The Sticking Place Theatre and Film productions

The emergence of film as the art of the young is one of the most significant cultural phenomena in America today. It is reflected in the proliferating growth of film societies, film magazines, discussion groups, local festivals, college courses and film repertory theaters. Films have entered the fabric of their lives and become the subject of heated passions and total acceptance on campuses, at parties and, happily, in boy-girl relationships; here, intermedia presentations, kinetic environments, mixed media events and film-oriented happenings are taking place not merely in small campus or off-Broadway theaters, but also in coffee-shops, nightclubs and discotheques.

This development, inevitably, has helped bring about a new wave of young film-makers and its concomitant recognition by the establishment. The present National Student Film Award program is a direct outgrowth of both these facts, and will, hopefully, lead to national circulation of student films, tangible monetary rewards for young film-makers, a raising of the general level of student film productions, and an opening of channels for new talents to enter the industry in all its various areas.

The preoccupation of the young with film is due to technological and philosophical causes. Greater accessibility and lesser cost, simplified and more portable equipment (including sound), represent the technological advancement. This is accompanied by far greater exposure both to classics (via the local film society) and to the American independent cinema (via ‘underground showings’ and some film repertory theaters).

Equally important are the philosophical motivations, arising from contemporary ideological and esthetic trends in the arts and the body politic. Traditionally, the young are the first to respond to such trends, to strive to broaden the base of personal and artistic freedom, to improve upon the tired values of their elders or to refashion them in their own image. It is they who feel most akin to the nouvelle vague, to cinéma vérité, to the ‘new cinema’ in Europe, Japan, America and, yes, even in the East and respond most deeply to the new modes of expression and content in world cinema. Thematically, they concern themselves with social documentaries, experimental works, lyricism and poetry, and, most importantly, personal statements. The winners of last year’s First Student Film Festival included a cinéma vérité political documentary about the Goldwater campaign, an animation about a boy who invents a machine to eliminate his parents, philosophical comments on the concentration-camp universe and on the bomb; a film about youth and age, a sexual allegory, an impressionist study of a young skate-board enthusiast and a satire on early film history. Fortunately, these students are not yet in a rut and are still, unlike so many of their elders, attempting to find and refine their own place in the scheme of things, re-examining, for all of us, their own position vis-à-vis their society. The substitution of hypocrisy for sincerity, the exposure of the meretricious, the contrast between status and real meaning, the limits of rationalism, the destruction of taboos, are of abiding concern. They question what is established; they favor new sexual and personal mores; they pose the new questions of a new generation. If at times their attempts at self-definition can be mistaken for narcissism; if their restless innocence leads them astray – are not the errors of the young forever preferable to the petrified-compromises-parading-as-truth of the old?

In previous times, the young ‘took hold’ of the pen. Today, they take hold of the camera. They carry it everywhere. Said Newsweek recently: ‘Dragging their cameras along New York’s Fourteenth Street, downtown Minneapolis, the cornfields of Iowa, San Francisco’s North Beach, or the Chatsworth Hills near Los Angeles, they are making movies, making movies, making movies.’ They frequently violate established procedures of ‘proper’ editing, camera placement, continuity, plot development, narrative structures. They swing, they zoom, they peek where no one has peeked before, they use these innocent (or devilish?) technological tools to demolish sacred cows, they take the best and the worst from the contemporary experimentalists and independents. Imitators and innovators, they are among the true explorers of our day: and some of their poverty-stricken productions, in a future age, will be viewed by sensitive observers as among the truer representations of the anguished spirit of the Sixties.

Indubitably, many young film-makers would wish to enter the main stream of American commercial film production – be it by means of Hollywood, the television networks, non-theatrical productions, or at least through educational television. Some do, and it is to be hoped that the stimulus of these annual competitions and the forthcoming American Film Institute will serve to increase their number. Others, less fortunate, seem willing to have their films displayed through their own distribution channels, schools, film societies, and perhaps repertory theaters. The growing audience and support they are obtaining from universities, foundations and even government agencies attests to their relative success.

Nevertheless, this is only a beginning. The general quality or originality of these films is not as great as it could be; they often represent good intentions or brilliant promise rather than achieved works: and it is a main purpose of the present event to encourage the best among them by force of example, exposure and comparison. This is why last year’s First Student Film Festival, organized by one of the most dynamic film departments in the country – UCLA – has now directly led to the annual National Student Film Awards, jointly presented by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (under a grant from the Lincoln Center Fund), the Motion Picture Association of America and the National Student Association. The Film Department at Lincoln Center, organizer also of the New York Film Festival, is proud to have acted as the catalyst in making this collaboration possible; for it aims to be a showcase for the best in contemporary cinema, always hospitable to new talent as the main hope for whatever large (or limited) promise the cinematic future may hold.

Philharmonic Hall Magazine 1966-67

© Amos Vogel/Lincoln Center
All rights reserved by the original copyright holders