Under Construction
The full title of my Ph.D dissertation, completed in 2004, is New York, New Cinema: The Independent Film Community and the Underground Crossover, 1950-1970.
The central research question driving the project was: How did Andy Warhol’s 16mm dual projection underground film The Chelsea Girls (1966) crossover into commercial theaters in 1967? For context to answer the question, I explored experimental and 16mm film distribution in general from the late 1940s through the 1960s. But the “too long; didn’t read” version of the answer was that the New American Cinema Group, who had created the Film-Makers’ Cooperative in 1963 as a non-theatrical distributor, attempted to create a theatrical distribution arm called the Film-makers’ Distribution Center (FDC), which lasted from 1967 to 1970. The FDC distributed several independent, documentary, and experimental features, including Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967).
The diss is an unwieldy beast. I haven’t thought about it much since leaving academia. But what I learned during the research and writing of it continues to inform my experimental film programming work.
Some recent citations from the dissertation in Nora Stone’s new book, How Documentaries Went Mainstream (Oxford University Press) has inspired me to take a fresh look at some of the topics I addressed in New York, New Cinema, and to see where things are at with the questions that it raised. Discussing the distribution of Shirley Clarke’s The Connection with Kelley Conway in the days leading up to her conversation with Manohla Dargis at the recent screening of The Connection at the Wisconsin Film Festival also inspired me to dust off some old research files.
This fresh look will take the form of occasional blog posts as I re-engage with old material, engage with more recent scholarship, and take a look at resources that were not available in 2004, like the Project Shirley restorations of the early short films of Shirley Clarke.
I will also share here some interesting or amusing documents from my research folders, when permissible.