The Sticking Place Theatre and Film productions

I have been asked to condense the concerns of a lifetime into twenty minutes - an exercise in intellectually rigor and futility. After spending 25 years in big cinema and in little cinema, shuttling between the Cannes Film Festival and the Film Forum in New York, between being director of the Lincoln Center Film Department or member of a Black film jury in Philadelphia recently, between The Exorcist and Carmen D'Avino, I find that I always return, irresistibly drawn, to the independent film.

Why should this be so? I think it is an intriguing question. I think it is an intriguing question. Speaking for myself, I can think of several important reasons why I consider the independent film inevitable, essential, and totally necessary.

First of all, I am constantly amazed, anew, at the diversity, wealth, and breadth of this particular area of filmmaking in terms of content. Needless to say, there are a great many very bad independent films being made constantly; but when they are good, they are very good.

What I like about the independent films, essentially, is that they provide me with glimpses of truth Our world is increasingly dominated by huge communication networks, projecting manufactured images and words at us. In film, this is represented by what is by now a generic rather than a geographical term, 'Hollywood,' which is synonymous with entertainment, with business, and with the fiction film. Another way of putting this would be to say that Hollywood concentrates on fables, on myths, on banal, pernicious or joyful half-truths. But in almost every case these films serve, to me, as a barrier between the self and reality.

More important, their productions, generally speaking, are filtered through such criteria as requirements of the box office, acceptability to banks, to business men and entrepreneurs, filmmaking by committee, concern with carefully nurtured myths, catering to stars, simplification to a common low denominator and a 'molding' of scripts toward inoffensiveness and therefore banality. In the independent film, I find greater veracity, a greater concern with truth, and, at times, the removal of the barrier between me and reality.

I am sure you understand that in counterpoising Hollywood and the independent film, I am really setting up ideal prototypes; in reality these two are not as distinct as I make them out to be. As we all know, there are artful Hollywood films and there are very commercial independent films. Generally speaking, however, I find in independent cinema, one voice, one person talking to me... rather than a committee. I find no, or at least fewer, axes being ground, a greater willingness to risk (which means a willingness to deal with unpopular, controversial, or even forbidden subjects). These might go in two directions; attacks on taboos, on those forbidden or at least frowned-upon objects, words, and images that deal with bodily functions… with events and acts so universal, indeed indispensable to human life and its perpetuation, that they must be forbidden… thereby providing neat additional proof that we are still at war with our bodies. I also find in these films an attack on other kinds of taboos - social and political taboos - the Establishment, law and order, the presidency, church and God, patriotism and the flag. In the independent cinema I find filmmaking 'out of passion' instead of 'on commission,' and I think there is a difference. I find confrontation, many times, with real problems, real subject matter.

I find the reality film, cinema-vérité, the old-style social documentary, the political film or the psychological, scientific, ethnographic study. I find genuine self-expression directed into the clogged interstices of an increasingly ossified society. I see the possibility of addressing particular and specialized audiences and the resultant freedom for the artist, rather than having to address a huge mass audience. I find work so original that it may even repel a particular audience… a cardinal sin in Hollywood films. I see intimations, hints in these films of the condition of man in today's world. I see films that somehow contain more knowledge, more information, more awareness than I find in commercial films. I see films that deal with new kinds of education, films that talk about the nature of our sexuality, films that deal with our ethnic groups, with our parents and where we came from, with rites of passage in various racial groupings, or offer the pain and honesty of a new kind of autobiographical film that has come to the fore in recent years. And I find films that confront the question of death and dying, films that deal with abortion, with poverty, with the unbridled exploitation of nature and of man, with the portrayal and documentation of genocide, torture and war. But there is a second area which, to me, is equally important: the area of form; and here, too, I find the independent film totally inevitable, totally necessary. In terms of form, I find in the independent film the possibility of fuller artistic experimentation. Compared to Hollywood, we know there is less cost in the making of these films, and therefore a greater openness to risk and to new forms. There are more artists in this field, and fewer businessmen; and the artist, as we all know, is our most naked, sensitive barometer to what might be referred to as our collective secrets.

In what I'm saying here, about form, I refer primarily to the experimental, avant-garde filmmaker, deeply affected by modern art, who concentrates on the disruption of existing norms and an attack on the conventional, on a kind of creative desecration and dissection of film. In the modern film, the tendency, generally speaking, is away from the literary, the narrative, away from the kind of simplistic realism that at one time many of us accepted fully. And instead, we have a tendency towards a much freer, much more poetic and lyrical use of the film medium.

Specifically, 'smooth' and so-called 'invisible' editing and 'matching continuity' has been frequently displaced by sudden jump-cuts, obtrusive montage, the telescoping of time and space, of memory, reality and illusion, as strictly separate absolute categories, thereby shattering old concepts of time and of space, and reflecting the revelations of contemporary science. We can also see this in literature, in the works of people like Joyce, Proust, and Robbe-Grillet. But this change in form goes further - establishing shots, orderly transitions from long shot to medium shot to close-up have all but disappeared in many of these films. So-called objectivity is under heavy attack; the camera has become utterly mobile, 'eternal' rules governing eye-line reaction shots or reversal of movement have been done away with, and there exist significant tendencies in the contemporary avant-garde that completely denude the work of all 'meaning' and lead towards silence or immobility to undo the pollution of false images and incessant, irrelevant motion. Instead, we are inundated by ambiguity, allegory, improvisation, by a kind of existential humanism devoid (for the first time) of certainty but perhaps simultaneously also of illusion. In short: the magic of the cinema (itself a technological medium, and a child of the technological age) propels the filmmaker into modernity. To me, this entire question is related to the philosophical problem (and I hate to bring up this dirty word)… the meaning of life. This is an endless debate which will not be ended here today, will not even be begun, but I think it's fair to say that one way of looking at it would be to talk about life as a period of incessant, continuous change; never-ending, inevitable change.

The question is: how does this change occur? On the one side, we have institutions, rulers, the Establishment, academicians, festival directors, museum directors, critics, politicians-all of these, in a sense, holding back, perhaps ever so slightly, but holding back because of the inherent conservatism of all institutions, even the most liberal, which, once they themselves become established, begin to exist to project their own status quo. On the other side, we have the 'outs' - the ones without power, the rebels, the have-nots-with no stake in the status quo and, partly as a result of this, they constantly attempt to push forward, broadening concepts of content, confronting previously forbidden subject matter, destroying old forms and immutable rules by new approaches to style and to structure. In this context, the artist - thematic, political, sexual and esthetic subversive of cinema - is seen as the catalyst of inevitable social and intellectual change. In the end, every work of art (to the extent that it is original, and breaks with the past instead of repeating it endless) is subversive. By using new form and new content, it opposes the old if only by implication and serves as an eternally dynamic force for change; it is thereby in itself in a permanent state of 'becoming.'

While art can never take the place of social action, and while its effectiveness is often seriously impaired by the power structure, its task forever remains the same - to change consciousness. When this occurs, it is so tremendous an achievement (even if it occurs in only one human being) that it provides all necessary justification for art. But if the task of the artists is to change consciousness, their tragedy and challenge is that as soon as they succeed, they are immediately superseded or are in danger of themselves becoming the new Establishment and the new conservatives; we have seen this happen. By acting as artists, they act as necessary links in the eternal chain of subversion - the eternal, never-ending struggle for, and here I must once again use another unpopular word… human freedom. To be able to open us (on a flat, two-dimensional, ridiculously artificial canvas) at least to the possibility of change, and progress in however limited or puny a form, represents to me the potential glory and inevitability of the independent film; and compels me, with much pain and much pleasure, to remain its proponent.

Sightlines, Volume 7, number 5 (1974)

© Amos Vogel/Sightlines
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