrated. For example, in a review of La Chinoise (1967), Kael explains how Jean-

Luc Godard, the film’s director, “assumes in his audience an Americanized sensibility…a quick comprehension of devices and conventions derived from American film style.”38 In another instance, Kael examines how the American cinema influenced Italian director

Bernardo Bertolucci’s controversial Last Tango in Paris (1972). Most reviewers focused on the film’s graphic sex and violence, but Kael emphasizes Last Tango in Paris’ connection to

Hollywood genre films, explaining how “the movie is American in spirit.”39 However, she had to contend with the film’s scenes of graphic sex and violence on some level. In contrast to critics who found Last Tango’s violence distasteful, Kael praises it, explaining how it

“expresses the characters’ drives [and] stands in distinction to the mechanized sex of most

37 Kael considered Frederick Wiseman to be “the most sophisticated intelligence to enter the documentary field in recent years.” See: Pauline Kael, “High School and Other Forms of Madness” in Deeper Into the Movies (Boston: Little, Brown and Co, 1973), 24. 38 Pauline Kael, “A Minority Movie” in Going Steady (Boston: Little, Brown and Co, 1968), 77. 39 Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema: Tango,” New Yorker, Oct. 28, 1972, 132.

78 exploitation films.”40 This argument is consistent with her longstanding acceptance of sex and violence, but Kael argues that Last Tango in Paris appealed to audiences because of

Marlon Brando’s rugged American masculinity. As Kael writes, Brando’s “profane humor and self-loathing self-centeredness…are in the style of American hard-boiled fiction aimed at the masculine-fantasy market.”41 It is right to label the film a “masculine-fantasy” since it is predicated on male domination, but Kael believed the film was honest in a way that few movies even attempt. As for the film’s violent sex, Kael argues that there isn’t “anyone whose feelings can be totally resolved about the sex scenes and the social attitudes in the film,” but she misses an opportunity to make a statement about masculine fantasies based in violence and control of women.42

Kael’s support of filmmaking rooted in Hollywood’s past led to her disapproval of

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange (1971), which reflected

Hollywood’s embrace of formalism and philosophical cinema. While her peers celebrated

Kubrick’s aesthetic brilliance, Kael argues that his films were self-indulgent and lacked clear narratives. Kael even dismisses 2001’s relationship to the counterculture: “Using movies to go on a trip has about as much connection with the art of film as using one of those Doris Day-Rock Hudson jobs for ideas on how to redecorate your home.”43 In her review of A Clockwork Orange, Kael also accuses Kubrick of succumbing to a “post- assassinations, post-Manson mood”44 by wrapping an exploitation film in the veneer of art

40 Ibid, 130. 41 Ibid, 132. 42 Ibid, emphasis org. 43 Kael, “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” 101. 44 Pauline Kael, “Stanley Strangelove” in Deeper Into the Movies (Boston: Little, Brown and Co, 1973), 375.

79 to make the audience “accept violence as a sensual pleasure.”45 Kael’s reception of Kubrick, whom “highbrow” critics applauded for his formal innovation, demonstrates her belief that cinema should remain popular entertainment that appealed to audiences with compelling characters and narrative. In fact, Kael disliked Kubrick for precisely the reason other critics celebrated him: his high-art aspirations.

Unlike Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg valued the cinema’s role as popular entertainment. Kael reviewed his film The Sugarland Express (1974) alongside Badlands

(1973), directed by Terrence Malick, in the March 18, 1974 issue of the New Yorker,

Spielberg and Malick had already established their trademark styles, and, as Kael explains,

Spielberg was “that rarity among directors [sic] a born entertainer.”46 Spielberg’s films also lacked pretense: “Spielberg loves action and comedy and speed so much that he really doesn’t care if a movie has anything else in it.”47 In contrast, Terrence Malick, who held a philosophy degree from Harvard, made impressionistic, philosophical cinema, and Kael criticizes Badlands as an “intellectualized movie…[that resembled]…a polished Ph.D. thesis.”48 Kael further argues that Malick mocked his lower-class characters, explaining how “[Badlands’] condescending tone toward the society makes it easy for people in the audience to feel superior.”49 Kael’s liminal class position, informed by her working-class background and occupation as an elite critic, made her attuned to representations of social class, and she found Malick’s elitism troubling because it was presented in a populist entertainment medium.

45 Ibid, 377. 46 Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema: Sugarland and Badlands,” New Yorker, Mar. 18, 1974, 130. 47 Ibid, 132. 48 Ibid, 136. 49 Ibid.

80 In contrast to Malick’s “elitist” cinema, Kael appreciated how American directors Robert

Altman and Martin Scorsese’s auteurist cinema synthesized aspects of Hollywood genre films. As Kael explains, Altman’s films drew from recognizable genres: M*A*S*H (1970) was an “unstable comedy”;50 The Long Goodbye was a “private-eye” movie;51 and Nashville

(1975) is “the funniest epic of America ever to reach the screen.”52 Kael also appreciated how Scorsese borrowed from and updated Hollywood genre cinema. In her review of Taxi

Driver (1976), Kael describes how the film represents Scorsese’s “appetite for the pulp sensationalism of the forties movies,”53 and she explores how Scorsese relates male sexuality to violence, explaining how the protagonist’s sexual frustration leads to the film’s bloody denouement.54 Like her review of Last Tango In Paris, Kael accepts that male sexual desire is related to violence, but her permissive attitude about representations of violence was based in a belief that it could confront an audience’s fear in a safe context. Kael argues,

“Movies, more than any form of expression, are capable of bringing us to us an acceptance of our terror.”55 In this regard, the movies allowed audiences to safely experience violence while making them vulnerable and open to cinematic expression, but Kael appreciated how

Scorsese personalized crime films that had relied on one-dimensional stock characters while pushing the genre forward with confrontational filmmaking.

50 Pauline Kael, “Blessed Profanity” in Deeper Into the Movies (Boston: Little, Brown and Co, 1973), 92, my emphasis. 51 Kael, “Movieland – The Bums’ Paradise,” 253, my emphasis. 52 Pauline Kael, “Coming: ‘Nashville,’” Reeling (New York: Warner Books, 1976), 598, my emphasis; Kael wrote Altman directly to express her appreciation: “You know from my reviews of my regard for your artistry.” See: Correspondence from Pauline Kael to Robert Altman. 10 February 1973, Box 1, Pauline Kael Archive, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. 53 Pauline Kael, “The Current Cinema: Underground Man,” New Yorker, Feb. 9, 1976, 82. 54 Ibid, 85. 55 Pauline Kael, “Fear of Movies,” When the Lights Go Down (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), 432.

81 Kael’s appreciation of Hollywood as an institution made her particularly attuned to the tenuous but productive relationship between art and commerce, but, in an elegiac essay,

“On the Future of Movies,” published in 1974, Kael recognizes that a unique period of cinema was coming to an end. Despite a decade of innovative cinema, Kael explains that “a number of the most devoted moviegoers stopped going to movies.”56 Audiences now avoided films with challenging themes, preferring “movies that do all the work for them.”57

As Kael explains, even interesting films, like Last Tango in Paris or Taxi Driver, exhibit a sense of “nihilism,” and, Kael notes that, while watching these films, “one sometimes feels at a porn show – the way everything is turned to dung, oneself included.”58 In Kael’s estimation, the problem, which would only worsen in the next decade, was that “middle men” had taken over the movies. In 1969, in the early days of the New Hollywood, Kael describes how “a handful of reviewers could help persuade people to give a small or unheralded film a chance,” demonstrating how American critics of the 1960s were uniquely able to influence reception.59 But, in the mid-1970s, critics held less power due to increased advertising and the rise of the blockbuster, which lead to the “demise of the ‘the film generation’ [and] a sharp break.”60

Hollywood had broken with its own past to cynically market and produce films with the intent of generating maximum profit. As Kael argues, producers no longer “assume an ideal viewer – they assume a hollow-eyed, empty-souled, know-nothing hick,”61 and they would not promote a director like Robert Altman, “because they just don’t know what he’ll do on a

56 Pauline Kael, “On the Future of Movies,” New Yorker, Aug. 5, 1974, 43. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid, 50. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid, 54.

82 picture; they can’t trust him to make it resemble the latest big hit.”62 The last decade had produced landmark Hollywood films, but the industry’s shift to the summer blockbuster signaled a distinct period of American cinema had come to an end. Businessmen solely concerned with profit had taken over the commercial film industry, ending a creative tension between art and commerce that had produced innovative cinema. Kael always recognized that Hollywood was a business, but she believed that the business aspect of filmmaking was counterbalanced by a love of the cinema. The New Hollywood, which revived the commercial film industry, demonstrated that innovative cinema could earn profits, but in the shift to the blockbuster, businessmen from the financial and corporate sectors took over Hollywood and disrupted this balance. While Kael understood that

American cinema was a business, she supported it as populist art and not as a ledger item in a corporate portfolio.

An Authority on Film

Kael’s success and popularity in writing about New Hollywood and a changing

American cinema in the New Yorker led to an engaged correspondence with her readers.

Writers wrote typewritten letters on letterhead that indicated they were doctors, lawyers, film professionals, teachers, college professors, and, in one instance, a member of congress.

Some of Kael’s readers lived in affluent New York neighborhoods, but readers lived across the country and even around the world, including Hungary and Switzerland. Kael annotated and corrected her letters, but most writers provided well-written and reasoned accounts of their experiences at the movies. Writers also demonstrated a significant level of education evident in detailed references to the fine arts, theatre, and literature. For

62 Ibid, 47.

83 instance, Anne Maire Caviglia explains, “Just now I am immersed in the English 19th century, with The New Yorker as occasional welcome relief.”63 Writers were forthright in their criticisms, but Kael’s correspondence demonstrates that her readers were eager to engage in debates and become more knowledgeable about the cinema. Kael’s correspondence also invalidates proposed oppositions between “highbrow” academic film reception and “mainstream” film criticism.

Undergraduates, graduate students, and one precocious high schooler wrote to Kael to discuss cinema. Older students looked to Kael as an authority and sought her advice about how to become professional film critics. In 1967, Larry Tate told Kael, “I want basically to be a writer, and my idea of a film critic is a writer who likes to write about film.”64 At the time of writing, Tate was in the process of applying for fellowships to fund an

English graduate degree at UCLA. One enterprising reader solicited Kael’s feedback on his

M.A. thesis. Lawrence Christopher Laybourne sent Kael his UCLA thesis, entitled

“Filmmaking in Secondary Education,” and writes in his cover letter: “Your concern for kid film study and filmmaking have cautioned me in my survey and analysis of filmmaking in secondary education, the thesis. And your skepticism continues to temper my enthusiasm for what film can be to education and, of course, to kids.”65 The letter affirms that students viewed Kael as an educational role model, but Kael was not enthusiastic about the thesis, writing in pencil on Laybourne’s letter, “Je vous dis merde. I would say it is shit.”66 However,

63 Correspondence from Anne Marie Caviglia to Pauline Kael. Undated, Box 9, Pauline Kael Archive, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. 64 Correspondence from Larry Tate to Pauline Kael. 14 January 1967, Box 9, Pauline Kael Archive, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. 65 Correspondence from Lawrence Christopher Laybourne to Pauline Kael. 27 August 1968, Box 9, Pauline Kael Archive, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. 66 Ibid.

84 Kael’s lack of enthusiasm about Laybourne’s project is consistent with her general disapproval of academic film writing that ignored cinema’s role as popular entertainment.

Despite Kael’s professed dislike of “highbrow” popular criticism, a recurring theme of letters concerned Kael’s role as a teacher of knowledgeable cinema appreciation. These writers were college students, instructors, and interested adults, who wanted to learn more about the cinema. Bevan Davies, who lived in New York City, told Kael, “I discovered a more informed way of looking at film through your writing and a very compassionate one. The only other critic I have read who cared as much film was James Agee.”67 Davies’ reference to James Agee suggests that Kael was continuing a tradition of film criticism informed by a literary sensibility that respected the cinema’s value as popular entertainment. Rosemary

Henberg, an instructor of Comparative Arts at Ohio University, wrote Kael a number of times, looking for advice about how to teach and analyze film. Rosemary explains, “We talked about movies in English Class…However I could not adequately articulate my perception that the center of the movie was confused and confusing in its pretensions to profundity. I was poorly armed to fight the ‘illusion and reality’ crew until I discovered your review.”68 Rosemary was writing about Blow-Up (1966), but she describes how Kael’s writing helped clarify her own interpretations. Rosemary follows with some questions about Kael’s method and explains that she had tried to write about Bonnie and Clyde for a

“cinema course” she took while pursuing a Ph.D. Rosemary concludes by asking Kael if she makes “the campus circuit,” hoping to continue their conversation in person.69

67 Correspondence from Bevan Davies to Pauline Kael. 30 March 1970, Box 9, Pauline Kael Archive, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. 68 Correspondence from Rosemary Henberg to Pauline Kael. 31 March 1970, Box 9, Pauline Kael Archive, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. 69 Ibid, 2-3.

85 Kael was popular with professional adults, but she also appealed to college students, looking to better understand the cinema. These writers were less concerned with ideological or formal analysis, and they embraced Kael’s preferences for the aspects of film in terms of narrative and character that made cinema a widely-appealing form of popular culture. Lauren Floetke, writing in 1970, explains Kael’s influence on her: “At the time that I first discovered your criticisms [sic] I was eighteen and had just entered college. At a time when I was discovering the depth of beauty in the arts, at a time when I needed a guide, I found in your work a deep love and appreciation not only for the art of films but for all the other arts, most particularly literature.”70 Floetke demonstrates how Kael influenced her newfound film appreciation and illustrates that Kael’s literary approach was an effective way to help readers new to film appreciation better understand the medium. Floetke concludes, “You have been a teacher in the highest most honorable term.”71 Interestingly,

Floetke first became interested in Kael’s work because of her review of a New American film made by well-known writer – Norman Mailer’s Wild 90 (1968).

Kael’s role as an educator and cinematic authority becomes especially clear in her many correspondences with college instructors and professors. Writers wrote from elite positions at prestigious programs or as instructors, looking to implement film studies into their courses. Despite their significant education and cultural capital, these writers regarded Kael as an authority and used their interest in the New Hollywood to learn about and debate the merits of cinema. College professors, schooled in literary and textual analysis, demonstrated their skills and training by challenging Kael’s interpretation, and

70 Correspondence from Lauren Floetke to Pauline Kael. 16 July 1970, Box 10, Pauline Kael Archive, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. 71 Ibid, 2.

86 their correspondence with Kael provided them an opportunity to engage in film criticism.

Gerald A. Joss, writing on Carnegie Institute of Technology letterhead, questions Kael’s opaque methodology: “You have a responsibility to thousands of book-oriented but cinematically naïve readers who want to know how in hell you arrive at your assessments.”

Joss continues, “Believe it or not, there are thousands of such educated people; but they won’t be convinced by most of your revues [sic] that they’re cinematic illiterates who ought to learn how to see all over again.”72 Joss is correct that Kael’s critical opinions could seem erratic, but his larger point demonstrates that Kael played an important role in helping an educated audience better understand the cinema. As Joss notes, Kael’s readers could be cultured and well-read but “cinematically naïve,” and it was Kael’s job to help them better understand the cinema. Joss’ letter further illustrates why Kael’s focus on popular cinema and use of literary analysis was an approach well-suited for an educated audience, whose understanding of film was primarily relegated to Hollywood.

Some readers contacted Kael for help in instituting film studies into their curriculum based on their appreciation of her accessible literary approach. For these readers who worked as educators, the New Hollywood offered films of equal cultural value to serious works of literature. Readers recognized that the American cinema demonstrated a cultural value that contradicted assessments of it as disposable mass culture, but they still wrote to

Kael looking for assistance. Donald P. Ringler,73 who taught English at San Mateo High

School in California, explains: “Last year we introduced a new American literature course,

72 Correspondence from Gerald A. Joss to Pauline Kael. 18 April 1967, Box 10, Pauline Kael Archive, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 73 In addition to teaching high school English, Ringler wrote about San Mateo film history for the local paper. The San Mateo Times published an article by Ringler on the history of silent cinema in San Mateo, entitled “Flashback on Early Fillums” Ringler was also one of the many amateur or aspiring film writers that looked to Kael for guidance. See: “Flashback on Early Fillums,” San Mateo Times, February 19, 1977, 37.

87 with some films.”74 For Ringler, the New Hollywood provided his students an opportunity for cultural analysis that was more relevant than works of classic literature: “We didn’t plan to eliminate the old Twain-Hawthorne-Melville Syndrome, but we did think that it was possible to live and share the experiences of being an American without going through the print of classical authors. 75 New Hollywood films could also supplant the old literary canon: “’Easy Rider,’ ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ and ‘Butch Cassidy’…can and do precipitate mutual feelings and class discussion on…themes in my classroom better than do the readings of ‘Huck Finn,’ ‘Moby Dick,’ and ‘The Scarlet Letter.’”76 Ringler included a provisional syllabus that incorporated cinema with works of literature organized by theme:

“The American Western,” “Horror (The American Gothic Tale),” “American Minorities,” etc.

The syllabus included Hollywood classics alongside a cult hit, What Ever Happened to Baby

Jane (1962), and an independent film, Nothing but a Man (1964).77 The syllabus demonstrates that Ringler, like Kael, primarily focused on Hollywood, because he believed this cinema was most relevant to his students, and he reciprocates Kael’s film appreciation by considering New Hollywood films alongside classics to provide his students a sense of context and film history.

Finally, Kael’s influence is evident in the many letters sent by directors, film professionals, and critics. Steven Spielberg and Robert Altman wrote Kael warm letters, thanking her for reviewing their work. Critics like Robert Christgau, who was at the start of his career as a music critic, praises Kael’s defense of the “interests of, ahem, Youth, without

74 Correspondence from Donald P. Ringler to Pauline Kael. 5 October 1970, Box 10, Pauline Kael Archive, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid. 77 Ibid, “Tentative Film List,” 2.

88 sounding like Nate Hentoff or Ralph Gleason.”78 Christgau was writing in support of Kael’s

Blow-Up (1966) review but seems to ignore her general distaste for youth culture. Director

Paul Schrader, whom Kael mentored, sent her an early draft of Taxi Driver and sought her advice and friendship throughout his career. Other prominent critics like Manny Farber wrote to wish Kael well, and she corresponded with reviewers from across the country.

Despite Kael’s harsh critiques in her published criticism, her correspondence demonstrates that film professionals respected her knowledge and analysis of the cinema, and Kael seems to have filled a lacuna between highly-formalized film studies programs in universities and more general education film studies in small colleges and high schools.79 Kael’s readers certainly viewed her as an authority on the cinema, but she remained approachable and discussed cinema in a way that educated audiences new to film appreciation could understand. In particular, her literary approach, evident in her emphasis on narrative and character and allusions to literary works, made her a good model for instructors looking to integrate film studies into English courses. She had less influence on university film studies programs based in theory and aesthetics, but her influence on American cinema at the time is clearly demonstrated by her correspondence. In fact, Kael was hired at UCLA as a guest lecturer for the 1970-71 academic year and was repeatedly asked by her alma mater, The

University of California-Berkeley, to teach film classes.80 Beyond her influence on academia,

78 Correspondence from Robert Christgau to Pauline Kael. 16 February 1967, Box 9, Pauline Kael Archive, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. 79 As Dana Polan demonstrates, film studies in the American academy dates back as early as 1915. Polan revises conventional wisdom that academic film studies was created in the 1960s. Nonetheless, the 1960s, represents a period of rapid institutionalization. See: Dana Polan, Scenes of Instruction: The Beginnings of U.S. Study of Film (Berkeley: California UP, 2007). 80 The University of California-Berkeley offered Kael the Beckman Professorship for the 1972 Spring Semester. In a letter from Oct. 5, 1971, John E. Jordan, the chair of the English department, explains that Kael would “give one course and perhaps two public lectures.” He continues, “We would hope certainly that you would like to give a course dealing with film, perhaps film and literature. We could probably arrange most

89 she compelled professional adults interested in film to explore film studies for themselves through self-directed study, and the fact her readers perceived her as an educator challenges distinctions between academic film analysis and popular reception.

Conclusion: The Rise of “High Concept”

Although the success of the blockbuster signaled the end of the New Hollywood,

Kael continued to write for New Yorker, retiring in 1991 after a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. However, seemingly as a coda to the New Hollywood, Kael reviewed the two films that inaugurated the “high-concept” era: Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) and George Lucas’

Star Wars: A New Hope (1977). Kael always appreciated Spielberg’s gift for entertainment, but she recognizes how Jaws represented something new: “It’s not only the visual technique of Jaws that’s different. The other big disaster movies are essentially the same as pre-Vietnam films, but Jaws isn’t.”81 Part of what made Jaws different, as Kael explains, was its self-aware humor: “The high point of the film’s humor is in seeing Shaw [a fisherman who hunts the great white] get it; this nut Ahab, with his hyper-masculine basso-profundo speeches, stands in for all the men who have to show they’re tougher than anybody.”82

Spielberg even sent Kael a telegram to express his appreciation of her review: “One thousand reviews later, you are the only writer who understood Jaws.”83 This

anything you would like to do.” In a follow-up letter, Jordan explains that Kael would “teach an upper division course.” Yet Kael refused, and in subsequent letters this refusal is attributed to both an illness and scheduling conflicts. On March 3, 1971, Jordan writes, “We are of course exceedingly sorry that you are unable to be with us as a Beckman Professor, and hope that something can be worked out another time.” Although Jordan continued to write Kael, demonstrating his eagerness to have her teach at Berkeley, she never accepted the position. See: Correspondence from John E. Jordan to Pauline Kael. 5 October 1971, Box 8, Pauline Kael Archive, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.; Correspondence from John E. Jordan to Pauline Kael. 3 March 1971, Box 8, Pauline Kael Archive, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. 81 Ibid. 82 Ibid, 196. 83 Correspondence from Steven Spielberg to Pauline Kael. 11 November 1976, Box 7, Pauline Kael Archive, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

90 correspondence demonstrates Kael’s influence as a critic while revealing the access she had to important Hollywood directors.84

In 1977, George Lucas’ Stars Wars: A New Hope entered American theatres. Kael recognized that Lucas and Spielberg were united in their commitment to the mass audience, but she argues that Star Wars was like the candy sold at the concession counter:

“‘Star Wars’ is like getting a box of Cracker Jacks which is all prizes.”85 The film provided a sugary rush but not substance: “An hour into it, children say that they’re ready to see it all over again; that’s because it’s an assemblage of spare parts – it has no emotional grip.”86

Kael understood that cinema could evoke childhood experiences, but she argues that evoking nostalgia was different than infantilizing the audience: “the excitement of those who call it the film of the year goes way past nostalgia to the feeling that now is the time to return to childhood.”87 Films could rekindle audiences’ early love with the movies without treating them like children, but Star Wars was the first of many films that allowed adults to feel like the children. Many of the top-grossing films of the 1980s, E.T the Extra-Terrestrial

(1982), Batman (1989), and the Indiana Jones movies appealed to children and to adults looking to re-experience a sense of childhood. Unlike New Hollywood films that challenged

84 Kael’s influence as a critic landed her a Hollywood job. Paramount studios wanted Kael’s creative ideas and feedback on upcoming projects. On May 9, 1979, Paramount Pictures sent Kael a letter to inform her of the conditions of her employment as a “creative production executive for a term of five months commencing as of May 1, 1979.” Her job, per the letter, required: “suggesting possible ideas, screenplays and other literary material suitable for motion picture development or production; analyzing and evaluating ideas, screenplays and other similar literary material referred to her by other Paramount executives or third parties; “recommending appropriate writers, directors, actors, and other talent…” Kael was compensated $50,000. Warren Beatty helped facilitate Kael’s employment, but she only lasted a few months and returned to criticism See: Correspondence from Kenneth Ziffren, Paramount Pictures, to Pauline Kael. 9 May 1979, Box 6, Pauline Kael Archive, Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. 85 Pauline Kael, “Contrasts,” When the Lights Go Down (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), 291. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid.

91 audiences to confront complex issues while providing entertainment, popular cinema of the “me” decade asked less.

Ultimately, Kael’s reception of Jaws and Star Wars had little overall effect on their box office success.88 While Kael’s review of Bonnie and Clyde helped establish it as an important New Hollywood film, the success of the blockbuster made audiences less interested in her reviews. Kael had always appreciated Hollywood as commercial cinema, but she appreciated cinema that grappled with serious themes and appealed to educated adults while still providing entertainment. This appreciation was an essential aspect of

Kael’s criticism, because it challenged perceived binaries of art and entertainment by celebrating popular culture that appealed to an educated middle class. However,

Hollywood’s embrace of pure entertainment and abandonment of formal ambition hampered the popularity of serious-minded critics, who challenged a critical paradigm that considered commercial cinema “low” culture. Longform critics of Hollywood like Kael,

Susan Sontag, and Andrew Sarris were eventually replaced by newspaper critics like

Rodger Ebert, who also appeared on television. Kael’s career continued until the early

1990s, but the rise of the blockbuster in 1975 again cleaved “art “and “entertainment” and relegated serious critics to niche roles. Nonetheless, Kael recognized how the New

Hollywood changed American perceptions of the cinema. In her criticism, Kael demonstrated how the New Hollywood synthesized American populist art and popular

88Due to excessive licensing, Star Wars’ characters and images are now ubiquitous, and the franchise has helped sell everything from backpacks to hamburgers. The film has produced countless sequels and spinoffs, including Christmas specials and children’s cartoons. The franchise also remains incredibly popular. The latest installment, Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017), with a running time of 2 hours and 32 minutes, grossed over 600 million dollars domestically (Box Office Mojo). Audiences are willing to accept bloated run times as long as Star Wars continues to deliver on the brand’s trademark effects and excitement. See: “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” boxofficemojo.com, accessed September 27, 2019, https://bit.ly/2m5fIib.

92 cinema to create an innovative and entertaining auteurist cinema. As Kael recognized, the audience for Last Tango or Robert Altman did not stop going to theatre entirely, but they retreated to familiar comforts. Writing in 1978, Kael asks if American audiences had become “afraid” of the movies.89 After the violence of Taxi Driver, the perversion of Last

Tango in Paris, Kael writes, “Discriminating moviegoers want the placidity of nice art – of movies tamed so that they are no more arousing than what used to be called polite theatre.”90

Although Kael was often negative, she knew Hollywood cinema produced from

1965-75 was important, and she used her criticism of the New Hollywood to challenge

“highbrow” criticism that dismissed Hollywood as disposable mass culture. In contrast,

Kael celebrated the American cinema as popular culture and populist art while challenging constructed binaries between art and entertainment. As Kael understood, the New

Hollywood was cinema that audiences would celebrate and rediscover. Classical Hollywood had influenced European New Wave cinemas, which, in turn, had influenced a new generation of American cinema. In recognizing this influence, Kael was determined not to let the educated readers of the New Yorker, who often looked abroad for “art,” ignore the influence of Hollywood. Contrary to Jonas Mekas, Kael argued that cinematic appreciation was not about rejecting the commercial cinema. Unlike Parker Tyler, Kael was less interested in critiquing the cinema’s support of dominant American values than in defending the importance of popular culture. In the end, Kael’s working-class background and populist taste influenced her support of American commercial cinema, and she

89 Pauline Kael, “Fear of Movies,” When the Lights Go Down (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980), 427. 90 Ibid, 428, emphasis org.

93 reminded her readers of the importance of film as populist art and popular culture. Finally,

Kael was something of an aberration in a culture defined by partisan identifications: politically and socially, she was not precisely liberal nor entirely conservative. In terms of her own taste, she loved musicals but championed auteurs. She was thus something of an intermediary. However, Jonas Mekas particularly opposed her bourgeois complacency and demanded an alternative to Hollywood. To find this cinema, Mekas would look beyond the sunny studio backlots of southern California to American city streets, lofts, and alternative exhibition spaces.

94 Chapter 3

Jonas Mekas’ “Visionary” Cinema: The New American Cinema and Cultural Renewal

“…if Jonas Mekas did not exist, the Establishment would have to invent him.”

– Andrew Sarris, “The Independent Cinema,” 1967

In July 1963, a New Yorker writer visited a downtown loft to profile a group of filmmakers dedicated to the distribution of independent and experimental American cinema for the uptown and suburban readers who consumed the magazine. In a snapshot of downtown that departed from the magazine’s usual uptown focus, the author describes the filmmakers’ loft that contained “a battered couch; two movie projectors; some film- editing equipment; and several live film-makers, who, we learned, wandered in out and all day to chat, use the equipment and occasionally sleep on the floor.”1 If the offices resembled a flophouse, it was due to the filmmakers’ inability to profit from their films and their professed ambivalence about finding additional work. Jonas Mekas, “a lean ascetic looking-man,” explains: “None of us can support ourselves by making films. Some have regular jobs, some have odd jobs, but many of the most talented don’t want to give up the time, and don’t have jobs at all.”2 The profile, which appealed to the New Yorker reader’s interest in downtown bohemia, depicts the Filmmaker’s Co-operative’s spartan offices and its members’ quasi-religious devotion to filmmaking like a monastic order devoted to cinema but angry at American society. As the author explains, “Ken Jacobs, a film-maker, who wandered in during our discussion...described himself as ‘just thirty and very angry.’”3

1 “Cinema Underground,” New Yorker, July 13, 1963, 17. 2 Ibid, 16-17. 3 Ibid.

95 When asked about a Ford Foundation grant the Co-op had won: “Mekas nodded and smiled,” but “Ken Jacobs looked angry.”4

The New Yorker profile highlights an animating tension of the 1960’s New York experimental film community. On one the hand, Jonas Mekas wanted to promote the New

American Cinema as an alternative to Hollywood and was willing to accept institutional support when needed. On the other hand, underground filmmakers like Ken Jacobs wanted to retain a non-commercial “purity” that would allow them to pursue an unconstrained artistic vision.5 While not strictly binary, there was a tension between Mekas’ mainstream ambitions, and Jacobs’ desire for artistic autonomy. However, beyond these internecine disputes, Mekas and Jacobs were both angry about the American social status-quo and believed personal expression through cinema could reform society. These filmmakers also sought to challenge appreciations of art propagated by publications like the New Yorker that celebrated high culture and encouraged their readers that knowledgeable cultural consumption was an essential aspect of a middle-class lifestyle. In viewing the cinema as an agent of cultural change, Mekas describes the New American Cinema in terms of change:

“These new happenings in our cinema reveal that man is reaching, growing into new areas of himself, areas which are deadened by culture, or scared, or sleeping.”6

4 Ibid; Mekas responded to the column in a July 25, 1963 column, criticizing the author’s comparison of the New American Cinema to British working-class literature from the 1950s: “The films of Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith, Ron Rice, Brakhage, etc., and the writings of the new poets have no anger similar to that of the British ‘angry young men.’” Rather, in characteristic terms, Mekas describes the New American Cinema in terms of spiritual rebirth: “There is a longing for a deeper, more essential (and more existential) change of man.” See: Jonas Mekas, “July 25, 1963, WHY WE AREN’T ANGRY YOUNG MEN,” in Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-71 (New York: Collier Books, 1972), 88 5 Stan Brakhage became particularly opposed to the commercialization of experimental cinema and publicly denounced the Film-Makers’ Distribution Center. See: Lauren Rabinovitz, “Wearing the Critics Hat: History, Discourses, and the American Avant-Garde Cinema” in To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground, ed. David James (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), 279. 6 Jonas Mekas, “August 8, 1963, CHANGING TECHNIQUE OF CINEMA,” in Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-71 (New York: Collier Books, 1972), 92.

96 Filmmaker, critic, and distributor Jonas Mekas promoted the New American Cinema due to his belief that a “poetic” American cinema rooted in self-expression could reform a middle-class culture based in capitalist consumption and social conformity. While the New

American Cinema was produced and consumed across the country, Mekas operated at the center of the New York underground, which was an important center of experimental and independent cinema production, but, in his roles as critic and distributor, Mekas promoted cinema produced across the country. Unlike Parker Tyler and Pauline Kael, Mekas did not provide evaluative judgement of new films, and he rarely wrote about cinema he disliked unless he was doing so for polemical purposes. He explains, “I am not a reviewer. I write,

[sic] I comment only those aspects which interest me. I never review the films.”7 Mekas also regularly criticized mainstream film critics, arguing that conventional criticism suppressed the growth of a more “poetic” cinema. Mekas implores his readers,“...try to live without criticizing! The trouble with our cinema is that we have film critics and film reviewers.”8

Mekas was a Lithuanian immigrant, who emigrated to New York City in 1949.

During the Second World War, Mekas lived in Biržai, Lithuania, where he wrote literary articles and poetry before participating in anti-Nazi resistance and escaping in 1944.9

Following the War, Jonas Mekas and his brother, Adolfas Mekas, lived in a displaced person’s camp, and Jonas Mekas studied philosophy at the University of Mainz before moving to the United States. Upon arriving in New York and settling in Brooklyn, Jonas

Mekas dedicated himself to the cinema and began to promote independent cinema through

7 Mekas, “February 6, 1969, ON GEORGE KUCHAR,” in Movie Journal, 334. 8 Mekas, “June 28, 1962, ON FILM CRITICISM AND MYSELF,” in Movie Journal, 62; Mekas expressed antipathy towards reviewers could be outright combative. For instance, the title of his Nov. 7, 1968 column was also his argument: “WHY WE SHOULD THROW BRICKS AT FILM CRITICS.” 9 Michael Casper has recently problematized Mekas’ account of his time during the War.

97 several related roles.10 First, Mekas was a lover of the cinema and a dedicated film consumer, who regularly attended screenings at Cinema 16. While potentially apocryphal,

Mekas claims to have attended “absolutely every screening...of the so-called experimental films in Cinema 16’s entire existence.”11 Yet, Mekas wanted to promote films that Cinema

16 ignored, and, in 1962, he formed the Filmmaker’s Co-operative, which was dedicated to the distribution of American experimental and independent film, with a group of influential filmmakers. As a result, Mekas’ promotion of the New American Cinema through his published film criticism supported his distribution efforts. Despite his critiques of

Hollywood’s profit motive, Mekas was a shrewd promotor, who understood the logistical and financial aspects of film production and distribution. Independent and experimental cinema typically received less promotion and press coverage than commercial cinema, but adequate promotion was essential to creating demand for rentals. Mekas returned rental fees to the filmmakers and used profits to keep the Co-op running, but the logistics of distribution required Mekas to treat film as a commodity.

The Village Voice, which published “Movie Journals” from 1959-71, provided Mekas an effective platform to promote the New American Cinema due to its liberal politics, respected arts coverage, and influential coverage of the cinema. The Voice attracted readers who lived beyond Greenwich Village and appealed to a broader readership than low- circulation publications like Film Culture, which was written solely for dedicated cineastes.

As Devon Powers explains, “The Voice both recognized and fostered the Village’s

10 Lost in some discussions of Mekas’ career is his filmmaking, but, as David E. James explains, “it has never been easy to hold his films in common focus with his other activities” See: David E. James, “Introduction,” in To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground, ed. David James (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), 16. 11 Mekas qtd. in Scott MacDonald, introduction to Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society, ed. Scott MacDonald (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002), 24.

98 emboldening bohemian community and, in the process, played a key role in enlarging the

Village’s conceptual borders.”12 The Voice was less radical than mimeographed papers like the East Village Other but still appealed to a counterculture audience that appreciated transgressive cinema and writing critical of bourgeois values. The magazine also presented a stark contrast to the New Yorker. While the New Yorker spoke to an educated readership that used cultural consumption to demonstrate their social status, the Village Voice represented a bohemian sensibility that challenged middle-class values.

Mekas’ film writing appeared in a range of publications, but his “Movie Journal” columns represent a period of concentrated engagement with the New American Cinema in a publication known for its arts coverage. 13 As Mekas recognized, the Voice’s readers overlapped with the audience of Cinema 16, who were young, well-educated, and enthusiastic cinema consumers.14 Writing in a Aug. 23, 1964 column, Mekas explains how the Voice’s readers were unique: “The truth is, [sic] there is a natural selection that takes place in the audience. Not ‘everybody’ reads The Village Voice where the avant-garde listings are announced; only certain people, with certain aesthetic and social preoccupations, with special sensitivities and interests.”15 Here, it appears that Mekas limits the New American Cinema audience to a select “in-group,” but he cleverly interpellates his readers by associating them with discriminating taste.

12 Devon Powers, Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), 24. 13 Jonas Mekas founded Film Culture in 1954 with his brother, Adolfas Mekas. 14 Vogel regularly surveyed Cinema 16’s membership. See: introduction to Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society, ed. Scott MacDonald (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002), 13. 15 Mekas, “April 23, 1964, ON LAW, MORALITY, AND CENSORSHIP,” in Movie Journal, 133.

99 The Voice was also notable for its film writing that covered everything from well- known Hollywood films to obscure experimental shorts. As Dennis Lim describes, the Voice was [w]ritten by and for cinephiles,” and he notes that “The Voice’s film pages recontextualized Hollywood and explored the avant-garde.”16 The “must-reads,” as J.

Hoberman explains, were Mekas’ “Movie Journal,” which first appeared on Nov. 12, 1958, and Andrew Sarris’ “Films in Focus.”17 Mekas covered independent and experimental cinema, and Andrew Sarris covered the commercial cinema.18 This division of labor allowed the Voice to cover a variety of films while enabling writers to cultivate areas of expertise. According to J. Hoberman, an influential critic from the Voice, who began reviewing films for the magazine in 1977, “While Mekas was totally committed to the new,

Andrew Sarris was the first regular movie reviewer who consistently and programmatically put current movies in their film-historical context.”19 Overall, the magazine profoundly affected American film culture through its publication of influential critics, and its reception of American cinema that challenged American middle-class values.

In contrast, the New Yorker primarily focused on mainstream Hollywood and art house cinema that did not offend the cultural sensibilities of a middle-class readership.

16 Dennis Lim, introduction to The Village Voice Film Guide: 50 Years of Movies from Classics to Cult Hits, ed. Dennis Lim (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2007), 1. 17 J. Hoberman, “A History of Film Criticism at the Village Voice,” in The Village Voice Film Guide, 4. 18 There are a few exceptions. Mekas occasionally wrote about Hollywood films, expressing appreciation for John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Orson Welles. In a few instances, he also covered art house cinema, demonstrated by his reviews of Jean Renoir, Yasujirō Ozu, Robert Bresson, and more. Here, too, Mekas would evoke a gendered discourse. Writing about Zabriskie Point (1970), Mekas remarks, “But something bothers me. You see, Antonioni’s women are always more intelligent than his men. But the man of Zabriskie Point is too naive and too unintelligent.” See: Jonas Mekas, “February 10, 1970, IN DEFENSE OF ZABRISKIE POINT, (1),” in Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-71 (New York: Collier Books, 1972), 371. 19 Ibid; Later, in the 1970s, the Voice employed the influential film critic, Molly Haskell, who provided a feminist perspective that challenged the male-controlled discourse of film criticism

100 Yet, it is important to recognize how Mekas’ film writing in the Voice was not intended to provide critical feedback like conventional film criticism, and his approach differed from mainstream critics like Pauline Kael and subcultural critics like Parker Tyler.

Kael and Tyler both provided evaluative assessments in their criticism that considered cinema within a larger history, but Mekas used criticism to support his distribution and exhibition efforts and advocate for independent filmmakers. Mekas’ criticism considered the New American Cinema a “revolution” to promote this cinema as new and radical, but

Kael evaluated the “New” Hollywood within larger tradition to demonstrate the American cinema’s evolution. Critics who understood experimental film history and aesthetics likewise rejected Mekas’ promotional criticism. Parker Tyler criticized Mekas’ “partisan” advocacy of the New American Cinema, and he argued that film criticism needed to be rooted in political, aesthetic, and historical analysis. Tyler was especially critical of the New

American Cinema, which he considered amateurish and unimaginative, and he critiqued the experimental underground’s appropriation of queer aesthetics. But, at his most polemical, Mekas rejected film criticism entirely, viewing the critic’s role as the artist’s advocate and promoter.

Mekas’ promotion of the New American Cinema attempted to establish an alternative to Hollywood. In discursive terms, Mekas’ description of the New American

Cinema as a “revolution” rejected Hollywood and positioned the New American Cinema as a more artistic, less constrained alternative. In terms of material change, Mekas’

“revolution” occurred through his distribution efforts, which included his attempts to make rentals of New American films widely available to film consumers. While it is difficult to assess the degree to which Mekas genuinely believed the New American Cinema could

101 supplant Hollywood – or if his “revolution” was simply a rhetorical attempt to promote the

New American Cinema – Mekas surely wanted experimental and independent cinema to reach a larger audience, if for no other reason, to support his distribution efforts. Scholars have recognized Mekas’ attempts to promote the New American Cinema beyond the art market in order to challenge Hollywood’s hegemony. David E. James explains how Mekas attempted to reach a larger audience to reform American film culture: “Not only was a mass audience essential to [Mekas’] political objectives...but industrial production was intrinsic to any cinema of which he could then conceive.”20 As James argues, Mekas believed

Hollywood was “structurally incapable of responding to the realities of American life,” and he wanted to “reinvent the medium” by changing the American cinema’s production and reception.21 However, Mekas’ desire to supplant Hollywood with experimental cinema also engendered criticism from avant-garde and subcultural critics. Parker Tyler, for instance, believed Mekas misunderstood the nature of experimental cinema that would appeal only to a vanguard audience.

Most importantly, Mekas promoted the New American Cinema as an alternative to

Hollywood because he believed an independent cinema rooted in self-exploration and expression could help combat a postwar American social and political status-quo. In this regard, Mekas used film criticism to argue that cinema could reform an American character rooted in capitalist consumption and social conformity. However, by celebrating a heroic male artist, producing an artisanal cinema that stood in opposition to a mechanized consumer culture, Mekas employed a critical discourse that celebrated male artistic

20 David James, To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground, ed. David James (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), 8, my emphasis. 21 Ibid.

102 achievement as a way to combat a perceived “crisis of masculinity.” Like Abstract

Expressionism, Bebop, and Beat poetry, which posed parallel challenges to dominant

American middle-class values, the New American Cinema demonstrated a spontaneity that was at odds with regimented corporate employment and suburban social conformity.

While avant-garde jazz and poetry were associated with African Americans, gays, and

Communists, who existed outside of an imagined, white middle-class, Mekas took the Beat revolt against the middle-class to the cinema. Consequently, Mekas championed a “poetic” cinema that reflected Beat values of individualism, free expression, and spiritual fulfillment.

“Beat,” after all, was derived from “beatific,” meaning “making blessed,” and Mekas’ arguments about the cinema’s spiritual nature echoed writers Allen Ginsberg and Jack

Kerouac, who found a similar spirituality in poetry and prose.22 But, like the Beats, Mekas lionized male achievement, and, as a result, his criticism marginalized women’s contributions to an alternative cinema that should have openly welcomed them.

In her study on women filmmakers and the New York avant-garde, Lauren

Rabinovitz reminds us that “women artists remained prisoners of an ideology that even constructed their points of resistance within traditional social roles.”23 Filmmakers Shirley

Clarke, Marie Menken, and Barbara Rubin made valuable contributions to the New

American Cinema, and Maya Deren, whose work belongs to a second-wave of American experimental filmmaking, was an important influence. Deren’s exhibition of her work at the

Provincetown Playhouse, as well as her attempts to control distribution, also influenced

Mekas’ distribution and exhibition efforts. As David E. James describes, “Since the war there

22 Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 6th ed. (2007), s.v. “Beatific.” 23 Lauren Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance: Women, Power, and Politics in the New York Avant-garde Cinema, 1943-71 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 5.

103 had been several attempts to organize the independent film community in New York, most of them filled by Maya Deren.”24 While Mekas did support some women filmmakers, his

“Movie Journal” columns contributed to a discourse that privileged male artists.25 Mekas’ columns championed the work of Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, John Cassavetes, Ken

Jacobs, Hollis Frampton and other male filmmakers. Although Mekas valued the New

American Cinema for its expressions of personal vision, this vision was more often than not a male gaze. As Mekas explains, “The modern American film…is…created by new men with new sensibilities.”26 When Mekas did acknowledge women’s contributions, he often resorted to gendered stereotypes. For instance, in a column from July 1963, Mekas announces: “There are new things coming to cinema, too…Women are coming to cinema.”27

However, Women had “arrived” well before this pronouncement, and Mekas describes their contributions in typically feminine terms: Storm De Hirsch’s films, for instance, evoked an “unseen sensuousness”; Barbara Rubin was “pouring her heart out”; and Marie

Menken’s “flower heart bloom[ed].”28

Ultimately, Mekas’ criticism affirmed normative gender roles by arguing that male artists were uniquely able to reform American culture. Mekas was not alone in diagnosing personal freedom as a solution for a culture in “crisis,” but he argued that Hollywood with

24 David James, “Introduction,” in To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground, ed. David James (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), 9. 25 It is important to remember that very few women had opportunities as directors after the institutionalization of the sound film and the establishment of the studio system in the late-1920s. However, Jane Gaines questions accounts of women’s participation in the film industry that clearly demarcates a silent “heyday of women” from later periods. While changes in political economy provide one reason why women were removed as directors and producers, Gaines reminds us it is not “as though women were working one day and let go the next.” Instead, Gaines suggests scholars “think in terms of multiple and disparate developments” in order to consider “what happened” to women in the film industry. See: Jane Gaines, Pink- Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 24. 26 Mekas, “March 2, 1961, ON IMPROVISATION AND SPONTANEITY,” in Movie Journal, 27. 27 Mekas, “July 25, 1963, ON WOMEN IN CINEMA,” in Movie Journal, 89. 28 Ibid, 90.

104 its industrial production and profit incentive was uniquely representative of postwar

America’s problems. In response, Mekas championed artisanal, highly-personal cinema that could provide men autonomy through self-expression, but, in promoting this cinema,

Mekas affirmed ideological aspects of a middle-class American society he purported to challenge. Like the Beats who influenced him, Mekas relegated women to secondary roles, supporting the normative gender roles that defined so much of postwar American life. At the same time, however, Mekas used film criticism to challenge normative American values, and he uniquely conceptualized the cinema as an agent of cultural change. Instead of evaluatively reviewing films or providing aesthetic analysis, Mekas used film criticism to promote experimental and independent cinema by rejecting American middle-class values that supported consumer culture. In appealing to and interpellating a male readership,

Mekas also argued that personal expression through cinema could provide men a sense of autonomy and free them from the demands of corporate employment and suburban domesticity. In this sense, he positioned the cinema alongside popular culture like jazz, rock n’ roll, and Beat literature that posed parallel challenges to an imagined white middle class. However, Mekas’ appeals for cultural reformation were primarily discursive and intended to provide promotion for the experimental and independent cinema he produced, distributed, and exhibited.

Criticism As Promotion

In consecutive “Movie Journal” columns from September 1965, Mekas directed his anger about the New York film festival at Pauline Kael, explaining how the festival’s selections and Kael’s criticism reflected a similar “middle-road” approach to cinema appreciation. The impetus for Mekas’ comparison was the festival’s omission of the New

105 American Cinema: “The complete misrepresentation of the American cinema at the New

York Film Festival – the exclusion of one its most creative part, the avant-garde, the underground cinema leads us to believe that other countries may be as badly represented as our own.”29 The festival, which opened with Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) and closed with Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard (1965), had ignored Mekas’ favorite directors:

Harry Smith, Stan Brakhage, and Andy Warhol. Kael’s first book, I Lost it At the Movies, published the same year in 1965, had also ignored the New American Cinema. In reference to Kael’s punning title, Mekas acidly remarks, “Now I know what Pauline Kael lost at the movies: the taste for cinema.”30 In Mekas’ view, Kael was too enamored with Hollywood to accept filmmakers who “want her to wake up, to change,” although the experimental cinema he championed struggled to reach audiences.31

In an attempt to generate enthusiasm for the New American Cinema, Mekas used a promotional film criticism that attempted to counteract Hollywood’s popularity by championing an independent and experimental cinema that attracted less attention. Years after the 1965 New York Film Festival, Mekas was forced to acknowledge that “screenings of avant-garde film around New York City, at the Cinematheque [sic] or some other place if not specially pushed, seldom attract more than twenty or thirty people.”32 Mekas could acknowledge that most people thought of Hollywood when they proposed “’going to the movies,’” but he was in a unique position: “I happen to know the depth and scope of the

29 Mekas, “September 16, 1965, THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL AS AN ENEMY OF THE NEW CINEMA,” in Movie Journal, 203. 30 Mekas, “September 23, 1965, WHAT PAULINE KAEL LOST AT THE MOVIES, AND WHY THE NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL DOESN’T INDICATE THE REAL STATE OF CINEMA,” in Movie Journal, 205; I cannot verify whether this exchange occurred, but Mekas’ tone suggests he fictionalized it for polemical purposes. 31 Ibid. 32 Mekas, “April 24, 1969, ON THE CHANGING NATURE OF AVANT-GARDE FILM SCREENINGS,” in Movie Journal, 343.

106 revolution in form and content which is going on in the film underground today, and I can’t be silent about it.”33 Mekas then explains his critical philosophy: “I don’t think a responsible movie critic can go by people’s definition of cinema. That’s why I go back to the underground. I know that the majority of you cannot see this cinema; but that is exactly the point: It is my duty to bring this cinema to your attention. I will bark about it until our theatres start showing this cinema.”34

Most mainstream critics took a different approach, treating films in evaluative terms. Critics like Bosley Crowther assessed whether a film was “good” or “bad,” letting readers know if a film was worth the investment of its ticket price and run time. This was a pragmatic approach to reviewing a large number of commercial films. But film reviewing is a subjective enterprise, and some critics looked to literary analysis to provide a veneer of objectivity. New Criticism emphasized close reading and textual analysis and influenced how some reviewers approached film criticism. However, critics like Manny Farber, who were concerned with film aesthetics, recognized the cinema’s unique formal aspects and rejected an approach taken from literary analysis. Mekas’ film criticism indiscriminately blended aspects of a literary and formal criticism but most often took the form of vague

“spiritual” pronouncements. Mekas explains, “if the critic has any function at all, it is to look for something good and beautiful around him, something that could get man to grow from inside.”35 In response to the New American Cinema’s detractors, Mekas remarks, “It is

33 Mekas, “May 2, 1963, THE IRRESPONSIBILITY OF MY COLLEAGUE FILM CRITICS” in Movie Journal, 85. 34 Ibid. 35 Mekas, “May 10, 1962, ON FILM CRITICISM,” in Movie Journal, 59.

107 unfamiliarity with the creative manifestation of man’s spirit that has, recently, provided us with foolish statements about the so-called New American Cinema.”36

New American Cinema rooted in formal exploration was often non-narrative and could not be considered through literary analysis. Although literary comparisons emerge in

Mekas’ criticism, he encourages his readers to focus on the image. 37 “Our thinking is still so literary,” he complained in 1963. “We have no immediate sense of the image itself, no immediate experience of the image, what’s happening in it.”38 Mekas viewed the non- narrative cinema as “a turn from the New York realist school (the cinema of ‘surface’ meanings and social engagement) toward a cinema of disengagement and new freedom.”39

Mekas, who had earlier criticized abstract films because they “do not appear to be part of the surrounding world,”40 now celebrates “a desire for experience of pure words, sounds, colors, forms.”41 Mekas’ early criticism had supported narrative films influenced by direct cinema documentary, but, in the mid-1960s, he embraced the formalist cinema that would dominate his interests until the 1970s. As he explains, “So we should stop crying that there is no plot in the new cinema. There is plot in the new cinema and there is story in the new cinema: Only that plot and that story is on another level of being, so no doubt it had different characteristics and laws and different logic (illogic)?”42

36 Mekas, “September 27, 1962, ABOUT THE CHANGING FRONTIERS OF CINEMA,” in Movie Journal, 68. 37 After all, Mekas regularly referred to the New American Cinema as “film poetry.” 38 Mekas, “February 28, 1963, ON IMMEDIATE SEEING,” in Movie Journal, 78. 39 Mekas, “May 2, 1963, ON THE BAUDELAIREAN CINEMA,” in Movie Journal, 85. 40 Jonas Mekas, “The Experimental Film in America,” in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Praeger, 1970), 22. 41 Mekas, “December 9, 1965, THE NEED FOR NARRATIVE AND NONNARRATIVE EXPRESSIONS IN THE ARTS, ” in Movie Journal, 219. 42 Mekas, “August 1, 1968, ON ERNIE GEHR AND THE ‘PLOTLESS CINEMA,” in Movie Journal, 316

108 Mekas wrote about cinema that was ineffable or difficult to describe but continued to emphasize how this cinema demonstrated personal expression that could lead to cultural reformation. Structuralist cinema that emerged in the mid-1960s resisted straightforward prose descriptions due to its emphasis on cinematic form and temporality.

Yet, Mekas, who championed structuralist filmmakers Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow, analyzed this abstract cinema in terms of personal expression instead of focusing on its novel formal aspects. As Mekas explains, “It’s through the form that we perceive the content, style. The manner in which it’s done (the rhythm, the pace) reveals, tells us something about the temperament, emotions...of the artist.”43 Earlier in the 1960s, in analyzing the editing and camera movement of Stan Brakhage’s films that signaled his transition from the psychodrama to a “visionary” style of cinema,44 Mekas explains,

“Movement can now go from complete immobility to a blurred swish vision to a million unpredictable speeds and ecstasies...The classic film vocabulary allows (or recognizes) only the slowly, respectably Brooks-Brothers-suit paced camera movements.”45 Here, Mekas emphasizes that Hollywood’s formal aspects such as continuity editing and carefully framed mise-en-scè ne reflected an American social status-quo of conformity as exemplified by the middle-class American male’s uniform: the Brooks Brothers suit. This reference interpellated a male reader and reveals how Mekas’ arguments for cultural renewal spoke to an imagined white middle class. For middle-class men, living in the suburbs and working

43 Mekas, “May 29, 1969, MORE ON FORM, STRUCTURE, AND PROPORTION,’ in Movie Journal, 346. 44 While Mekas’ reviews of structuralist film and Brakhage creates a sense of continuity between Brakhage and filmmakers like Snow and Frampton, Sitney disputes this association. In Sitney’s reading, Brakhage’s films reflect a “cinema of the mind rather than the eye” despite his formal experimentation. Conversely, Sitney viewed Warhol’s temporal explorations as an important precursor to structuralist film, although Warhol is “spiritually at the opposite pole from the structural filmmakers.” See: P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-1978 (New York: Oxford UP, 1979), 373. 45 Mekas, “August 9, 1963, CHANGING TECHNIQUES OF CINEMA,” in Movie Journal, 91.

109 corporate office jobs, an abstract cinema based purely in self-expression could provide a sense of “freedom.” Mekas explains, “These new happenings in our cinema reveal that man is reaching, growing into new areas of himself.”46 The New American Cinema, in Mekas’ estimation, was a manifestation of a liberated postwar man, who represented a distinct sense of rebellion that challenged the middle-class values promoted by the New Yorker:

“Often unnoticed, often misinterpreted, man’s growth continues...[and] when his growth manifests itself in overt action, it shocks some of us with its unfamiliar angelic beauty.

An Authority on Film

Mekas’ promotion of the New American Cinema attempted to make independent and experimental cinema a viable alternative to Hollywood by challenging a distribution and exhibition system that ignored it. The statement of the New American Cinema Group, which Mekas helped formed in 1960, made exhibition the subject of its fifth point, which vowed to “take a stand against the present distribution-exhibition policies.”47 In bombastic language, Mekas and the Co-op members declare, “it is time to blow the whole thing up.”48

Although independent theaters exhibited the New American Cinema across New York City, and Americans elsewhere saw it at independent theaters, institutions of higher education, film festivals, and travelling exhibitions, Mekas wanted the New American Cinema to be widely available to the point of challenging Hollywood. 49 One prescient solution was to bring the New American Cinema directly into the American home. Writing before the advent of VHS home video, Mekas wanted to make 8mm rentals available at books stores

46 Ibid, 92. 47 “The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group,” in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Praeger, 1970), 81. 48 Ibid, 82. 49 Important sites of experimental film exhibition included Cinema 16, the Bleeker Street Cinema, The Charles, and, later, Film Forum (1970).

110 and considered partnering with ESP records, a progressive jazz label, to distribute tapes in record stores, placing the New American Cinema in stores where Americans purchased other media.50 Mekas warns, “If you close your theaters, we’ll invade the Beautiful

American Home, we’ll undermine and ‘corrupt’ you from inside!”51 The home seemed the paragon of domesticity, but, in fact the suburban ideal was under constant threat. By 1965, the year of Mekas’ proposed invasion, popular culture had already provided teenagers with films and songs about rebellion. “Teen pics” and rock n’ roll encouraged generational strife and stoked adult fears about juvenile delinquency. As American studies scholar Thomas

Doherty explains, “The juvenile delinquent of the 1950s was a terrifying crime problem because he resisted a reassuring socioeconomic analysis, especially if (as was increasingly the case) he came from a fairly well-off background.”52 The iconic youth rebel of the 1950s,

Jim Stark, played by James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause (1955), became a model of suburban rebellion, and, for Mekas, Dean’s performance signaled a new period of American culture had begun: “There was no true American way of life until James Dean – there was only a bastardized Europe.”53

In Mekas’ estimation, Dean helped initiate a period of American culture that expressed themes of male autonomy and rebellion. As Mekas explains in a description of the “young actor”: “he doesn’t trust any will but his own, which nevertheless he knows is so frail, so harmless – no will at all, only distant deep waves, and motions and a voice and

50 Paul Arthur, “Routes of Emancipation: Alternative Cinema in the Ideology and Politics of the Sixties,” in To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground, ed. David James (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), 31. 51 Mekas, “May 13, 1965, ON FLY-BY-NIGHT FELLOWS, OR HOW THE UNDERGROUND FILM IS INVADING THE BEAUTIFUL AMERICAN HOME,” in Movie Journal, 187. 52 Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2002), 100. 53 Mekas, “March 2, 1961, ON IMPROVISATION AND SPONTANEITY,” in Movie Journal, 29.

111 groan of a Marlon Brando, James Dean, Ben Carruthers – waiting, listening (the same way

Kerouac is listening…or Coltrane; or Leslie.”54 For Mekas, these artists – Brando, Dean,

Kerouac, and Coltrane – created work that reflected an emergent zeitgeist. While Mekas’ celebration of an iconic Hollywood actor may belie his repeated claims about the superiority of the experimental cinema, Mekas believed that James Dean, popular for films produced in the 1950s, demonstrated a prescient sense of cultural rebellion that would be fully articulated in the New American Cinema.55 Although the above quotation also supports Parker Tyler’s claim that Mekas was not particularly well-versed in experimental cinema and was too concerned with Hollywood and popular culture as models of cultural production, it demonstrates Juan Suárez’s claims about the relationship between popular culture and experimental film. Writers like P. Adams Sitney have treated experimental film as largely autonomous, but Suárez explains how cultural circulation created a relationship between the mainstream and avant-garde. In particular, the experimental underground, was “strongly influenced by…contemporary cultural and aesthetic currents.”56 Aspirational popular cultural models represented Mekas’ hopes that the New American Cinema could be both popular and artistic, and his mixture of Hollywood cinema with “higher” culture like jazz and literature reflected his embrace of a “new” sensibility. But crucially for Mekas, what united Brando, Dean, Kerouac, and Coltrane was the availability of their work. Films starring Marlon Brando and James Dean were Hollywood films that screened at commercial

54 Ibid, 28. 55 However, Mekas’ argument about Marlon Brando is more complicated. Mekas is likely celebrating Brando for his roles in films from the 1950s like Streetcar Named Desire (1951) or On the Waterfront (1954) that demonstrated his “method” acting. Of course, Brando was also important to the New Hollywood, because he starred in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) and Apocalypse Now (1979). Brando’s career was long, influential, and varied, and he is the only actor celebrated by Kael, Tyler, and Mekas. 56 Juan A. Suárez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1996), xvi.

112 theatres. The writing of Jack Kerouac could be purchased at bookstores or checked-out from a library. John Coltrane’s records could be purchased at record stores and listened to on a home stereo. Television changed Americans’ relationship to the cinema by making

Hollywood films accessible, but an alternative cinema had yet to make similar inroads. As a result, Mekas wanted to bring the New American Cinema to a place where it could have the most impact: the American living room.

Mekas’ desire to popularize experimental cinema subtended his critique of exhibition strategies that appealed to upper-class audiences. For instance, he derisively describes the opening of New York City’s 55th Street Playhouse in 1964, which screened

“experimental and avant-garde’ movies,” as “something bigger for the uptown people.”57

This comment may appear symptomatic of a bohemian snobbery, and counterproductive given his complaints about the lack of experimental film exhibition, but Mekas’ critique of the 55th Street Playhouse demonstrates his concern that experimental cinema would become a rarified art appreciated only by elite audiences. Mekas knew the New American

Cinema would need to reach working- and middle-class audiences to challenge Hollywood, and his arguments about the experimental cinema’s critique of capitalism would not appeal to New Yorker readers interested in the magazine’s celebration of consumerism. Mekas also disliked American “art” films made with moderate budgets that appealed to educated audiences: “In the middle is stuck the $100,000 to $400,000 movies, the so-called American

‘art’ film.”58 He further argues that the quality of these films was poor: “I have seen a good

57 Mekas, “February 20, 1964, ON THE MYSTERY OF THE LOW-BUDGET ‘ART’ FILM,” in Movie Journal, 120. 58 Ibid.

113 number of them, and the best ones are dogs. American cinema remains in Hollywood and the New York underground. There is no American ‘art’ film.”59

It is unsurprising that Mekas disapproved of Hollywood’s appropriation of experimental film techniques that were the result of financial necessity and creative workarounds. As Mekas writes, “It all started ten years ago, when a few of us who wanted to make films very badly but who couldn’t get our hands either on the Hollywood studios or the equipment, one day, suddenly, came up with a brilliant idea.”60 Producing films with limited financing led to the creation of an artisanal cinema characterized by “kooky ideas and gimmicks – like hand-held cameras, out-of-focus shots, shaky camera techniques, improvised acting, singles frames, jump cutting.”61 What appeared to some as amateurish appeared to others to demonstrate an appealing personal quality, and Hollywood caught on: “Today, in Hollywood, they are running in the studios with hand-held cameras, they are shaking them, while dollies and tripods are getting rusty.”62 Yet, for Mekas, Hollywood’s appropriation of experimental film techniques simply produced ersatz underground films even though critics like Pauline Kael celebrated the New Hollywood’s formal ambitions. In contrast, Mekas, who believed “[o]ne great piece of art by itself could change the whole society,” knew audiences needed to experience genuine experimental cinema for his

59 Ibid. 60 Mekas, “December 21, 1967, ON HOW THE UNDERGROUND FOOLED HOLLYWOOD,” in Movie Journal, 301. 61 Ibid, 302; In a seminar address on the “diary film,” Mekas explains how a defective Bolex camera that could not maintain a consistent frame rate informed the composition of Journey to Lithuania (1972): “And when I finally realized there was no way of fixing it or locking it, I decided to accept it and incorporate the defect as one of the stylistic devices.” This was just one example of how the formal composition of New American films was influenced by the filmmakers’ use of cheap – or, in this instance, defective – equipment. See: Jonas Mekas, “The Diary Film,” in The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York UP, 1978), 195. 62 Ibid.

114 revolution to succeed.63 Mekas’ complaints about experimental film going “mainstream” may contradict his attempt to popularize this cinema, but his critiques of middle-class values would not succeed “within” the mainstream, and the New American Cinema needed to keep its marginal status for Mekas’ arguments about cultural renewal to succeed with middle-class men, who were looking for an alternative to the culture that surrounded them.

Combatting a Culture in Crisis

Mekas’ criticism was unique in considering the cinema a tool for cultural reformation, and he challenged arguments that popular culture like cinema supported dominant ideologies. Yet, before his “Movie Journal” columns, Mekas revealed his own anxieties about the cinema’s moral character. In an early essay, “The Experimental Film in

American,” Mekas argues that experimental films represented a “homosexual conspiracy.”

Mekas, who famously stormed the projection booth at the 1964 Knokke-le Zoute film festival to continue a screening of a landmark queer film, Flaming Creatures (1963), was initially opposed to the experimental cinema’s queer politics. In an oft-cited passage, Mekas argues, “[the] conspiracy of homosexuality…is becoming one of the most persistent and most shocking characteristics of American film poetry today.”64 Mekas continues, “In these films, the protagonists are consistently exposed to physical and mental assault; they are a prey to the most ingenious forms of brutality, sadism and masochism.”65 Mekas would later defend queer cinema, including Jean Genet’s Un Chant d’amour (1950),66 but had wondered early in his career if “these neurotic and homosexual poems can be called art.”67 Mekas

63 Jonas Mekas, “November 7, 1963, ON MONEY,” in Movie Journal, 107. 64 Ibid, 23. 65 Ibid. 66 Mekas’ defense of Genet’s film was mostly an attempt to combat film censorship. 67 Ibid, 24; The latter remark articulates “homosexuality” and “neuroticism,” suggesting a discourse that considered homosexuality a form of mental illness. Homosexuality was listed in the first edition of the DSM,

115 eventually renounced this essay as his “Saint-Augustine-before-the-conversion piece,” but his “Movie Journal” columns continued to express an ambivalence about queerness, vacillating between fetishistic embrace to a discomfort reflective of a pre-Stonewall culture.68 In a column from 1960, Mekas complains, “Is it true that nobody can conceive of any other friendship between two men any longer? That would be pitiable.”69

Yet, characteristically, Mekas changed his opinion. In a column published mere months after his complaint about the suggestion of homosexuality in male friendship,

Mekas explains, “The only remaining sensibilities worth portraying in art seem to be those pertaining to women and homosexuals…Who wants books or films on executives?”70 While this reflects an evolution of Mekas’ views, it demonstrates how his criticism affirmed normative gender roles. By linking homosexuality and femininity, Mekas conflates sex and gender and separates them from the masculine domain of business. Mekas’ conflation of sex and gender is also evident in his Film Culture essay. After arguing that experimental cinema is a “homosexual conspiracy,” Mekas reserves specific criticism for Maya Deren:

“The supposed depth of Maya Deren is artificial, without the ingenious spontaneity which we find, for instance, in Brakhage’s or Anger’s work.”71 This opinion did not reflect a consensus view, and Parker Tyler, for instance, argues that Deren’s films provided

“archetypal models of form whose deep influence would be very healthy.”72 Tyler’s

the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. It was removed in its second edition in 1973 68 Mekas, “The Experimental Film in America,” 26 69 Mekas, “February 10, 1960, ON HOMOSEXUALITY AND FRIENDSHIP,” in Movie Journal, 12. 70 Mekas, “November 7, 1960, ON FEMININE SENSIBILITIES,” in Movie Journal, 21. 71 Mekas, “The Experimental Film in America,” 26; Mekas includes Anger without referring to the explicitly queer themes of his work. His curious inclusion of the period’s preeminent gay filmmaker suggests that he accepted homosexuality in his published writing without fully understanding its political nature. 72 Parker Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 175.

116 appreciation of Deren was echoed by P. Adams Sitney, Annette Michelson, and David E.

James, who, according to Lauren Rabinovitz, viewed her “as the single important transatlantic link to the modernist tradition established in Paris in the 1920s.”73 However, like his reversal on homosexuality, Mekas would change his opinion. In a review of Deren’s

The Very Night of The Eye published on Feb. 5, 1959, Mekas describes how “Maya Deren differs from most of the other experimentalists through her clarity of purpose, clarity of images, universality of symbols.”74

A Beat Influence

Mekas wrote positively about films made by women, including Deren, as well as

Marie Menken and Shirley Clarke, but his “Movie Journal” columns were informed by and contributed to an arts discourse that privileged male artists inherited from the Beats. While there is debate about the meanings of “Beat,” which began as a literary movement in the

1950s, Ann Charters defines it in relation to a specific historical moment. Charters describes how the Beats’ shared experience was “based on a tumultuous changing of their times: the historic events that began with America’s dropping the atomic bomb on Japan to bring World War II to an end, and the political ramifications of the Cold War…in the late

1940s and 50s.”75 The Beats originally consisted of a tight-knit group of writers that included Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and John Clellon Holmes.76 While originally based on

73 Lauren Rabinovitz, “Wearing the Critics Hat: History, Discourses, and the American Avant-Garde Cinema” in To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground, ed. David James (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992), 273. 74 Mekas, “February 25, 1959, MAYA DEREN AND THE FILM POEM,” in Movie Journal, 2. 75 Ann Charters, “Introduction: Variations on a Generation,” in Portable Beat Reader, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Penguin, 1992), xvii. 76 John Clellon Holmes most well-known novel, Go (1952), celebrated a sense of frenetic movement and activity. Similarly, New American films like Marie Menken’s Go Go Go (1962-4) depicted New York City on the move.

117 the East Coast, although the Beats were peripatetic by nature, the movement coincided with the San Francisco Literary Renaissance and had a significant West Coast presence. In

San Francisco, the City Lights bookstore, which also published Howl, was an important center of West Coast Beat activity. By 1960, Grove Press anthologized the Beats, along with

San Francisco Literary Renaissance and New York School poets, in The New American

Poetry, 1945-60, edited by Donald Allen. The New American Cinema, which emerged in

1959, the year before the anthology’s publication, shared aesthetic qualities with Beat literature. Like Beat writing, the New American Cinema expressed a sense of spontaneity and a spirit of improvisation that was influenced by Bebop and Abstract Expressionism, which privileged unconstrained expression over formalist rigor.77

New American filmmakers and Beat writers both critiqued postwar American middle-class values. The Beats, who were overwhelmingly white and male, were interested in black culture, jazz, Eastern religions, and working-class culture, which seemed to present an alternative to white, middle-class suburbia. Beat writers also stressed the importance of self-exploration, and Jack Kerouac emphasized the Beats’ relationship to “beatitude,” or a larger spiritual purpose. In conversation with Clellon Holmes, Kerouac defines “Beat” as a

“kind of furtiveness…Like we were a generation of furtives [sic]. You know with an inner knowledge there’s no use flaunting on that level, the level of the ‘public,’ a kind of beatness

…because we all really know where we are”78 Kerouac’s emphasis on the Beat’s “furtive” nature contrasts self-knowledge with the “public,” echoing sociologist David Riesman’s

77 This is certainly not true of all of New American Cinema. Structuralist cinema that emerged in the late 1960s was almost solely concerned with cinematic form, space, and temporality. 78 Jack Kerouac qtd. in Ann Charters, “Introduction: Variations on a Generation,” xix, emphasis org.

118 explanation of the differences between the “inner-directed” and “other-directed” person.79

According to Riesman, the “other-directed” individual sought acceptance at the expense of their “inner-directed” aspirations and worked for the approval of others, and America’s culture of conformity reflected Americans’ shift from “inner-” to “outer-directed.” But, in contrast, Beat writers like Kerouac sought to reclaim a sense of autonomy through “inner- directed” artistic, personal, and spiritual exploration.

Throughout the 1950s, the Beats became a cultural phenomenon. Dressed in a beret, black turtleneck, horn-rimmed glasses and wearing a goatee, the beatnik stereotype symbolized urban bohemians and those who aspired to be. Media representations of the

Beats focused on their fascination with jazz and fetishized the “beat” pad. In marketing and media discourses, the beatnik was represented by both men and women, but writers have explained how Beat culture was oriented around male bonding. At the same time, however,

Barbara Ehrenreich notes how the Beat movement reflected a departure from a male

“breadwinner” ethic that prioritized supporting a family. Ehrenreich explains, “The Beat pioneers were deeply, if intermittently, attached to each other. Women and their demands for responsibility were, at worst, irritating and more often just uninteresting compared to the ecstatic possibilities of male adventure.”80 In terms of literary production, women played supporting roles. Charters explains, “Reflecting the sexism of the times, women mostly stayed on the sidelines as girlfriends and wives.”81 Charters demonstrates how cultural representations of the Beats overlapped with their literary production: in both

79 David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale UP, 1950). 80 Barbara Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983), 54. 81 Charters, “Introduction: Variations on a Generation,” xxxiii.

119 instances a woman was most likely to be a friend or girlfriend. This was also true of postwar arts cultures that maintained traditional gender roles, ensuring women remained surrogates of male artists. As Lauren Rabinovitz explains, “The bohemian realm of the

Greenwich Village scene in the 1940s through 1960s celebrated the male artist as Romantic hero while configuring women’s roles only in relation to the male artist’s greatness – as either wives or lovers.”82

In 1959, Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie made a short film entitled, Pull My Daisy, that featured Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso in autobiographical roles.

Like the Beat literature that preceded it, Pull My Daisy featured jazz music, enthusiastic conversation, and male bonding. Women are represented as a hinderance to the men’s adventure, expressed in scenes that feature a married couple’s argument. Reviewing the film, Mekas remarks, “I don’t see how I can review any film after Pull My Daisy without using it as a signpost.”83 The title of Mekas’ column, “PULL MY DAISY AND THE TRUTH OF

CINEMA,” signals that Frank’s film had inaugurated a new period of American cinema, and his prose affirms the film’s importance: “As much of a signpost in cinema as The Connection is in modern theatre…[both] The Connection and Pull My Daisy clearly point towards new directions, 84 new ways out of the frozen officialdom and midcentury senility of our arts, toward new themes, a new sensibility.”85 In contrast to a “frozen” culture, Frank’s film was

“alive,” “spontaneous,” and “true.” Mekas writes, “Robert Frank has succeeded in transplanting life – and in his very first film…Directorially, Pull My Daisy is returning to

82 Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance, 5. 83 Mekas, “November 18, 1959, PULL MY DAISY AND THE TRUTH OF CINEMA” in Movie Journal, 5. 84 The Connection was a play written by Jack Gelber that later became a New American film. The film was adapted by directed by Shirley Clarke, one of the New American Cinema’s most important female directors. However, the play centered on a Beat obsession: drug-addicted jazz musicians. 85 Ibid.

120 where the true cinema first began, to where Lumière left off.”86 Mekas further describes the film’s directors in hagiographic terms: “In a sense, Alfred Leslie, Robert Frank, and Jack

Kerouac, the film’s author-narrator, are only [sic] enacting their times in the manner prophets do: The time expresses its truths, its styles, its messages, and its desperations through the most sensitive of its members.”87 In Mekas’ estimation, Frank’s film presented an alternative to a culture of conformity by emphasizing a spontaneity emblematic of a new consciousness, themes expressed by the film’s Beat protagonists in their writing. While the film may have appeared to the uninitiated as representing a group of men joking around, drinking beer, and talking incessantly, for Mekas, it represents “in all its inconsequentiality, the most alive and the most truthful of films.”88

Visionary Male Artists

Like the Beats writers who inspired him, Mekas argued that personal expression could challenge a culture of consumption and conformity, and he championed “visionary” male filmmakers, who, he argued, were uniquely able to challenge a middle-class status- quo. In his celebration of “visionary” filmmakers, Mekas embraced an “anti-establishment” rhetoric. Early in his career, Mekas labelled mainstream culture, the “Big Lie of Culture,” but would adopt the counterculture’s preferred term of “establishment.” Mekas defined the establishment as institutional, official, or middle-class culture that represented older, conservative Americans and mainstream middle-class values rooted in social conformity and capitalist consumption,89 and he argues that the establishment was suppressing man’s

86 Ibid, 6, my emphasis. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid. 89 Although Mekas was nearly forty by decade’s beginning, he would still remark unironically that a film like Robert Downey Sr.’s Chafed Elbows (1966) went “through the doors and windows of the Establishment unnoticed…[because] It belongs to the young.” See: Jonas Mekas, “December 1, 1966, ON ROBERT DOWNEY

121 spirit: “With man’s soul being squeezed out in all four corners of the world today, when governments are encroaching upon his personal being with the huge machinery of bureaucracy, war, and mass communications, he feels that only way to preserve man is to encourage his rebellion.”90 Mekas’ favorite filmmakers echoed his rhetoric. Stan Brakhage, an influential experimental filmmaker, whom Mekas celebrated as the paradigmatic artist, describes how “the entire society of man is bent on destroying that which is alive within its individuals (most contemporarily exemplified by the artist).”91 In Mekas’ estimation, a postwar culture that stripped American men of their autonomy was best combatted by a male artist, and he views the New American Cinema as an anodyne for the “New American man, lost and shaky, searching, fragile, groping in an uncertain more landscape.”92 As

Mekas argues, the New American Cinema could help reform American society: “the new independent cinema movement – like the other arts in America today – is primarily an existential movement, or, if you want, an ethical movement, a human act; it is only secondarily an aesthetic one.”93

According to Mekas, the New American Cinema’s ability to lead to a new male consciousness was also reflected through its formal elements. In a discussion of the New

American Cinema’s “changing language,” Mekas explains, “There are still people who think it doesn’t exist – neither the new cinema, nor the new man…they don’t see a much deeper revolution that is taking place right here, they don’t hear the sounds of a new cinematic language being developed by the experimentalists and documentarists in New York, in

AND CHAFED ELBOWS,” in Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-71 (New York: Collier Books, 1972), 263. 90 Ibid. 91 Stan Brakhage qtd. in Mekas, “Notes on the New American Cinema,” 103. 92 Mekas, “March 21, 1961, ON IMPROVISATION AND SPONTANAEITY,” in Movie Journal, 27. 93 Mekas, “Notes on the New American Cinema,” 104.

122 Boulder, in San Francisco.”94 Mekas’ conflation of the “new cinema” with the “new man” demonstrates how his writing employed a gendered discourse even when describing formal, non-representational elements, and Mekas viewed experimental film that resisted clear interpretation as a type of Rorschach test that allowed him to describe cinema in the vague terms of cultural renewal or a revolution of consciousness. But describing this renewal within a gendered discourse revealed the limitations of his proposed revolution.

Mekas often describes the New American Cinema as if it were a form of consciousness:

“Only the cinema that is always awake, always changing, can reveal, describe, make us conscious of, hint at what we really are what we are not.”95 By placing the New American

Cinema within a cultural discourse that privileged men, Mekas’ revolution of consciousness re-articulated normative gender roles and circumscribed the contributions of women.

Mekas’ remark about an “experimentalist” living in Boulder referred to Stan

Brakhage, who had left New York City to move to Colorado with his family. More than other filmmakers of the period, Brakhage uniquely represented Mekas’ ideal of the “new man.”

Even Brakhage’s desire to live in the mountains corresponded to Romantic representations of the “artist” working in isolation. Brakhage was widely celebrated as an experimental filmmaker, but Mekas’ criticism described him as a visionary artist, who remained fiercely independent and committed to “pure” artistic expression. In a column from Oct. 26, 1961,

Mekas explains, “Brakhage’s work is a far more advanced cinema, true cinema, cinema with a small and/or capital ‘C,’ author’s cinema, personal cinema.”96 His films also represented

“true” film art: “If we talk about the true personal creation, the true experimentation, one

94 Mekas, “January 25, 1962, THE CHANGING LANGUAGE OF CINEMA,” in Movie Journal, 49. 95 Ibid, 50. 96 Mekas, “October 16, 1961, ON STAN BRAKHAGE,” in Movie Journal, 35.

123 which is also a deep experience of art, we have to talk…about the work of Stanley

Brakhage.”97 Brakhage’s films were abstract and open to a wide range of interpretation, but

Mekas found “truth” and “deep experience” in them, qualities he valued above specific formal aspects. As the 1960s progressed, Mekas’ representation of Brakhage as a heroic, visionary artist became more explicit. Describing “The Art of Vision,” which reedited footage from Dog Star Man (1961-4), Mekas explains, “The film crowns not only Brakhage’s work but is the first masterpiece of the new vision. It is a beautiful, visionary, and monumental work. It is a work of art as anything by the old great masters; it is a discourse on new vision and new aesthetics; it is, truly, a manifesto of the new vision.”98 Brakhage was more than a filmmaker: he was the “visionary” artist Mekas’ criticism demanded.99

Brakhage jokingly described Dog Star Man as a series of films about a “man who climbs partway of up a mountain,” but the rapid editing, manipulation of the film stock through scratches, cuts, and drawings, as well as the intercuts and superimpositions of natural imagery, celestial movements, close-ups of the body, and biological processes ensure the films resist any singular interpretation.100 More telling is Brakhage’s claim that the film’s “mytho-poetic” elements concerned the “history of man” – a comment that reflects the true scope of his ambition. Although the films depict a man’s journey in literal

97 Ibid. 98 Mekas, “March 11, 1965, MORE ON THE IRRESPONSIBLITY OF NEW YORK FILM REVIEWERS,” in Movie Journal, 180. 99 Some scholarship has affirmed the notion of Brakhage as “visionary.” For instance, Film Quarterly published a late-career interview with Brakhage conducted by Scott MacDonald with the title “The Filmmaker as Visionary” In a preface to the interview text, McDonald explains that Brakhage “articulated what became a theory of sight…[he] theorized that acculturation involves the gradual constriction of the freedom of sight we witness in young children…we come to understand what is socially acceptable to look at, and how we should look at what we see.” Of course, Brakhage contributed to the idea that he was a “visionary”: MacDonald’s prose echoes Brakhage’s claims from Metaphors on Vision (1963). See: Scott MacDonald, “The Filmmaker as Visionary,” Film Quarterly , Vol. 56, No. 3 (Spring 2003): 2, emphasis org. 100 Dog Star Man, 1961-64, “Commentary,” By Brakhage: An Anthology, Vol. 1, Dir. Stan Brakhage (2003: The Criterion Collection), DVD.

124 and metaphorical terms, the “Prelude” and “Part Two” present traditional imagery of women oriented around sex and childbirth. This was material Brakhage had explored in in other films, particularly in Window Water Bay Moving (1959), which graphically depicted his wife, Jane, giving birth.101 However, the most clearly identifiable figure in Dog Star Man is a bearded man accompanied by a dog, climbing the snowy Colorado mountains with an axe in hand. In this image, Brakhage’s film presents a rough-hewn image of a masculine

“searcher” situated within an ambiguous textual matrix. Interestingly, Mekas’ criticism and the Dog Star Man films both foreground male vision in the context of an existential search, but the Dog Star Man films were also rooted in the tropes of a Romantic male artist, who had removed himself from society to search for meaning in nature. This is further demonstrated by Brakhage’s description of how he attempted to represent his own

“removal from society, from civilization even.”102

In addition to championing Brakhage as the paradigmatic artist, Mekas supported

Andy Warhol’s work and even participated in the filming of Empire (1964). However,

Mekas was particularly excited about Chelsea Girls (1966), describing the film as “not only a more advanced cinema that anything I had seen at the [New York?] festival, but…an important work by any standards.”103 Writing with a sense of voyeuristic wonder, Mekas recounts how “[m]any strange lives open before our eyes, some of them enacted, some real

– but always very real, even when they are fake – since this is the Chelsea Hotel of our

101 Some feminists have critiqued Brakhage’s appropriation of women’s experiences, but Brakhage claims to have “tried to get the woman’s view – what was specific to being a woman” (qtd. in Film Quarterly, 9). See: Anne Friedberg, “Misconception = The Division of Labor in the Childbirth Film,” Millennium Film Journal 4-5 (1979). 102 Ibid. 103 Mekas, “September. 29, 1966, ON THE CHELSEA GIRLS,” in Movie Journal, 254.

125 fantasy, of our mind.”104 Warhol had captured a subcultural tableau: “Lovers, dope addicts, pretenders, homosexuals, lesbians, and heterosexuals, sad, fragile girls, and hard tough girls.”105 Mekas was so impressed, he declares, “I know no other film, with the exception of

The Birth of a Nation, in which such a wise gallery of people have [sic] been presented as in this film.”106 Mekas’ description of Warhol’s cast of “addicts,” “lesbians,” and “homosexuals” is imbued with incredulity, and his assessment of Chelsea Girls suggests how Warhol’s films corresponded to audience expectations of outré forms of difference. As Parker Tyler argued, Warhol exploited a mainstream audience’s voyeuristic interest in sexual difference, but he also made the “drug addict” and the homosexual “downtown” characters.107

Despite his immersion in the bohemian milieu of the New York arts scene, Mekas accepts Warhol’s characters as honest representations. Warhol’s films blended fiction and reality, and his “stars” performed versions of their constructed selves, but Mekas describes

Chelsea Girls as a revelation: “This is the first time that I see in cinema an interesting solution of narrative techniques that enable cinema to present life in the complexity and richness achieved by modern literature.”108 Beyond this, Chelsea Girls demonstrated the male artist’s ability to understand a culture in crisis: “Every work of art helps us to understand ourselves by describing to us those aspects of our lives which we either know little of or fear.”109 As Mekas argues, artists like Warhol demonstrated visionary insight:

“Most of the critics and viewers do not realize that the artist, no matter what he is showing,

104 Ibid, 256. 105 Ibid. 106 Ibid. 107 This is especially true for drug-addled “geniuses” like jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker. Of course, Beat writer William Burroughs, author of Junky (1953), was also a well-known user of heroin and other narcotics. 108 Ibid. 109 Ibid.

126 is mirroring or forecasting also our own lives.”110 However, Mekas’ interpretation of

Chelsea Girls, which is a long and difficult film presented in triptych, was a tendentious attempt to support his claims about male filmmakers’ ability to challenge the Vietnam-era social and political status-quo. Mekas explains, “The terror and desperation of The Chelsea

Girls is a holy terror (an expression which…Warhol himself uses in reference to his work):

It’s our godless civilization approaching zero point. It’s not homosexuality, it’s not lesbianism.”111 Mekas’ interpretation of Chelsea Girls is consistent with his argument that

“visionary” male artists could interpret, critique, and combat a cultural in crisis, but his rhetoric had become increasingly topical and reflective of New Left discourse. For instance, in his review of Chelsea Girls, Mekas compares “dead” culture to Vietnam during the

Johnson administration, “The terror and hardness we see in The Chelsea Girls is the same terror and hardness that is burning Vietnam; and it’s the essence and blood of our culture, of our ways of living: This is the Great Society.”112

As Hollywood adopted the techniques of the New American Cinema, which had produced influential narrative features and experimental shorts from 1959-1965, leading to the creation of New Hollywood in the late 1960s, Mekas started championing films like

Chelsea Girls, which consisted of three screens playing simultaneous images, as an experiential medium.113 In the second half of the decade, as structuralist and expanded cinema defined the New American Cinema’s second period (1965-71), Mekas wrote about

110 Ibid, 257. 111 Ibid. 112 Ibid; As the 1960s progressed, Mekas’ counterculture rhetoric become more explicit. In 1967, he related his arguments about cultural renewal to the “Aquarian Age”: “…a few among us feel that nothing will stop the advent of the Aquarian Age, the spiritual age. See: Mekas, “November 9, 1967, SHOULD THE ARTISTS CRUMBLE WHEN TIMES CHANGE?” in Movie Journal, 297. 113 The New American Cinema’s second phase, beginning in 1965, largely consisted of purely formalist structuralist cinema that resisted commercial appropriation.

127 intermedia and film exhibition that required multiple projectors like Chelsea Girls, or contained interactive and performance elements, strobe lights, music, and provided experiences that could not be easily commodified or reproduced. Mekas explains how this new cinema was tactile and interactive, demonstrating a “more direct relationship between the artist, his tools, and his materials.”114 Like the “visionary” cinema that had preceded it, this expanded cinema provides a way “to see ourselves in a different perspective…like looking at ourselves from the outside and the inside at the same time…learning again everything from the beginning.”115 Mekas’ emphasis on cinematic “purity” reached its apotheosis in his discussion of intermedia but could extend to conventional films that possessed an “aura”: “…what’s happening is that some of the work of Harry Smith, or

Jefferey Joffen, or Robert Whitman, or Barbara Rubin, or Andy Warhol cannot be shipped and shown in a film can – their projects have become extensions of their creative work, the film in the can isn’t really thing by itself.”116 Mekas’ evocation of film’s purity suggests

Walter Benjamin’s discussion of an artwork’s “aura,” “this unique existence…that bears the mark of the history to which the work has been subject.”117 However, Benjamin considers film a particularly salient example of the destructive nature of mechanical reproduction:

“The social significance of film…in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic side: the liquidation of the value of tradition in cultural heritage.”118

In claiming film as an object of artistic purity, Mekas was reclaiming film’s “aura,”

114 Mekas, “June 23, 1966, ON THE TACTILE INTERACTIONS IN CINEMA, OR CREATION WITH YOUR TOTAL BODY,” in Movie Journal, 248. 115 Mekas, “June 16, 1966, MORE ON STROBE LIGHT AND INTERMEDIA,” in Movie Journal, 247. 116 Mekas, “June 23, 1966, ON THE TACTILE INTERACTIONS IN CINEMA, in Movie Journal, 249 117 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Second Edition, eds. Vincent B. Leitch, William E. Cain, et al (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2010) 1053. 118 Ibid, 1054.

128 privileging the sensory or interactive experiences of intermedia. In an acknowledgement of his prophetic or quasi-religious role in promoting the New American Cinema, Mekas remarks, “This is the preacher speaking – but since everybody’s speaking revolution, why not me?”119 But like any effective evangelist, Mekas knew belief must ultimately lead to fulfillment: “The avant-garde film-maker, the home movie-make is here with something more…he is presenting to you, he is surrounding you with insights, sensibilities, and forms which will transform you into a better human being.”120

Conclusion: “The End of Civilization”

Mekas describes a summer evening he spent with film-maker Jack Smith in 1971,121 watching an ad-hoc theatre performance: “I suddenly was very conscious that it was in 2

A.M. in New York, and very late, and most of the city was sleeping…and that only here in this downtown loft, somewhere at the very end of all the empty and dead and gray downtown stress…was this huge junk set and the end-of-civilization activities.122 Mekas concludes: “I began getting a feeling, it resembled more and more the final burial rites of the capitalist civilization, complete civilization.”123 Despite his dire evocation of the “end of civilization,” Mekas’ criticism of the New American Cinema from 1959-71 changed the discourse of film criticism by using critical film writing to challenge dominant middle-class ideologies rooted in capitalist consumption and social conformity. In conceptualizing the

119 Mekas, “September 26, 1968, ON TV MONITORS AND PUBLIC OFFICES,” 323. 120 Mekas, “July 17, 1969, ON ART AND POLITICS, OR ‘THE AUTEUR THEORY,’ 1969,” in Movie Journal, 352. 121 Mekas’ discussion of the evening he spent with Smith in 1971 serves as a useful coda for a few reasons. For one, Smith abandoned filmmaking altogether in 1969 and turned to creating “junk” theater. For another, Smith and Mekas had a public falling-out after Mekas denied him access to a print of Flaming Creatures Smith intended to cut up for a film production. As a result, Smith regularly criticized Mekas, referring to him with pejorative nicknames like “Uncle Fishhook.” 122 Mekas, “July 23, 1970, JACK SMITH, OR THE END OF CIVILIZATION,” in Movie Journal, 393. 123 Ibid, 393-4.

129 cinema as a tool for cultural change, Mekas further challenged Marxist arguments that popular culture supported dominant ideologies, and he demonstrated how film criticism could be used to challenge American social values. In addition, Mekas challenged cultural demarcations by aligning “high” culture, like fine art and poetry, with “low” culture, like

Hollywood cinema and rock n’ roll, and by attempting to popularize experimental cinema for a mainstream audience. As Mekas recognized, cultural exchange between mainstream and marginal cultural production, and art and “trash” cinema, went beyond aesthetics to encompass a shared challenge to dominant middle-class values of the 1960s.124 But by employing a masculine arts discourse in response to a perceived “crisis” of masculinity,

Mekas’ criticism affirmed normative gender roles, and he supported aspects of a dominant middle-class he purported to challenge.

Mekas’ career did not end in 1971 with “Movie Journal,” but he shifted his attention to Film Forum and Anthology Film Archives, the New York City institution dedicated to the preservation, promotion, and exhibition of American independent and experimental cinema, where he attempted to define the New American Cinema’s legacy. It was also clear the New American Cinema was not going to supplant Hollywood despite Mekas’ attempts to integrate experimental cinema into mainstream popular culture. In fact, Mekas’ hopes for an American “New Wave,” which Juán Suarez describes as “a movement with a certain mass appeal that would be at one independent, artistically bold, and ethically engaged,” was over as early as the mid-1960s as directors like John Cassavetes and Peter

Bogdanovich went to Hollywood and other directors of early promise failed in their follow-

124 Jack Smith’s films represented “trash” cinema in terms of their vulgarity and lack of taste, but Smith also used trash and collected detritus in his sets.

130 ups or stopped creating films entirely.125 Mekas’ recognition of the difficulties in competing with Hollywood also explains his turn to intermedia at mid-decade.126 Yet, the success of auteur-driven New Hollywood in the late-1960s challenged the supposed artistic superiority of American independent cinema. During the Hollywood “renaissance,” the studios provided distribution to independent films, which would be increasingly supported by grants, festivals, and financing underwritten by corporations and investment firms in the following decades, and experimental cinema was institutionalized in the academy. In the background of these changes, Mekas continued to make films and provide interviews and articles about the New American Cinema, but he lost some of his relevancy and worked on confirming his legacy.

Upon his death in 2019 at 96, a New York Times obituary headline declared Mekas the “’Godfather’ of American Avant-Garde Film,”127 and other tributes labeled him a

“titan”128 and “legend” of experimental film.129 However, his legacy is more contested than these headlines suggest.130 He has long been criticized for attempting to exert control over

125 Suárez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars, 79. 126 Juan Suárez also explains how the “alliance of formal innovation, playful / satirical attitudes toward mass culture, and sex, social, and political protest that converged in the underground had dissolved, [although] each of these components survived separately in the arenas of discourse.” See: Juan A. Suárez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1996), 260. 127 See: Bruce Weber, “Jonas Mekas, ‘Godfather of American Avant-Garde Film, is Dead at 96. New York Times, January 23, 2019. 128 See: Alex Needham, “Jonas Mekas, titan of underground filmmaking, dies at 96,” The Guardian, Jan 23, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/jan/23/jonas-mekas-titan-of-underground-filmmaking- dies-aged-96 129 See: Eric Kohn, “Why this 96-year-old Legend was Our Most Important Cinephile” IndieWire, Jan 23, 2019. https://www.indiewire.com/2019/01/jonas-mekas-rip-cinephile-obituary-1202037652/ 130 In a June 7, 2018 New York Review of Books article, Michael Casper examines Mekas’ time in Biržai, Lithuania during WWII. Although Mekas represented himself as a “naïve, neutral poet” during the War, Casper explains that Mekas contributed literary essays and book reviews to a Lithuanian Activist Front (LAF) paper and later edited Panevėžio Apygardos Balsas, published by an offshoot of the LAF, before joining the anti-Nazi resistance in 1943 (On Jonas Mekas: An Exchange). The nationalist LAF was devoted to reclaiming Lithuania from the Soviet Union, but, as Casper explains, the LAF “greeted the Germans as Lithuania’s liberators and spread the idea that the country’s Jews were Communist traitors” upon Germany’s invasion in

131 alternative film production defined by formal heterogeneity and heterodox viewpoints, but

Mekas’ long career as filmmaker, distributor, lecturer, writer has earned him deserved recognition. Mekas also become the public face of experimental film due to his success in promoting difficult, non-commercial cinema in accessible prose. Unlike P. Adams Sitney, who wrote the first academic monograph on experimental underground cinema, or influential publications in the 1960s-70s on academic film criticism like the British-based

Screen, Mekas wrote about experimental film without in-depth formal analysis or heuristics drawn from critical theory. Mekas never achieved the public renown of Pauline Kael, but his influence is evident in contemporary American experimental and independent cinema, and he remains an important influence on critics like J. Hoberman.131 Perhaps Mekas’ success in achieving public recognition is best understood in comparison to a contemporary like Parker Tyler, who has largely faded from public memory. Mekas’ promotional efforts were self-directed, and he helped reify his position as the “godfather”

1941. While Casper makes it clear that Mekas did not contribute anti-Semitic articles or propaganda, he notes that Mekas misrepresented the publications he wrote for during the War as “’patriotic’ but not pro-Nazi.” In addition, Casper questions Mekas’ assertions that he was unaware of the Lithuanian Holocaust and the massacre of Jews in Biržai in August 1941. Casper’s article thus questions Mekas’ public narrative about his role in the German resistance and subsequent escape from Lithuania, which Mekas often represented “as if they were a single a continuous event.” Published the year before Mekas’ death, Casper’s article engendered controversy and reconsiderations of Mekas and his career. For instance, J. Hoberman, writing on his blog, acknowledged that Mekas was “a contradictory man” but explains how he “would like to think that Jonas was haunted, if not traumatized, by the fact that…thousands of his neighbors were slaughtered in the woods.” (“Why I cannot review…”]. Barry Schwabsky, art critic for the Nation, responded by defending Mekas and questioning Casper’s motives. Schwabsky writes, “What [Casper] does not have the right to do is, even through mere implication, to use his questioning to impute guilt to any individual without positive evidence to support the charge. Nor is it justified to use the subject’s unwillingness to discuss such matters to imply guilt” (On Jonas Mekas: An Exchange). See: Michael Caspar, “I Was There,” The New York Review of Books, June 7, 2018, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/06/07/jonas-mekas-i-was-there/; Barry Schwabsy, reply by Michael Caspar, “On Jonas Mekas: An Exchange,” The New York Review of Books, July 19, 2018, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/07/19/on-jonas-mekas-an-exchange/; J. Hoberman, “Why I cannot review Jonas Mekas’s Conversations with Filmmakers, June 30, 2018, http://j- hoberman.com/2018/06/why-i-cannot-review-jonas-mekass-conversations-with-film-makers/. 131 See: J. Hoberman’s “My Debt to Jonas Mekas,” The New Yorker, January 24, 2019.

132 of experimental film, although celebrations of his career focus on his filmmaking and fail to adequately consider the importance of his criticism. While Mekas’ challenge to an American middle-class status-quo was a promotional attempt to distinguish the New American

Cinema from Hollywood, Mekas changed the discourse of criticism by using it to question ideologies that supported the hegemony of a white middle class. In this regard, Mekas successfully integrated experimental cinema into a wider American popular culture that posed similar challenges to social and political status-quo, and he provided a model for popular culture that appeals to disenfranchised suburban youth. Mekas has earned deserved criticism for his attempts to control the discourse around the New American, but he believed his revolution needed to be proclaimed loudly to Americans “scared” or

“sleeping,” awaking them to new possibilities.

133 Chapter 4

Against Propaganda: Parker Tyler’s Subcultural Criticism and the Underground

“I’ve been with it all, personally, since 1943 when I made friends with the late Maya Deren, pioneer of the Underground, so I’ve been witness to each step in the evolution of Underground film. The knowledge here isn’t a research job. It’s all first hand: when it happened and how it happened. I know many of the filmmakers personally and so there’s a lot here about what goes on beyond camera range.

– Parker Tyler, Underground Film, 1972

Tyler’s long involvement with experimental cinema provided him a greater sense of historical context than his peers, and he maintained a critical independence influenced by the ethics of a modernist avant-garde. In his criticism of American experimental

“underground” cinema, Tyler challenged the promotional criticism of writers and critics with an investment in the production, distribution, and exhibition of the New American

Cinema, and he considered promotional criticism and “counterculture” politics propaganda. But crucially, Tyler’s queer criticism critiqued experimental cinema’s use of sexual difference to appeal to a mainstream audience, and his analysis of the cinema’s sexual politics demonstrated the political value of film criticism.

Critic and writer Parker Tyler argued in his correspondence and film writing that film criticism should be rooted in aesthetic standards and historical context, but his focus on camp, sexuality, and experimental cinema made his film criticism subcultural and provided an alternative reception. In contrast, Jonas Mekas embraced the queer and transgressive politics of the New American Cinema to promote this cinema. As Tyler explains to filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos, he was “the ‘independent’ one, Jonas the

134 involved one.”1 Mekas’ “involvement” was based in his support of his distribution efforts through criticism, but Tyler maintained his independence even when evaluating work by filmmakers who were personal friends.2 In a 1967 letter to the Village Voice, Tyler writes,

“No young film maker… is invulnerable to criticism or beyond judicious analysis.”3 Tyler’s independence allowed him to pursue topics like representations of sexuality that mainstream critics ignored or were unable to consider, and his expressions of queer desire would not have been publishable in a mainstream magazine like the New Yorker.

Unlike Jonas Mekas and Pauline Kael, Tyler’s film writing did not appear in well- known publications with large readerships that covered topics of general interest beyond the arts.4 Rather, Tyler wrote primarily for low-circulation publications like The Evergreen

Review, Film Culture, and View, the Surrealist magazine Tyler published with Charles Henri

Ford from 1940-47, written for readers interested in the cinema and fine art.5 Despite their small readerships, these publications appealed to educated readers, who could appreciate

Tyler’s allusive criticism that considered cinema in the relation to painting, dance, poetry, and theater.6 Grove Press, publisher of The Evergreen Review and Underground Film, also

1 Correspondence from Parker Tyler to Gregory Markopoulos, 28 September 1967, Container 4.9, Parker Tyler Collection, Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 2 Tyler corresponded with Willard Maas, Gregory Markopoulos, and Stan Brakhage – all of whom sought his advice and expertise. 3 Correspondence from Parker Tyler to Village Voice editor, 5 February 1967, Container 5.5, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 4 The Voice is mainstream here in the most relative sense. As I explain elsewhere, the paper was more radical than publications like the New Yorker, but, compared to niche arts publications with low circulations, it was more popular and influential. 5 The Evergreen Review was a literary magazine published from 1957-73, and Film Culture was a small circulation magazine, published from 1954-96, focused on cinema. 6 Tyler was committed to film criticism, but he continued to maintain other interests. He wrote about dance, theatre, and poetry, and published a lengthy biography of Russian painter, Pavel Tchelitchew, in 1967, considered by some to be his “magnum opus.” As Tyler admits in a letter to the New York Gallery of Modern Art, “Film is still one of my interests though now it has rivals in my critical affections. See: “Biographical Sketch,” Parker Tyler: An Inventory of His Collection at the Harry Ransom Center, accessed 24 September 2019, https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingAid.cfm?eadid=00674; Correspondence from Parker

135 supported Tyler’s work. Purchased by Barney Rosset in 1951, Grove was a well-known publisher of modernist and Beat literature and fought censorship battles over its publications and film distribution. In 1966, the press inherited Cinema 16’s distribution, demonstrating a commitment to experimental and documentary cinema.7 Grove’s focus on modernist literature,8 sexual freedom, free speech, and experimental cinema made it an appropriate publisher for Tyler’s criticism, although his independence created conflict with

Rosset. Writing to Rosset to complain about Grove’s delay in publishing Underground Film,

Tyler explains “I imagined that you and staff knew all along it was to be a critical book and not an ecstatic wave of promotion. This is done by Grove and Evergreen in so many other ways.”9

Unlike his contemporaries, Tyler’ criticism is unique because it was published in books or specialized journals and resembles the work of today’s film scholars. Of course, popular critics like Pauline Kael wrote books or collected their reviews, but Kael was as well-known for her New Yorker articles. Conversely, Tyler did not maintain a consistent byline in any publication, but the fact he found an audience for dense, often abstruse books of criticism demonstrates the degree to which a segment of the movie audience took film seriously.10 Tyler worked at the fringes of academia throughout his career, publishing

Tyler to Mr. Hartford, New York Gallery of Modern Art, 14 April 1964, Container 5.1, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 7 Sheldon Renan, An Introduction to the American Underground Film (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co, 1967), 214. 8 Tyler began his career as a Surrealist poet and experimental novelist. He co-authored The Young and Evil (1933) with Henri Ford. 9 Correspondence from Parker Tyler to Barney Rosset, 18 March 1969, Container 4.6, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin Texas, emphasis org. 10 Tyler recognized this fact. In a letter to Seymour Lawrence, a publisher who was then at the Atlantic Monthly, Tyler explains, “I don’t know if you have followed the fortunes of my film writing but as soon as I started in 1944 it caught on with a sophisticated audience with the result that less than three years later Allen Tate put out my second volume with Holt.” See: Correspondence from Parker Tyler to Seymour Lawrence, 31

136 articles in the American Quarterly,11 and regularly pursued lecture and teaching jobs.12

Academics republished his essays, and Tyler corresponded with intellectuals Marshall

McLuhan, Rudolf Arnheim, Dwight McDonald, and Edmund Wilson. 13 Although Tyler’s career overlaps with the institutionalization of film studies in the 1960s, he lacked the support of established academics and relied on grants and fellowships to finance his work.

He also attempted to capitalize on the decade’s “film book boom.”14 The success of critics like Kael, whom Tyler admired,15 inspired his hope for a “‘Parker Tyler explosion.’”16

Tyler’s critical independence was based in an “ethics” predicated on subverting dominant ideologies and maintaining aesthetic judgement that was inspired by the modernist avant-garde of the 1920s and 30s. As a young poet and publisher of the

Surrealist magazine View, Tyler had been immersed in the European avant-garde of the

1920s and 30s, and he maintained a life-long interest in the films of René Clair, Jean

October 1958, Container 3.2, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 11 See: Parker Tyler, “Hollywood as the Universal Church,” The American Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Summer 1950): 165-76; Parker Tyler, “An American Theatre Motif: The Psychodrama,” The American Quarterly, Vol 15, No. 1, Part 15 (Summer 1963): 140-51. 12 Tyler pursued positions at the New York School of Visual Arts and Bard College. 13 Julius Bellone, Assistant Professor of English at Lincoln University, wrote to Tyler asking for permission to republish “Rashomon as Modern Art” in a “book of serious film criticism” Bellone’s edited collection Renaissance of Film was published in 1970 but is now out of print. See: Correspondence from Parker Tyler to Julius Bellone, 19 November 1968, Container 6.5, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 14 Tyler referenced a film-book “boom” in several letters. Writing to Olympia Press in 1968, Tyler remarks, “The screwy publicity given me by Myra Breckenridge…has rebounded astonishingly in my favor in view of the current filmbook boom.” In another letter to Forrest Selvig, Tyler made a parenthetical aside to “a great filmbook boom” that had resulted in “two current commitments.” See: Correspondence from Parker Tyler to Olympia Press, 24 November 1968, Container 3.1, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas; Correspondence from Parker Tyler to Forrest Selvig, 9 February 1969, Container 5.2, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 15 In a 1955 letter to Kael, written before her tenure at the New Yorker, Tyler writes, “I think your analytical stuff excellent even when I demure at one of your aesthetic valuations.” See: Correspondence from Parker Tyler to Pauline Kael, 21 February 1955, Container 4.6, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 16 Correspondence from Parker Tyler to Atheneum Publishers, 24 November 1968, Container 3.1, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas.

137 Cocteau, Salvador Dalí, and Luis Buñuel. Tyler’s belief that Hollywood’s “hallucinations can be seriously utilized” further motivated his early Surrealist criticism.17 David Bordwell explains, “Tyler spun threads – homosexuality, gender masquerade, dreaming, hallucination, mythology – that would guide his journey through Hollywood movies.”18 As his career progressed, Tyler focused more on experimental cinema, culminating in his late- career writing about the American underground cinema, which was an important subset of the larger New American Cinema.19 In his criticism of 1960’s American experimental cinema, Tyler continued to focus on American social values, especially in terms of sexual politics, but he critiqued the underground’s lack of imagination and artistic vision. In contrast to a modernist avant-garde, Tyler argued that underground cinema relied on cheap effects, demonstrated an indifference to technique, and relied on topical counterculture “fashion” to mask an absence of artistic commitment. Unlike a subversive modernist avant-garde of the 1920s and 30s, American underground cinema of the 1960s appealed to a mainstream audience interested in psychedelic effects. Tyler concluded that the underground’s pandering counterculture politics and mainstream aspirations produced a cinema that would best appeal to youth audiences.

17 Parker Tyler, The Hollywood Hallucination (New York: Creative Age Press, 1944), 246. 18 David Bordwell, How 1940s Critics Changed American Film Culture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2016), 112. 19 Tyler analyzed Hollywood throughout his career even as he focused more attention on experimental cinema. In an essay for Film Culture on Orson Welles, Tyler argued that the cult around famous auteurs like Welles was oriented around an appreciation of their often-unrealized ambition. He explains, “Simply what he is and has been makes Welles quintessential type of Big Experimental Cult hero – always achieving failure yet bringing it off brilliantly, decking it with eloquence and a certain magnificence; fusing, in each film, the vices and the virtues appropriate to them. Welles is the eternal Infant Prodigy and, as such, wins the indulgences of adult critics and the fervid sympathy of the younger generation, which sees in him a mirror of own budding aspirations and adventurous near-successes" See: Parker Tyler, “Orson Welles and the Big Experimental Film Cult,” in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Praeger, 1970), 383.

138 Although Tyler was an important critic of the New American Cinema, he preferred

“underground,” because he associated “New American Cinema” with Mekas and “partisan” critics. 20 For the sake of clarity, Tyler uses “underground” to refer to American experimental cinema produced in the 1960s that constituted a subset of the larger New

American Cinema. Tyler describes experimental cinema produced in the 1920s and 30s as

“avant-garde” or in relation to their associated art movements like Dada or Surrealism, which is reflective of his historical approach. However, Tyler refers to directors as much as individual films, which suggests the influence of “auteurism.” In many regards, the auteur theory is more applicable to experimental cinema than Hollywood. Experimental cinema is produced on smaller budgets with fewer people and is more often the result of a personal artistic vision than a Hollywood film produced by a crew of people. Lauren Rabinovitz provides a helpful discussion of the relationship between the auteur theory and avant- garde filmmakers, explaining how auteurism provided a way to “historicize” independent film practice and “canonized a cinematic avant-garde that summarily linked Maya Deren to such successors as Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, Michael

Snow, and Hollas Frampton.”21 Auteurism thus provided continuity and definition to film production defined by heterogeneity.

Yet, importantly, Tyler’s belief in a critical ethics made him resist Jonas Mekas’ promotional film writing, and he argued that an evaluative aesthetic and political reception of the New American Cinema would create a more discriminating audience. This opinion

20 In contrast, Tyler was not interested in the New Hollywood, which is absent from his film writing. Tyler considers some films reviewed by mainstream critics but provides little formal consideration of them. Tyler appreciated classical Hollywood but did seem not register the New Hollywood as being particularly “new.” 21 Lauren Rabinovitz, Points of Resistance: Women, Power and Politics in the New York Avant-garde Cinema, 1943-71 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 16.

139 mirrored Amos Vogel’s belief that Mekas’ promotional approach led to a glut of hastily produced films of poor quality while suggesting Pauline Kael’s criticism of the art house audience.22 Tyler, like Kael, wanted his readers to move beyond the underground’s topical conceits and analyze experimental cinema within a larger tradition. Like Kael, Tyler stressed the importance of an earlier period of film history that had established a standard of quality. However, Tyler’s historical approach further distinguished his criticism from his contemporaries who analyzed experimental cinema. In contrast to Tyler, Mekas celebrated the New American Cinema as a “revolution,” and, for Mekas, even the “New” in “New

American Cinema” signified a period of cinema that broke with historical precedent. But

Tyler’s knowledge of film history provided him a more critical position to review American experimental cinema, and he argued that writers who approached film criticism without aesthetic awareness became “partisan” critics.

“Partisan” critics like Mekas celebrated the New America Cinema’s expressions of sexual difference as a way to promote this cinema, but Tyler criticized the underground’s sexual politics, explaining how filmmakers demonstrated normative attitudes about sexuality while expressing an ambivalence about homosexuality.23 A discomfort about homosexuality was also reflected in the critical reception of American experimental cinema. Mekas condemned homosexuality in experimental film, later praising it as a way to combat censorship and challenge mainstream values, but Tyler was especially critical of cinema that appropriated queer aesthetics to exploit a mainstream audience that wanted to

22 See: Amos Vogel, “13 Confusions” in in From the Third Eye: The Evergreen Review Film Reader, eds. Ed Halter and Barney Rosset (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2018). 23 Tyler explains, “it has been left to the underground to portray stag-movie sex and (more or less) get away with it.” See: Parker Tyler, “Do They or Don’t They? Why it Matters So Much,” No. 78, May 1970 in From the Third Eye: The Evergreen Review Film Reader, eds. Ed Halter and Barney Rosset (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2018), 178.

140 signify cultural rebellion by consuming transgressive cinema. Tyler argued that experimental filmmakers Andy Warhol and Jack Smith used camp to satirize and mock queer aesthetics, which diminished its ideological critique of heteronormativity.

Finally, Tyler should be recognized as a pioneering queer critic, who challenged heteronormativity in a period of rampant homophobia, and he provided a necessary critical reception of an emergent queer cinema. In understanding “queer” as the “sexualities that encompass both straight and gay but also the vast gray areas between them as well as the sexualities that might lie beyond them,” Tyler’s consideration of sexuality in cinema encompasses the varied identities “queer” suggests.24 In his 1972 book Screening the Sexes,

Tyler explains his intent to free sexual identity from delimited categories: “I have wanted to free the sexual body and all its behavior from the straightjacket of conventional ideas that limit them for serious contemplation and cripple them on the open ground of imagination.”25 In a 1968 letter to Barney Rosset, Tyler also challenges normative sexual divisions: “Heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality are all old-hat categories and on their way out. They just don’t (as I’ve long believed) correspond to the facts of life.”26

Americans in the 1960s continued to resist ideas about liminal sexual identities, and

American social discourse considered homosexuality aberrant or deviant. However, Tyler challenged the cultural dominance of heterosexuality through his criticism of the cinema’s sexual politics, and his criticism initiated a greater focus on identity and American social values related to sexuality. In contrast to his peers, Tyler recognized the subversive value

24 Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin, Queer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in American (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005), 11. 25 Parker Tyler, Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), ix. 26 Correspondence from Parker Tyler to Barney Rosset, 21 March 1968, Container 4.5, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas.

141 of queer aesthetics like camp, and he demonstrated the political value of film criticism through his critiques of experimental cinema’s representations of sexual difference.

Subcultures and Camp

Tyler’s fierce independence and queer sensibility led him to create a subcultural film criticism. Helpfully, cultural studies scholars have examined the relationship between reception and the constitution of subcultures. Subcultural film reception encompasses both subversive interpretations of mainstream cinema and considerations of marginal cinemas like the 1960s experimental underground. Subcultural criticism also uses bricolage to create new meanings from available films. British cultural studies scholar Dick Hebdige describes how subcultural interpretation discards a “fixed number of concealed meanings…in favour of the idea of polysemy where each text is seen to generate a potentially infinite range of meanings.”27 Tyler’s early criticism used polysemy and bricolage through Surrealist rewriting, and his absurdist interpretations of Hollywood foreshadowed the parodic impulse of filmmakers Andy Warhol, Jack Smith, and Mike and

George Kuchar. “Taste” likewise plays an essential role in subcultures, giving critics, who act as cultural arbiters, power in these communities. As Sarah Thornton explains, subcultures are constituted around alternative canons,28 and film critics provide an important gatekeeping function by determining the films that constitute the basis for a film subculture or “cult.”29

27 Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 1988), 117. 28 Sarah Thornton, Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital (Middletown, Wesleyan UP, 1996), 164. 29 Juan Suárez provides a helpful discussion of the relationship between film “cults” and experimental cinema. Cultism is most associated with auteurist appreciation of Hollywood directors, but avant-gardists also formed “cults” around their favorite actors and directors. As Suárez explains, “Cultism is a recurrent phenomenon in the avant-garde intellectual’s long-standing fascination with products of mass culture.” Avant-garde cultism often revolved around the appropriation of iconic Hollywood actors and actresses, but “intellectual” cultism

142 Tyler’s use of camp also provides continuity between his early-career criticism of

Hollywood and later criticism on the experimental underground and is an essential element of his queer criticism. Susan Sontag famously defines camp as “something of a private code, a badge of identity even,”30 but Moe Meyer explains how camp is a uniquely queer expression that straight audiences can only access via “derivatives constructed through the act of appropriation.”31 In Cold War America, pervasive homophobia created a culture of protective insularity for gay Americans, and queer identity was often expressed in coded messages. As John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman explain, a more permissive attitude about heterosexual expression in postwar America was concomitant with “an effort to label homosexual behavior as deviant.”32 Police harassment of gay social spaces and Cold War anxieties that gay Americans’ “moral failings” made them susceptible to

Communism forced queer social life “underground” before Stonewall and gay liberation.

But the cinema could provide queer Americans a sense of community through reading strategies, and “camp created a subject position from which urban gay men could revise a text’s original meanings, and thus it strongly figured in the creation of a sense of shared community.”33 Camp was likewise important to underground film aesthetics and united queer filmmakers and audiences in a shared sensibility. Juan Suárez explains how “by

was also a manifestation of taste and aesthetic discrimination. Critics like Parker Tyler could champion their preferred filmmakers as a way a establish a canon that could serve as the basis for “cult” appreciation. As Suárez explains, cultism also provides another link between the appreciation of mainstream and avant-garde cinema based in cultural circulation. See: Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1996), 120. 30 Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966), 275 31 Moe Meyer, “Introduction: Reclaiming the discourse of Camp,” in The Politics and Poetics of Camp, ed. Moe Meyer (New York: Routledge, 1994), 1. 32 John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in American, 2nd Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 288. 33 Benshoff and Griffin, Queer Images, 67.

143 drawing on stylistic resources from the camp sensibility, the underground sought to recreate some of the commonality woven around the gay transgressive activation of popular objects.”34 These objects could include popular songs, comic books, pulp novels, and Hollywood films. Tyler’s camp readings of popular culture, which used “low” culture for subcultural purposes, contributed to an imagined queer community and demonstrated an appreciation of camp that he shared with queer filmmakers.

A Critical Ethics

In a letter to publisher Seymour Lawrence, Tyler explains the trajectory of his career as a film critic:“…after 1947 my writing began to crystallize into separate categories; roughly, comment on current trends, appraisal of Experimental Film [sic], and refutations of Hollywood’s political and social good-doing in the form of straight fiction.”35 Tyler’s letter describes his shift to the “appraisal” of experimental cinema that would define his late-career criticism, and, in 1962, Tyler reviewed Shadows and Pull My Daisy, which marked the beginning of the New American Cinema.36 Tyler was often critical of films with a queer aspects like Pull My Daisy as a way to resist an essentialist support of queer aspects and provide a critical reception. Consequently, Tyler does not consider Pull My Daisy’s queer sensibility, and he was opposed to the film before he attended a screening, explaining to Cinema 16 director Amos Vogel that “from its script, which I have had, it adds nothing to

34 Juan A. Suárez, Bike Boys, Drag Queens, and Superstars: Avant-garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Bloomington, Indiana UP, 1996), 134. 35 Correspondence from Parker Tyler to Seymour Lawrence, 31 October 1958, Container 3.2, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 36 Shadows was originally produced in 1958, but John Cassavetes, the film’s director, reworked the film to produce a version that screened in 1959. Critics compared Shadows and Pull My Daisy, which premiered in 1959, and argued these films shared aesthetic characteristics. Mekas was famously critical of Cassavetes’ re- cut, but his periodization of the New American Cinema begins in 1959. For this reason, I consider Pull My Daisy and the re-cut of Shadows from 1959 the beginning of the New American Cinema.

144 Stan’s [Brakhage] Desistfilm but some dubious literature and mean-minded sentimentality.37 Tyler concludes, “This recent American stuff is lowbrow pillaging of

Hollywood’s own cultural coffers,” but his dislike of Pull My Daisy was matched by a surprising enthusiasm for Shadows.38

Tyler’s review in The Evergreen Review, “For Shadows, Against Pull My Daisy,” contrasts his support of Shadows with his disapproval of underground cinema through his review of Pull My Daisy. Tyler argues that Pull My Daisy’s “Beat” aesthetic, which was evident in its jazz score, improvised dialogue, and Beat “pad” mise-en-scène, pandered to a youth audience and failed to demonstrate artistic vision.”39 But, in contrast, Tyler praises

Shadows for its unique depiction of relationships, and he rebukes critics like Mekas, who considered it in relation to Pull My Daisy based on the “loosest level of current film conventions.”40 However, Tyler’s support of Shadows also demonstrates how his analysis of identity was full of contradiction. Tyler wrote about Shadows’ passing narrative in his published and unpublished writing, focusing on race in relation to taboo sexual desire.41 In

37 Correspondence from Parker Tyler to Amos Vogel, 14 December 1961, Container 5.5, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 38 Ibid.; While Tyler praises Shadows, he was critical of Cassavetes’ later efforts. For instance, Tyler was particularly critical of Husbands (1970). In the July 1971 issue of the Evergreen Review, Tyler explains, ““What [Husbands] calls into question is lodged in a general abiding state of question by the whole film: heterosexuality itself…Husbands is flagrant with homosexual innuendo” See: Parker Tyler, “Those Homophile Husbands,” No. 91,July 1971 in From the Third Eye: The Evergreen Review Film Reader, eds. Ed Halter and Barney Rosset (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2018), 275. 39 Tyler further argues that Pull My Daisy, which borrowed from Dada and Surrealism, reveals a “lack of historical consciousness in its own field See: Parker Tyler, “For Shadows, Against Pull My Daisy,” in Film Culture Reader, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: Praeger, 1970), 109. 40 Ibid., 112. 41 For instance, in Sex, Psyche, Etcetera, he explains how “a person of Negro blood white-looking enough to pass as White.” Tyler also considers the potentially incestuous relationship between the film’s protagonists, explaining how “the white-looking younger brother and sister… form an authentic duo in unconscious incest. In an unpublished draft of Underground Film, Tyler again mentions how Shadows featured “a hot topical theme about ‘passing’ among white-skinned Negros.” See: Parker Tyler, Sex, Psyche, Etcetera, (New York: Horizon Press, 1971), 78-9.; Background of the Underground (“scrapped version) first work sheets, 22, Container 36.7, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas.

145 an unpublished addendum to his article, “Hollywood as the Universal Church,”42 Tyler uses the film’s passing narrative to criticize the Black Power movement: “The tensions of the drive toward a universal ideal of race and color remain and today are put in dramatic relief by the slogan of Black Power raised by Negro fascists.”43 Tyler’s analysis of marginalized identities may seem a key aspect of his subcultural criticism, but his resistance to supporting any overt political position demonstrates a conflict between his desire to subvert dominant ideologies while maintaining a critical objectivity.

Tyler’s focus on American experimental cinema culminated in his monograph

Underground Film, published in 1969, and its aesthetic evaluation of the experimental underground cinema’s represents a marked departure from Mekas’ celebratory and promotional criticism. Throughout Underground Film, Tyler critiques the home-video quality of underground cinema that Mekas celebrated as a mark of artisanal, personal filmmaking. Mekas, of course, was also a filmmaker, who made biographical films that critics compared to home video; he cultivated this aesthetic in his work and celebrated it in the work of others, because he believed “personal” filmmaking provided a necessary antithesis to manufactured Hollywood films.44 In terms of production, Mekas recognized that 16mm portable cameras, which led to the “home video” effect Tyler criticizes, allowed filmmakers to work on limited budgets. However, Tyler does not consider production, which reflects a desire to treat experimental cinema as an autonomous artistic practice.

42 Published in The Three Faces of the Film: The Art, The Dream, and The Cult (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1960); “Hollywood as the Universal Church,” The American Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 2 (Summer 1950), 165-76. 43 Note for “Hollywood as a Universal Church,” Container 3.1, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 44 Tyler disputed the notion that the underground was an alternative to Hollywood, explaining how it was “a forthright bid for overground [sic] status” See: Background of the Underground (“scrapped version) first work sheets, 13, Container 36.7, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas.

146 While this impulse is ironic given Tyler’s focus on representation and identity, he believed the aesthetics of underground cinema reflected an absence of artistic vision. In many instances, it appeared to Tyler that underground filmmakers simply set up a camera to record their friends or intimate moments.

Like his review of Pull My Daisy, Tyler argues in Underground Film that underground cinema embraced aspects of the youth counterculture to appeal to a mainstream audience.

Tyler explains in an early draft of Underground Film: “Just a glance at women’s fashions tells us a great deal about the erupting popularity of Underground films: the shrinkage of the hemline is something only those definitely under thirty can well sustain.”45

Underground cinema also appealed to the counterculture through psychedelic effects that appealed to stoned audiences. Filmmakers used anamorphic lenses to create the “illusion of an inner state extending from the drugged spectator to a spectacle or environment,” but these effects masked the absence of poetic-imaginative vision.46 As Tyler argues, underground cinema created an “inept propaganda of ecstasy and happiness – something that is very close to publicizing certain personality cults that have emerged from beatnik and hippie milieus.”47 Unlike the subversive modernist avant-garde of the 1920s and 30s, the 1960’s counterculture represented an ersatz form of rebellion and was mainstream. As

Tyler argues, “…the quasi-aesthetic culture I’ve been discussing (hippies, etc) have more in

45 Background of the Underground (“scrapped version”) first work sheets, 33, Container 36.7, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 46 Parker Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 130; However, Tyler ignores the hypnagogic cinema of Bruce Conrad, Harry Smith, or Paul Sharits that could genuinely induce a trance-like state. 47 Ibid, 99, emphasis org.

147 common with the pretentious and aggressive vulgarity of the Establishments than they do with elite good taste and the high-art tradition.”48

Tyler further labelled a subset of underground cinema “pad” films, which is a term that suggests Beat slang for an apartment. “Pad” films were set in domestic spaces like apartments, lofts, or hotels and featured the filmmaker’s friends and social circle. Of course, underground filmmakers did appear in each other’s films, demonstrating a sense of community: Ken Jacob’s Little Stabs at Happiness (1959-63) featured Jack Smith; Ron Rice’s

Chumlum (1964) starred Smith, Barbara Rubin, and Beverly Grant; and Andy Warhol cast the artists, performers, and hangers-on from the Factory in his films. Tyler argues that this cinema documented a social circle for the voyeuristic pleasure of an audience, but he again ignores production constraints. Filmmakers like Jacobs, who worked with almost no budget, could not afford to film on sets or soundstages.49 Casting one’s friends was cheaper than hiring professional actors and provided underground cinema an appealing personal quality. However, Tyler viewed the pad film as a demonstration of the insular nature of

New York City’s experimental film community. 50 In an early draft of Underground Film,

Tyler even complains that Mekas “limits the domain of Underground Film to its American headquarters in New York City.”51 Despite this critique, Tyler focused overwhelmingly on

New York-based filmmakers in the published edition of Underground Film and was

48 Background of the Underground (“scrapped version) first work sheets, 41, Container 36.7, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 49 Jacobs was only able to finance a sound of print of Last Stabs due to a donation from Jerome Hill facilitated by Mekas. Previously, Jacobs played 78 records to soundtrack the film. 50 However, there is some ambiguity regarding Tyler’s use of “pad.” In fact, a German translator wrote to Tyler to clarify: “It would be helpful to me, if you could indicated to me the ‘semantic range’ of your usage of ‘pad’” See: Correspondence from Max Looser to Parker Tyler to, 9 July 1970, 2, Container 37.5, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, emphasis org.. 51 Background of the Underground (“scrapped version) first work sheets, 6-7, Container 36.7, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas.

148 susceptible to similar criticism. Robert Pike, who led the Creative Film Society in Los

Angeles, wrote to Tyler to complain of his “lack of familiarity with the relatively current films being produced on the West Coast.”52

Ultimately, Tyler preferred early-twentieth century modernist films to the 1960’s experimental underground. For instance, Tyler considers German film The Cabinet of Dr.

Caligari (1920) directed by Robert Wiene, representative of the “true history of

Underground film as well as the avant-garde film,”53 and Tyler explains how Caligari should serve as a model for the underground: “[Caligari’s] optical distortion in the stage like set…is important because of its link to the psychedelic environments which Underground films play with as a simple result of drug taking.”54 The difference, then, between the modernist avant-garde and experimental underground was based in vision and intent. As Tyler argues, underground cinema created “unreal” environments that disavowed the “dynamic relationship between love on one side and death and madness on the other.”55

Underground cinema’s “Drug Attitude” and “libidinal fantasies” also sublimated the fear of death and madness that modernist cinema had confronted, and the modernist avant-garde created a sense of magic without relying on cheap effects: “Un Chien andalou and L’Age d’or are surreal mixtures of very literal elements…[and]…hold no magic or dreamlike atmosphere achieved through ‘filmic’ trickery.”56 Like Robert Wiene’s film, Luis Buñuel and

Salvador Dalí’s film demonstrated a similar sense of danger. Un Chien andalou (1929) famously begins with the image of an eyeball being cut, which symbolized the film’s

52 Correspondence from Robert Pike to Parker Tyler, 27 December 1969, Container 37.5, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 53 Tyler, Underground Film, 71. 54 Ibid, 97. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid, 134.

149 “optical assault.”57 This image, as Tyler explains, demonstrates how the “destructive violence of the early ideals of avant-garde film cannot be overemphasized.”58

Although Underground Film is highly critical of 1960’s American experimental cinema, Tyler did appreciate second-wave experimental filmmakers Gregory Markopoulos and Kenneth Anger, who began their careers in the 1940s but produced films throughout the 1960s. Both men were pioneering queer filmmakers, who explored homosexual desire in their films. Tyler considers Markopoulos “one of the leading independent filmmakers”59 and “the most underrated member of new avant-garde,”60 and Tyler argues that Kenneth

Anger’ films,61 which allegorized homosexual desire, should be in the “central Underground cannon.”62 In Tyler’s estimation, Markopoulos and Anger presented honest representations of queer identity that contrasted with Andy Warhol’s glib appropriations, and they appealed to a queer and subcultural audience that existed outside of the mainstream.

Tyler’s evaluative ideological and aesthetic assessments of the experimental underground further demonstrates how he felt a responsibility to create a canon that avoided the partisan interests of critics like Mekas.63 Tyler explains, “…if all film, and especially avant- garde film, is to be conceived as the history of an ever maturing art, then we move

57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid, 215. Important films directed by Gregory Markopoulos include Twice a Man (1963) and the Illiac Passion (1964-67). 60 Correspondence from Parker Tyler to Gregory Markopoulos, 6 May 1969, Container 4.9, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 61 Tyler maintained a friendly correspondence with Anger. In fact, Anger wrote Tyler on August 30, 1969, “I had not been aware that you were doing a book on Underground Film and am delighted to hear the news.” See: Correspondence from Parker Tyler to Kenneth Anger, 30 August 1969, Container 6.3, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas; Important films directed by Kenneth Anger include Fireworks (1947) and Scorpio Rising (1963). 62 Tyler, Underground Film, 214. 63 This is evident in the filmography. See: Parker Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 241-9.

150 automatically to a quite different perspective…in which the anatomy of the avant-garde movement can actually be described and systematized.”64 Despite his criticism of the experimental underground, Tyler believed in the aesthetic and political potential of cinema, but he wanted to free the underground from its faddish relationship to the counterculture and mainstream ambitions that led filmmakers to support dominant ideologies.65

“Is Film Criticism Only Propaganda?”

In a lecture at the 1966 New York Film Festival, later published in Film Culture,

Tyler explains how film critics had abandoned evaluative standards and critical responsibility. Tyler states, “It strikes me very forcibly that good film criticism, responsible film criticism, is impossible, when so high a degree of tolerance is exercised toward manifestations of what roughly may still be termed the avant-garde.”66 In Tyler’s view, critics like Mekas, who did not provide ideological and aesthetic evaluation in their criticism, were merely propagandists. Tyler explains, “Film criticism can be only propaganda…so long as mere technical antics involving sensation are deemed an adequate substitute for emotional and intellectual values engendered through filmic means.”67 Later, in a letter to art critic Gregory Battcock, Tyler asks why Jonas Mekas had published his lecture that was so critical of the New American Cinema: “I wonder why Jonas wished to print it – maybe only as an excuse to attack me…Frankly speaking, my position as a champion of the avant-garde has been much compromised in latter [sic] years by what I

64 Ibid, 209. 65 He was even more direct in his first draft, writing, “I love the Underground.” See: Background of the Underground (“scrapped version) first work sheets, 50, Container 36.7, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, emphasis org. 66 Parker Tyler, “Is Film Criticism Only Propaganda,” in The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton Co, 1967), 69, emphasis org. 67 Ibid, 71.

151 consider the faults of the new tendencies.”68 Tyler was aware that his lecture would engender controversy, and he explains to Battcock that it would stick out “like a sore thumb” in his anthology.69

In many regards, Tyler considered Mekas’ criticism the paragon of the New

American Cinema’s promotional bent and lack of standards, but their critical spats could generate controversy and attract readers. In a 1966 letter to Amos Vogel, Tyler explains how Mekas took advantage of the “art film” audience’s naiveté: “Jonas and the Film Co-op are attempting to challenge [the] status quo by organized promotion and by catering to the taste in art film audiences that tends to prefer the ‘deranged’ and ‘spontaneous’ to the orderly and calculated, to prefer the less artful to the more artful.”70 As Tyler argues, “Jonas is an excellent opportunist…[who]… organized film makers exactly like a political party with a filmic platform: Freedom of Expression for Fetich Footagists.”71 Tyler also critiques

Mekas’ professed spiritual relationship to the cinema. In a 1967 letter to the Village Voice,

Tyler explains, “A few years later, indeed, Mekas was ‘converted.’ Like certain religious converts, he now lives rigorously ‘by the book.’ But the book alas is much closer in spirt to biblical fundamentalism than to modern criticism.”72 Consequently, Mekas views

“discrimination and even analysis toward Underground films as heresy in the avant-garde church which he has personally set up.”73

68 Correspondence from Gregory Battcock to Parker Tyler, 27 December 1966, Container 3.2, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 69 Ibid; The anthology Tyler references is The New American Cinema: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: E. P. Dutton Co, 1967). 70 Correspondence from Parker Tyler to Amos Vogel, 20 April 1966, Container 5.5, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 71 Ibid. 72 Correspondence from Parker Tyler to The Editor, The Village Voice, 5 February 1967, Container 5.5, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 73 Ibid.

152 Tyler ultimately considers Mekas a “propagandist” rather than a critic: “A commentator such as Mekas is not a critic at all…His true function is that of cheer-leader. In short, he is a politician, a revolutionary propagandist.”74 According to Tyler, Mekas’ promotional criticism created an uniformed audience that accepted unimaginative cinema:

“The in-groupers, the film buffs, the super-hipsters who from the Underground’s cheering sections are sometimes just as far from understanding the realities of the current avant- garde as those who think that Underground films are the pretentious productions of very wild, nasty-minded amateurs.”75 Of course, this line of attack was not entirely novel.

Pauline Kael made similar accusations against the art house crowd, whom she accused of accepting a “lack of clarity as complexity.”76 But Tyler confirms that a critic must provide evaluative judgment rather than uncritical promotion: “A true evaluator (that is, a critic) must know to juggle the pros and cons of a given work’s elements and come out with a responsible, enduring judgement of them.”77 As Tyler explains, the critic was essential to the New American Cinema’s reception because “…it is exactly when a revolutionary trend makes its appearance that the critic’s function becomes the most precious, the most urgently needed.”78

Mekas responded to Tyler’s description of him as a “propagandist” in a December

18, 1969 “Movie Journal” for the Village Voice entitled “UNDERGROUND FILM ACCORDING

TO PARKER TYLER.” Mekas begins, “At the end of the decade, we should settle for good the

74 Tyler, Underground Film, xix. 75 Ibid, 6. 76 Pauline Kael, I Lost it at the Movies (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1965), 15. 77 Tyler, Underground Film, xx, emphasis org. 78 Ibid, xxi.

153 question of underground film.”79 He then culls two-pages worth of adjectives from

Underground Film, compiles them in a single paragraph, and ironically concludes, “The author of [Underground Film] is a writer and has an unlimited vocabulary. I admire writers.

More power to them.”80 Mekas cleverly insinuates that he is a not a writer like Tyler – a supercilious critic who passes judgement – but Tyler argues that Mekas was misrepresenting him.81 In response to the column, Tyler sent Mekas an ironic Christmas card via the Village Voice editor, explaining, “Now, Jonas, that you’ve stuffed the stocking of

Underground Film with about a hundred non-gifts, or bad-sounding phrases from my book… I hope you’ll prepare another column full of the gifts of my book – that is, an equal number of the good-sounding phrases by which I characterize Underground and avant- garde films.”82 Despite their mutual animosity, Tyler was forced to acknowledge Mekas’ influence on American experimental cinema. In a letter to Grove, Tyler asks that Rosset include a quote from Mekas in a press release announcing their commitment to the book:

“[Add] a quote from Jonas Mekas: ‘If there is someone who knows more than anyone else in this country about avant-garde film, that make is Parker Tyler’?…will get exact quote from

79 Jonas Mekas, “December 18, 1969, UNDERGROUND FILM ACCORDING TO PARKER TYLER,” in Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-71 (New York: Collier Books, 1972), 362. 80 Ibid, 364. 81 In a letter to filmmaker Ken Jacobs, Tyler expresses his anger about Mekas’ column: "Jonas Mekas has found a delectable way of slandering my book in his Voice column of Dec. 18, but – as he explained to me when I asked him if he were preparing another column composed of good-sounding phrases from my book – it was, after all, a 'political article,' meaning that, naturally, anything goes." See: Correspondence from Parker Tyler to Ken Jacobs, 20 December 1969, Container 37.5, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 82 Correspondence from Parker Tyler to The Editor, The Village Voice, 18 December 1969, Container 37.5, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas; Tyler was not a fan of the Voice, which he refers to as a “weekly tabloid” in the forward to the 1972 Penguin edition of Underground Film. See: New Forward, Revised text for Penguin Edition, 2, Container 37.4, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas

154 Village Voice.”83 Tyler’s insistence on using Mekas’ quote to promote his book demonstrates how he used the controversy between them as way to promote his own criticism.

Tyler’s critique of partisan critics was supported by his argument that underground cinema’s counterculture politics were a form of “propaganda.” Although Tyler’s criticism was subcultural and ideological, he was opposed to second-wave feminism, Black Power, and the New Left. These critiques may have been Tyler’s attempt to maintain his critical independence, but they also reflect a generational distrust. In a letter from 1970, Tyler, who critiqued normative gender roles throughout his career, describes his response to

“Women’s Lib”: “It seems painfully obvious, over and over, that all these people want is to create disruption and chaos as a tester toward revolution via nihilism.”84 Tyler appreciated the anarchic nature of Surrealism and Dada, but he rejected a modernist political commitment and was opposed to filmmakers who explicitly supported political causes.

Tyler likewise rejects the notion that experimental film was necessarily anti-Capitalist, criticizing Mekas and the Film-makers’ Co-op in a letter to Vogel: “However much an art may be organized economically, politically and socially, if it lacks a basic intellectual cohesion, a basic harmony of motives and objectives, its’s going to be just another form of competition within the capitalist structure: the small guild product as opposed to the mass- manufactured product.”85 In Tyler’s view, filmmakers embraced politics as a way to mask the absence of artistic commitment: “Let’s face it: the only unity which the radical

83 Correspondence from Parker Tyler to Barney Rosset, 4 September 1967, Container 4.6, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 84 Correspondence from Parker Tyler to Fred, 30 June 1970, Container 37.5, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 85 Correspondence from Parker Tyler to Amos Vogel, 30 April 1966, 4, Container 5.5, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, emphasis org.

155 independent filmmakers have – aside from the mostly sterile permissiveness to be fetichistic and messy – is the old familiar one of social protest at any cost.86 In 1968, Tyler wrote to Renata Adler, who was in her only year as film critic at the New York Times, to explain how underground cinema represented “a debasement of democratic values insofar as its broadest, most radical forces desire to dump all standards of art and even craft in favor of personal expression on one side and revolutionary expression on the other.”87 In taking his argument to its conclusion, Tyler explains how the underground cinema’s politics resemble the “‘cultural’ ideology of socialism as practiced these days by the Soviet

Union.”88

Appealing to a “Straight” Audience

Tyler’s focus on queer sexual politics challenged critics who considered representations of sexuality without fully considering how they challenged mainstream

American social values. For example, writer Sheldon Renan devotes a section to “Sex” in his survey of the Underground, Introduction to the American Underground Film, but merely provides a descriptive account of how the underground’s attitude about sex “tends to be more uninhibited.”89 While Renan acknowledges the New American Cinema’s alternative sexual representations, he ignores their political import: “An underground film-maker is more likely to follow his own inclinations. Other sexual relationships than strictly heterosexual ones may be shown.”90 Writers agreed that underground cinema represented

86 Ibid. 87 Correspondence from Parker Tyler to Renata Adler, 1 September 1968, Container 5.1, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 88 Ibid, 2. 89 Sheldon Renan, An Introduction to the American Underground Film (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co, 1967), 31. 90 Ibid.

156 a greater range of sexual desire, but they failed to consider how queer representations challenged mainstream American social and sexual values. Conversely, critics like Mekas celebrated homosexuality in cinema to promote the New American Cinema’s transgressive value but failed to consider how filmmakers used sexual difference to exploit a youth audience. In contrast to his peers, Tyler specifically questioned the underground cinema’s sexual politics and critiqued filmmakers’ apolitical appropriations of queer aesthetics.

Throughout the 1960s, Playboy published a series of articles that examined the history of sex in cinema and devoted an article to representations of sex in experimental cinema. While the magazine, first published in 1953, represented a newfound sense of sexual freedom, Playboy was focused on heterosexual desire, consumed by a straight male audience, and supported patriarchy by objectifying women. Writing in response to

Playboy’s April 14, 1967 issue focused on “The History of Sex in the Cinema,” Tyler responded with an ambivalent letter that, at least, commends Arthur Knight and Hollis

Alpert, the article’s writers, “for being very much on ball; that is, when they are also on the course.”91 Tyler agrees with Knight and Albert’s claim about the underground’s “erotic candor,” but he argues that filmmakers like Andy Warhol used camp to represent queer identity as “deliberately gauche and gawky.”92 The Playboy writers, Tyler argues, were too

“straight” to recognize the political critique embedded in camp: “Maybe all camping to one side, Arthur Knight and Hollis Alpert are too plain ‘straight’ to recognize some deviate sex antics for exactly what they are.”93 In many ways, Knight and Albert did not understand the

91 Correspondence from Parker Tyler to Editor, Playboy, 14 April 1967, Container 5.1, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas; Arthur Knight and Hollis Alpert, “The History of Sex in Cinema,” Playboy, April 14, 1967, 136-53. 92 Ibid, 2. 93 Ibid.

157 political aspects of queer aesthetics, and Playboy appealed to a mainstream readership interested in voyeuristic depictions of “deviant” sexual practices. In their desire to be shocked and surprised, straight audiences were unable to distinguish genuinely queer cinema from ersatz appropriations. Consequently, Knight and Alpert argue that Flaming

Creatures (1963) was taken from the “homosexual’s handbook,”94 but Tyler explains, in contrast, how the “Mattachine Society…would join Kinsey in standing up to protest the aspersion in sincere homosexual practice.”95

Tyler’s letter to Playboy expresses several themes that animated his critiques of the experimental underground cinema’s sexual politics. For one, Tyler was the most prominent queer critic to review the New American Cinema, and he understood the political aspects of queer cinema. In this regard, Tyler provided a reception of queer filmmaking that recognized how queer aesthetics critiqued dominant sexual values. Tyler also recognized how filmmakers used sex as a form of exploitation, and he explained how Andy Warhol and

Jack Smith used camp to comically signify sexual difference. As Tyler argued, the camp appeal of Warhol and Smith’s films functioned as form of comedy that satirized sexual difference and became a way for underground cinema to titillate straight audiences, transmuting a genuinely subcultural expression into an appeal for a mainstream audience.

As Tyler explains in an unpublished draft of Underground Film, “Camp…is one of the more satiric forms taken by the non-professional aestheticism of Underground Film. But camp too has grades of wit, or moral importance.”96

94 Ibid. 95 Ibid. 96 Background of the Underground (“scrapped version) first work sheets, 54, Container 36.7, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas.

158 Although camp interpretations of classical Hollywood functioned as critique of the sexual values encoded in these films, underground cinema took the camp appeal of the “sex goddess,” represented in the past by actresses like Jean Harlow, Jane Russell, and Marilyn

Monroe, to even more exaggerated levels.97 Drag performer Mario Montez, whose name referenced camp icon Maria Montez, starred in underground films directed by Andy

Warhol, Jack Smith, and Ron Rice. Mario also became one of Warhol’s “superstars” after starring in Flaming Creatures. Tyler describes Mario’s role in Warhol’s Harlot (1964): “The camp symbolism of the Warhol film…is to have Montez extract first one banana then another from various caches and munch them deliberately, in voluptuous leisure, for about an hour. This is the principle action.”98 Tyler considers Harlot a litmus test for one’s ability to tolerate the underground’s indulgences: “Get the picture? If you do, you qualify for the

Underground sex scene.”99 Despite his sarcasm, Tyler explains how Mario Montez’s evocation of a camp icon reoriented camp reading strategies: camp was now embodied rather than read. As Tyler argues, Montez, whose masculine features contrasted with his feminine attire, was a deliberate send-up of the overdressed, oversexed Hollywood goddess. Harlot’s ridiculous mise-en-scène and comically overt symbolism further heightened the camp absurdism. Underground cinema also imbued its camp appropriations with counterculture stereotypes. As Tyler describes in Underground Film,

“…the beat hero is transparently homosexual, the women at least conspicuously offbeat,

97 Women in Hollywood films were either passive sexual objects or maternal figures, but subcultural criticism sought textual ruptures that subverted Hollywood’s dominant messages. For instance, Tyler explains how camp icon “[Mae West] dared to add a legitimate dash of humor to the myth of the Oedipus complex,” which acknowledged the absurd roles women played while demonstrating her agency as a performer. See: Parker Tyler, The Hollywood Hallucination (New York: Creative Age Press, 1944), 96. 98 Parker Tyler, Sex, Psyche, Etcetera (New York: Horizon Press, 1971), 24. 99 Ibid.

159 undoubtedly the pair are wild travesties of the old Hollywood stereotypes.”100 This odd couple, “the homosexual beat” and “offbeat woman,” as Tyler explains, appealed to the counterculture through their evident sexual difference. While Tyler seems to be criticizing the alternative representations of sexuality he had previously demanded, he argued that underground cinema used camp to comically signify and, in some instances, mock queer identity as way to exploit straight audiences.

In addition, Tyler argued that the experimental underground relied on exploitative representations of sex to appeal to the voyeuristic desires of a straight audience. For instance, Tyler compares underground cinema to pornography: “Not merely the audience is seeking peephole sensations, so are the actors and filmmakers who provide numerous films that correspond to sex shows and are aesthetically too little above the commercial nudie film show on Forty-second street.”101 Tyler’s aversion was not based on a desire to censor, but he argued cinema had to do more than appeal to an audience’s prurient desires to warrant a consideration as art. Tyler also critiques Warhol’s exhibitionist films that were produced with no evident purpose: “The peculiar interests of Warhol’s blatantly artless films – any aesthetic interest in them is purely coincidental and does not refer to any individual living or dead – lies in the fact that they are direct, technically primitive records of improvised human behavior.”102 Warhol was a widely-celebrated filmmaker, but Tyler’s focus on American social values compelled him to criticize Warhol’s sexual politics, and he argued that the appeal of Warhol’s films was based in their exhibitionist, quasi- pornographic nature. Tyler further criticizes Warhol’s films by labelling them “primitive

100 Ibid, 52. 101 Tyler, Underground Film, 21. 102 Tyler, Sex, Psyche, Etcetera, 12.

160 records.” Unlike direct cinema documentary that used “real” footage to capture the essence of a subject, Warhol’s films seemed to have little intent beyond their prurient value. While directors working in “direct” cinema relied on careful editing, juxtaposing footage for narrative or polemical purposes, Warhol presented long takes without any ostensible point: “Time is of immense importance in Warhol’s mesmerically boring films simply because the watcher…is being forced to participate in the actual durée of an object.”103

Warhol’s films also relied on an exhibitionist “obligingness.” In describing the couple in Warhol’s Fuck [Blue Movie] (1969), Tyler explains: “This is not to say that the usually offbeat characters who work for Warhol’s cameras…are either innerly [sic] depraved morbid exhibitionists or simple frauds.”104 Instead, Warhol’s actors performed “for Andy.”

As Tyler explains, “[Fuck] is not meant to represent; it is meant to be. And therein…lies its

[sic] great, really cool distinction. Are the performers here self-conscious; do they look at the camera—or the camera man?”105 The film even failed to excite in the manner of pornographic film, where, as Tyler argues, “everything is calculated…to provide an illusion of erotic pleasure or lust.”106 Nor was Fuck successful as a documentary because of its performative nature. Fuck simply presented footage without intent or purpose, and, in this regard, Warhol represented sex like he represented the Empire State Building in Empire:

“We know the Empire State Building is always there…but it would not occur to us to watch it for eight or six hours, not to mention one hour.”107 The lack of artistic intent evident in

103 Ibid, 14, emphasis org. 104 Ibid, 13. 105 Ibid, 16 emphasis org. 106 Ibid. 107 Ibid, 14.

161 Warhol’s films suggested to Tyler that underground cinema relied on voyeurism to exploit a mainstream audience, who wanted to be shocked by “radical” cinema.

Tyler likewise considered Shirley Clarke’s quasi-vérité film, Portrait of Jason (1967) an example of the underground cinema’s exhibitionism. Clarke’s film focused on a single subject, Jason, who provides a monologue for the entirety of the film. Jason, a gay, black man, who performs for Clarke’s camera, is prompted by offscreen questions and drinks alcohol to the point of inebriation. Clarke’s film seemed to question documentary film ethics, but Tyler argues that it was exploitative and affirmed homosexual stereotypes. Tyler writes, “Portrait of Jason provides a climax for the Underground film camera as a morally sanctioned, altogether self-righteous voyeur whose findings are meant for public consumption.108 Clarke used Tyler’s description for promotion, but his comment is a critique of the underground’s attempts to mask its voyeuristic qualities with ethical purpose. Tyler continues by focusing on the film’s exhibitionist aspects: “The fact remains that the true cachet of Portrait of Jason is that it portrays a real-life individual who is willing to admit publicly everything which (especially in the case of a homosexual) it has been considered socially desirable to keep secret.”109 Tyler advocated honest representations of homosexuality, but the performative nature of Portrait of Jason and exploitative focus on

Jason’s past as an “errand” boy was intended for the voyeuristic desire of the audience. At worst, Jason’s performance affirmed notions of homosexuals as deviant. Jason’s marginal identity provided some glimpse of an identity absent in mainstream cinema, but the ethical

108 Tyler, Underground Film, 40. 109 Ibid, 39.

162 questions surrounding Clark’s representation of Jason attenuated whatever progressive potential the film possessed.

Conclusion

In 1958, filmmaker Stan Brakhage wrote to Tyler, “I understood that it was precisely because you are an artist…that you could accomplish these great feats in aesthetic criticism.”110 Despite his influence on American experimental cinema, Tyler, who died in

1974, never achieved the recognition of his contemporaries, Jonas Mekas and Pauline Kael.

Tyler wrote for niche publications while Kael reached thousands of readers through the

New Yorker. Tyler’s repeated criticism of underground cinema also ensured that he remained on the fringes of the community that supported experimental cinema, and his critiques of heteronormativity alongside his refusal to support liberal political movements engendered opposition on both sides of the political spectrum. However, Tyler’s radical alterity was essential to his queer criticism that rejected the mainstream while exposing the hypocrisies, contradictions, and ambivalence that characterized the underground’s sexual politics, and his queer criticism challenged the cinema’s support of heterosexuality.

Tyler’s interest in American experimental cinema did not end with the publication of Underground Film, and he planned a follow-up that was never published. Tyler explains his intention behind the book, which had the proposed title, “Pioneering the Underground /

Studies of Films and Film-makers 1958-68,” in a letter to an editor at Atheneum: “The distinction between this and the Grove book is quite simple: the Atheneum book would be history from the inside, personal, documentary, interpretive; the Grove Book, history in

110 Correspondence from Stan Brakhage to Parker Tyler, 25 May 1958, 3, Container 6.7, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas.

163 general, impersonal perspective, long-range, critical.”111 As proposed, the book overlaps with Mekas’ coverage of the New American Cinema in his “Movie Journal” columns (1959-

71), but Tyler’s ill health and commitment to his last book, The Shadow of an Airplane

Climbs the Empire State Building, which ambitiously considered a “world theory of film,” prevented him from finishing a follow-up

However, Underground Film was successful enough to warrant a second printing by

Penguin Press, and Tyler wrote additional material.112 In the revised 1972 edition, Tyler added considerations of El Topo (1970), a midnight movie directed by Mexican director

Alejandro Jodorowsky that was an experimental Western, and Kubrick’s A Clockwork

Orange (1971). In terms of production, both feature-length films were more expensive than the low-budget underground cinema Tyler had considered in the first edition. As Tyler explains, “Very few films have come on the scene since 1969 which might be added…very few, that is, which are radical and inventive enough to clearly belong to the avant-garde as carried forward by Underground Film. Today we are in the midst of new vogue, the borderline film, or the underground-conscious-of-being-overground.113 Here, as Tyler argues, underground cinema of the 1960s had become the “borderline” cinema of the

1970s. This “borderline” cinema, which received substantial capital investment, used formal innovation alongside graphic sex and violence to appeal to a mainstream audience, but, in many ways, the “borderline” film represented the fulfillment of the underground’s mainstream ambition. Yet, Tyler’s queer criticism, which was often more radical than the

111 Correspondence from Parker Tyler to Zenowhich, 221 December 1968, Container 5.6, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas. 112 The Da Capo Press publication from 1995 currently in print is a re-publication of Tyler’s first version that adds his 1972 preface from the Penguin edition. 113 “Note” on New Copy, Revised text for Penguin edition, 1 July 1974, Container 37.4, Parker Tyler Collection, The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas.

164 experimental cinema it analyzed, challenged normative American values that affirmed the cultural dominance of heterosexuality while initiating a greater focus on marginal identities. While Tyler’s peers like Renan simply remarked upon the underground cinema’s representations of sexual difference, and Mekas uncritically celebrated queer aspects of the

New American Cinema for promotional purposes, Tyler challenged a putatively radical cinema that used sexual difference for exploitative purposes, anticipating contemporary queer alternative and academic criticism that uses analysis of the cinema to question

American social and sexual values.

165 Conclusion

Popular Culture is Political Culture: The Legacy of Critics of the New American Cinema

In their respective critiques of New American Cinema, Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler demonstrated the film critic’s authority in shaping reception of the

American cinema by challenging popular criticism that supported both the film industry and “highbrow” intellectual criticism that dismissed cinema as low culture. Their critiques also countered Marxist arguments that popular culture such as cinema supported the analyzing American social values, and this helped Americans recognize the value of marginal independent and experimental cinema. Mekas attempted to integrate experimental cinema into mainstream popular culture, and Tyler helped readers appreciate this cinema within a historical tradition. Pauline Kael primarily reviewed mainstream cinema while she provided a serious reception of Hollywood that demonstrated American popular culture’s ability to engage with social issues and exhibit formal innovation. Finally, Kael, Mekas, and Tyler’s critiques accounted for the industrial and cultural changes that produced the New American Cinema; their film writing challenged perceived distinctions between “high” and “low” culture, popular culture and fine art, and mainstream and marginal culture.

The industrial and cultural changes that affected Hollywood in postwar America fundamentally changed reception of American cinema by providing film critics a greater opportunity to influence reception. Hollywood had controlled nearly every facet of the

American cinema since the 1930s, but the postwar dissolution of the studio system and the film industry’s economic difficulties created the space necessary for new kinds of reception.

166 As American audiences consumed the independent, experimental, and “New” Hollywood cinema that constituted the New American Cinema, they looked to film critics, working outside of the film industry, for analysis and interpretation of cinema that challenged their expectations of American filmmaking. Jonas Mekas and Parker Tyler, who wrote for alternative arts and culture publications based in New York, and Pauline Kael, who wrote for the New Yorker, appealed to readers interested in analytical film writing that did more than simply promote Hollywood’s newest release. Readers looked to Kael, Mekas, and Tyler to explain the New American Cinema’s formal and social aspects, but educated readers appreciated their analysis of the American cinema that moved film criticism beyond

“consumer’s guide” reviews that appeared in newspapers.

As these critics provided a more serious reception of contemporary U.S. cinema, they inserted political and social analysis into film criticism that industry-supported publications would have resisted. Pauline Kael analyzed Hollywood’s representations of gender, sexuality, and violence, and she popularized film writing that analyzed social issues. Jonas Mekas and Parker Tyler received transgressive experimental and independent cinema and recognized how this cinema challenged Hollywood’s industrial orthodoxy, aesthetic conventions, and support of dominant American values. Mekas also celebrated experimental New American Cinema for confronting American values of social conformity and capitalist consumption, and he argued that alternative cinema could become an agent of cultural reformation. Mekas’ criticism celebrated the New American Cinema’s transgressive qualities for promotional purposes, but Parker Tyler pioneered a radical, subcultural criticism that anticipated the queer and feminist criticism to follow. In his criticism of the New American Cinema, Tyler evaluated the cinema’s sexual politics by

167 analyzing the underground’s appropriations of queer aesthetics and attempts to appeal to a mainstream audience through an exploitative representations of sex. Consequently, Tyler’s criticism, which appeared in magazines and journals during a period of rampant homophobia, should be recognized as an important influence on queer academic and popular reception that critiques the dominant sexual values encoded in the American cinema.

In championing alternative American experimental and independent cinema, these three critics initiated an increased acceptance and recognition of marginal American cinemas. Industrial changes had created the space necessary for alternatives to Hollywood, but independent and experimental cinema still needed a serious reception and made audiences aware of its aesthetic and cultural value. Mekas played an essential role in promoting experimental cinema, and he helped popularize cinema that challenged

American expectations of the cinema’s aesthetic and social characteristics. His promotional criticism also considered this cinema in accessible cultural terms that his readers, who may have been new to film appreciation and could not necessarily appreciate formal analysis, could understand and appreciate. In contrast to Mekas, Parker Tyler provided an evaluative assessment of experimental cinema, but his criticism took this cinema seriously as an aspect of American culture that required intellectual analysis. Tyler demonstrated that even the most marginal cinema attention and recognition, and his serious engagement with “trash” cinema, produced by Jack Smith or Andy Warhol, anticipated the later critical reception of filmmakers like John Waters, who appropriated “low” cinema for queer and subcultural purposes. In creating a critical reception of cinema that existed well outside of

Hollywood and the mainstream, Mekas and Tyler demonstrated the value of alternative

168 cinema from the “margins,” and thereby anticipated today’s reception oriented around specific genres, directors, and subcultures.

Finally, these critics used their reviews of the New American Cinema to challenge distinctions between “high” and “low” culture that had dominated American popular culture for decades. Pauline Kael celebrated Hollywood as popular culture and populist art, and her criticism explained how American popular culture could engage with social issues and demonstrate formal innovation. Kael’s longform criticism also provided a serious reception of Hollywood that has influenced subsequent generations of critics and writers, who provide critical analysis of mainstream popular culture. Mekas’ attempts to popularize experimental cinema challenged distinctions between art and popular culture by positioning serious filmmakers like Stan Brakhage alongside jazz, Beat literature, and popular culture like Hollywood cinema, and Mekas celebrated the American Cinema in cultural terms oriented around a rejection of mainstream values. Parker Tyler’s early- career analysis of Hollywood used “high” modernist criticism to analyze “low” commercial cinema, but his criticism of the “underground” recognized how American experimental cinema recontextualized “low” culture through camp and pastiche and responded to changes in American society by incorporating aesthetic elements of the counterculture.

Although Tyler was highly critical of the underground’s relationship to the counterculture and critiqued underground filmmakers’ use of queer aesthetics, he recognized how this cinema represented a broader dialogue between popular culture and marginal artistic production like experimental cinema.

Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler’s respective critiques of the New

American Cinema also demonstrated film writing’s social and political value. By using film

169 writing to question aspects of American identity in terms of class, gender, and sexuality, these critics anticipated film analysis focused on identity such as the queer and feminist film criticism and reception focused on representation. In examining the social values in

Hollywood film or experimental cinema, these critics argued that cinema was an important conduit for American social values. At the same time, Parker Tyler demonstrated how alternative cinema actually supported the social values it purported to challenge. Mekas' criticism likewise revealed how alternative reception could reinforce traditional gender roles. Although Pauline Kael was the most politically conservative of the three critics, she questioned class-based hierarchies related to “taste” and was a pioneering figure in a male- dominated profession. In the end, Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler’s influence is apparent in criticism and critical reception of American experimental, independent, and

Hollywood cinema that considers this cinema in political terms and values it as an art form.

America’s Cultural Capital

Today’s critical reception has been changed by the rise of digital media technologies and the decline of print-based publications. Forums for film criticism with significant resources and readerships have successfully adapted to a changing media landscape, but magazines like the Village Voice, which ceased publication in 2018, have shut down due to economic pressure and competition from the Internet. But, in the 1960s, New York City- based publications with national readerships determined what American culture mattered.

As a result, they provided Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler, each of whom wrote for influential publications based in the city, authority in a period when Americans respected print journalism. New York City was the center of American art and culture due to its vast infrastructure of museums, performance spaces, theatres, and publishing houses

170 and was home to prominent American writers, artists, and intellectuals. The New Yorker,

Village Voice, and Evergreen Review were based in New York City, and these publications represented the city’s culture to readers throughout the United States.

The film writing that appeared in these publications associated cinema with New

York City’s arts, culture, and politics. The New Yorker represented uptown sophistication by focusing on fine arts like theatre, opera, dance, and literature, and Kael’s film writing in the magazine associated cinema with “high” New York culture. In contrast to the New Yorker’s uptown focus, the Village Voice and the Evergreen Review, which published Tyler’s film criticism, represented downtown New York culture. Both publications covered important

American art and considered cinema as part of the city’s counterculture. The Village Voice represented Greenwich Village, which, in the 1960s, was home to Beat literature, the folk revival, and a vibrant queer community, and the magazine considered cinema an important expression of the Village’s culture and politics. The Evergreen Review also placed cinema in a unique context by placing film writing alongside fiction from New York writers William

Burroughs, Norman Mailer, and Henry Miller. Finally, publications represented New York

City because of its writers, who lived in the city and were involved in the arts. Parker Tyler, who lived on 15 Charles Street in Greenwich Village, foregrounded this identity in his film writing by referencing New York theater, arts exhibitions, and cultural events, as well as

Greenwich Village’s queer community.

By associating Kael, Tyler, and Mekas’ film writing with New York City’s cultural authority, the New Yorker, the Village Voice, and the Evergreen Review provided these critics the needed authority to influence American readers’ perceptions of the cinema.

Kael’s reviews of the New Hollywood provided this cinema a sense of sophistication that

171 readers associated with the New Yorker, and the counterculture politics of the Village Voice and Evergreen Review helped legitimize Mekas’ and Tyler’s critiques of middle-class and suburban social values. It is also important to remember what the geographies of print publication signified in an era before digital technologies deracinated American journalism.

New York City held an important position in American culture, and publications that represented the city’s culture provided a gatekeeping functioning by indicating what culture mattered to readers across the country. The New York-based magazines that published Kael, Tyler, and Mekas in the 1960s associated their film writing with New

York’s cultural authority and provided the cinema they wrote about a distinct sense of urban sophistication.

A Political Criticism

The New Yorker, Village Voice, and Evergreen Review allowed Kael, Mekas, and Tyler to insert their own political sensibilities into film writing through their examinations of

American social values and identity. Although Kael, Mekas, and Tyler understood identity in their own ways, and were writing in a period before writers provided “intersectional” analysis, they made American film writing and criticism political in ways that anticipate contemporary film analysis influenced by identity politics. Yet, each critic’s focus on identity was also motivated by their own backgrounds and life experiences. Kael, who grew up in a working-class family in rural California and struggled economically for years as a single mother, brought a needed awareness of social class to her film writing that challenged elitist cultural hierarchies. As a consequence, she was acutely aware of how

American social class was represented on-screen, and this she challenged the class blindness of elite critics, who were the beneficiaries of upper-class backgrounds. Kael’s

172 challenges to elitist cultural hierarchies and defense of popular culture also anticipates the serious reception that American popular culture like television or video games, which intellectuals have dismissed, now receives.

Unlike Kael, Jonas Mekas and Parker Tyler used film writing explicitly to challenge mainstream social values. Mekas understood that challenging middle-class values of social conformity and consumption would appeal to a youth readership that wanted to signal their rebellion. Mekas was not the first cultural critic to understand the appeal of critiquing social norms, but he recognized that challenging American middle-class values would appeal to a disaffected suburbanites. Mekas’ challenges to the status quo also provided him an important identity as a critic. By connecting his film criticism and promotion of the New

American Cinema with broader social and political challenges, Mekas aligned himself with the 1960s counterculture, which made his criticism appealing to younger readers who may not have trusted the opinions of a middle-age Lithuanian immigrant. In contrast to Mekas,

Tyler’s film writing was not promotional and represents a genuine challenge to American social and sexual values. Tyler was openly gay in a homophobic culture, and he used film writing to challenge a society that viewed homosexuality as deviant. Beyond this, Tyler’s film writing made queer identity visible in a period where it was often hidden, and, in this sense, his criticism reflects the politics of the emergent gay liberation movement.

Contemporary reception that focuses on identity or the American cinema’s political import owes a debt to the pioneering criticism of Kael, Mekas, and Tyler. Contemporary film writers, whether writing for traditional journalistic outlets like the New York Times or websites that provide cultural analysis like the A.V. Club, are especially aware of how

American identity is represented in cinema. This focus is influenced by contemporary

173 identity politics, but Kael, Mekas, and Tyler’s film writing provides an early model of film writing and criticism that want beyond consumer guide reviews or a focus on aesthetics.

Kael, Mekas, and Tyler examined how American identity was reflected through broader social issues, whether it was Kael’s focus on the relationship between class and taste,

Mekas’ critique of the relationship between masculinity and capitalist consumption, or

Tyler’s analysis of the relationship between sexuality and aesthetics. The political concerns of these critics were rooted in respective identities to various degrees, but they paved the way for film reception that considers the cinema a conduit for the social values that defines what it means to be an American.

The Film Generation

Kael, Tyler, and Mekas were likely unaware they were changing American culture, but they played a fundamental role in compelling Americans to value the cinema as art and culture. By putting these critics in dialogue to consider the full scope of the New American

Cinema, it is clear the unique moment in American film history this cinema represents. In the 1960s, Americans embraced cinema as an art form, and filmmakers responded with a decade of innovative independent, experimental, and Hollywood cinema. Kael, Mekas, and

Tyler gave voice to Americans’ newfound appreciation of the cinema and helped readers understand an important period of film production, but they were following their own intellectual, cultural, and aesthetic interests. But in carefully reading their reviews, essays, books, and considering them as a dialogue, it is clear these critics provided the reception the New American Cinema needed to change American film culture. Serious cinema that explored social themes and demonstrated formal innovation needed an equally serious reception. In demonstrating the cinema’s social and artistic value, Kael, Mekas, and Tyler

174 met the challenge posed by American filmmakers of the 1960s, and they created the reception the New American Cinema required.

The value of Kael, Tyler, and Mekas’ film writing to film culture can also be assessed by considering how the cinema has changed in their wake. Filmmakers continue to produce innovative cinema, but big-budget genre films dominate American theatres as Hollywood provides audiences fewer options. One consequence of the complete dominance of the blockbuster – which has been ascendant since the mid-1970s – is that film critics have lost the authority and influence that Kael, Mekas, and Tyler once possessed. In some sense, the

New American Cinema also represents an aberration in American film history: Americans in the 1960s uniquely valued the cinema as art and culture. However, the kind of serious filmmaking Kael, Mekas, and Tyler preferred has not entirely disappeared. Independent theatres still screen challenging non-commercial cinema, and Americans continue to watch and discover the filmmaking that constitutes the New American Cinema. Americans also continue to read intellectual film writing that considers cinema as art or analyzes its political meaning. Writers Manohla Dargis or Richard Brody analyze cinema’s aesthetic value, and political analysis of the cinema terms of gender, race, or class is common to the point where “political” film criticism now receives backlash.1 But in today’s atomized media landscape it is unlikely critics can command the influence and authority to fundamentally change how Americans think about the cinema. In the end, the film writing of Pauline Kael,

Jonas Mekas, and Parker Tyler represents a unique moment in American film history

1 See: Jessa Crispin, “Is politics getting in the way of assessing whether films are actually good?” The Guardian, Jan. 13, 2020.

175 defined by the confluence of innovative cinema and serious reception that created a “film generation,” who particularly appreciated the cinema’s cultural, social, and aesthetic value.

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Select Filmography 2001: A Space Odyssey. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. MGM, 1968. Badlands. Directed by Terrence Malick. Warner Bros., 1973. Bonnie and Clyde. Directed by Arthur Penn. Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, 1967. Chelsea Girls. Directed by Andy Warhol. Filmmakers Distribution Center, 1966. Chumlum. Directed by Ron Rice. 1964. A Clockwork Orange. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Warner Bros., 1971. The Connection. Directed by Shirley Clarke. 1961. The Cool World. Directed by Shirley Clarke. Wiseman Film Productions, 1963. Dog Star Man, Prelude – IV. Directed by Stanley Brakhage. 1961-64. Easy Rider. Directed by Dennis Hopper. Columbia Pictures, 1968. Flaming Creatures. Directed by Jack Smith. 1963. Go! Go! Go! Directed by Marie Menken. 1962-64. The Graduate. Directed by Mike Nichols. Embassy Pictures. 1967. Jaws. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Universal Pictures, 1975.

187 Little Stabs at Happiness. Directed by Ken Jacobs. 1959-63. The Long Goodbye. Directed by Robert Altman. United Artists, 1973. McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Directed by Robert Altman. Warner Bros., 1971. Mean Streets. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Warner Bros., 1973, Mothlight. Directed by Stan Brakhage. 1963. Nashville. Directed by Robert Altman. Paramount Pictures, 1975. Portrait of Jason. Directed by Shirley Clarke. Film-Makers’ Distribution Center, 1967. Pull My Daisy. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie. 1959. Rocky. Directed by John G. Avildsen. United Artists, 1976. The Sugarland Express. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Universal Pictures, 1974. Star Wars: A New Hope. Directed by George Lucas. 20th Century Fox, 1977. Taxi Driver. Directed by Martin Scorsese. Columbia Pictures, 1976. The Wild Bunch. Directed by Sam Peckinpah. Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, 1969.

188