About Film Culture

Film Culture

Film Culture was an American film magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1954 by the Lithuanian-born brothers Jonas Mekas and Adolfas Mekas, with its first issue appearing in 1955. It published 79 issues before ceasing operations in 1996, and in those four decades it became the house journal of independent, experimental and avant-garde cinema in the United States and the forum of the New American Cinema movement. It billed itself as America's independent motion picture magazine, and by early 1964 the historian P. Adams Sitney could describe it as the quasi-official magazine of the avant-garde filmmaker.

Its importance far exceeded its circulation. Film Culture published Andrew Sarris's essays that introduced auteur theory to American readers, Stan Brakhage's treatise Metaphors on Vision, and Sitney's own essay that coined the term structural film. It gave annual Independent Film Awards to John Cassavetes, Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, Michael Snow and Kenneth Anger, and it incubated the institutions — the Film-Makers' Cooperative, the Filmmakers' Cinematheque and Anthology Film Archives — that still preserve avant-garde film.

Jonas and Adolfas Mekas and the founding in 1954

Jonas Mekas, born in 1922, and his younger brother Adolfas arrived in the United States in 1949 as displaced persons, after wartime imprisonment and four years in displaced-persons camps in Germany following the Second World War. In New York they organised film screenings, immersed themselves in the city's art world and, in 1954, founded Film Culture, publishing the first issue in 1955. Jonas edited the magazine for most of its life and became, through it and his Village Voice column Movie Journal, begun in 1958, the chief public advocate for underground cinema in America.

The magazine was headquartered in New York City, as this directory lists, and that geography was essential to it. Postwar New York held the filmmakers, galleries, lofts and small cinemas of the emerging avant-garde, and Film Culture functioned as their printed headquarters: reviews, interviews, manifestos, photo series and reports that treated personal, anti-commercial filmmaking as the most important cinema being made, at the height of the Hollywood studio era.

Advocacy and an early self-correction

In the magazine's third issue Jonas Mekas published an essay on the experimental film in America that attacked what he saw as the adolescent character of American avant-garde culture and the gap between Hollywood populism and experimental self-absorption. He later distanced himself from the piece, calling it a pre-conversion work, because he became the leading supporter of many of the very filmmakers he had criticised. The episode set a pattern: Film Culture was a polemical magazine whose positions were argued in public and revised in public, and its pages record the avant-garde defining itself in real time.

Alongside advocacy, the magazine carried the ordinary work of a serious film journal: reviews of new films and film books, interviews with motion picture artists and accounts of film festivals. What distinguished it was that the filmmakers themselves wrote for it, so that criticism, manifesto and practice appeared side by side, and the boundary between the magazine and the movement it covered largely disappeared.

Auteur theory reaches America: Sarris in Film Culture

The magazine's most consequential service to general film culture was its publication of Andrew Sarris's Notes on the Auteur Theory in 1962, in its winter 1962–63 issue, number 27. The essay introduced American readers systematically to the idea, developed by critics at the French journal Cahiers du Cinema, that a film's director is its author and stamps a unique personality on the work. The following year Film Culture published Sarris's much longer companion essay ranking and categorising more than 150 directors, which became the basis of his landmark 1968 book The American Cinema.

Those two essays changed American film criticism permanently. They gave repertory programmers, students and the generation of directors who emerged in the 1970s a map of Hollywood history organised by authorship, and they ignited the famous critical arguments of the 1960s, in which Sarris's auteurists contended with Pauline Kael and her circle. That the argument began in a small avant-garde magazine, rather than in a mass-circulation review, shows how Film Culture's interests ranged across all personal cinema, commercial as well as experimental, wherever a director's hand could be argued for.

Brakhage, the Poetry and the Film symposium and structural film

In 1963 Film Culture devoted an entire issue to Stan Brakhage's Metaphors on Vision, a treatise on non-narrative filmmaking and visual experience that became one of the canonical statements of avant-garde film aesthetics and was later reissued in book form by Anthology Film Archives. The same year the magazine printed transcript excerpts from the 1953 Poetry and the Film symposium, whose panel — Maya Deren, Parker Tyler, Dylan Thomas, Arthur Miller and Willard Maas — debated the intersections of poetry, mythology and cinematic form, preserving a founding conversation of the American avant-garde in print.

In 1969 the magazine published P. Adams Sitney's essay Structural Film, which coined the term for a movement of filmmakers who organised works around a fixed formal structure, and helped define that movement for critics and programmers. A special Fluxus issue, number 31, and a Warhol special, number 45, are among the other numbers singled out in library descriptions of the run, along with Luis Bunuel's statement in issue 21. George Maciunas, the founder of Fluxus, designed layouts for some issues, making the magazine's physical form part of the art world it documented.

The New American Cinema and the Cooperative

In the summer of 1961 the magazine printed a manifesto principally drafted by Jonas Mekas announcing the New American Cinema Group, a new generation of independent filmmakers determined to finance and distribute their own work and to break the hold of the official cinema establishment. In 1961 Mekas also co-founded the Film-Makers' Cooperative, the artist-run distributor that made avant-garde films available to anyone who wanted to show them, and Film Culture publicised the new organisation, listing the Cooperative's catalogue of films in a 1965 issue.

The institutional sequence that followed — the Cooperative in the early 1960s, the Filmmakers' Cinematheque in 1964, and Anthology Film Archives in 1970 as an international centre for the preservation, study and exhibition of independent, experimental and avant-garde film — grew directly out of the world the magazine had organised in print. Film Culture was thus not only a record of a movement but one of its organising tools, and its back issues function as the movement's archive of first resort.

The Independent Film Awards

From 1959 the magazine presented annual Independent Film Awards that now read as a canon-forming list of the American avant-garde. The first award went to John Cassavetes for Shadows in 1959. The second went to Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie for Pull My Daisy in 1960, and the third to Ricky Leacock, Don Pennebaker, Robert Drew and Al Maysles for Primary in 1961, honouring the new direct cinema documentary. Stan Brakhage received the fourth award for The Dead and Prelude in 1962, and Jack Smith the fifth for Flaming Creatures in 1963.

Andy Warhol received the sixth award in 1964 for Sleep, Haircut, Eat, Kiss and Empire. Harry Smith and Gregory Markopoulos were honoured for their entire bodies of work in 1965 and 1966, Michael Snow received the ninth award for Wavelength in 1968, and Kenneth Anger the tenth for Invocation of My Demon Brother in 1969. No comparable institution was certifying this cinema at the time; the awards told programmers, funders and younger filmmakers which work mattered, and nearly every recipient is now a fixture of film history syllabuses.

Later years, the Reader and the end in 1996

Publication was always irregular and became more so as the founding generation's institutions absorbed the energy that had once gone into the magazine. In 1970 Sitney selected essays from Film Culture for the anthology Film Culture Reader, which Cooper Square Press reissued in 2000, giving the magazine's best writing a second life in classrooms. The magazine produced 79 issues in total between 1955 and 1996, when it ceased operations. Jonas Mekas remained its presiding figure to the end; library records list him as editor from January 1955 into the 1970s and beyond in all but name.

The magazine's afterlife has been archival and celebratory. Selections are available through UbuWeb, a complete index of the first 57 issues circulates among scholars, and in 2017 and 2018 a Berlin project devoted to editing and republishing Film Culture produced a newly created 80th issue as a homage, accompanied by exhibitions of original editions, covers and documents supported by Mekas and Anthology Film Archives. Mekas himself remained active into his nineties as filmmaker, poet and archivist, and retrospectives treated the magazine as the first of his life's three great works, alongside the Cooperative and Anthology.

Legacy

Film Culture demonstrated that a small magazine could create the critical language, the award structure and the distribution institutions for an entire art form. Auteur theory in America, the term structural film, the New American Cinema as a named movement and the reputations of Cassavetes, Brakhage, Warhol, Snow and Anger all passed through its pages. Film scholars cite its essays as primary documents rather than commentary, because in many cases the essays were the events: the manifesto, the coinage and the ranking happened there first.

For the directory reader, the essential facts are the disproportion between scale and influence. Seventy-nine irregular issues from a New York office, produced by two immigrant brothers who had arrived in the country six years before the first issue, permanently altered how English-speaking audiences understood who makes a film and what kinds of film count as art.

Publication facts

Film Culture was founded in 1954 in New York City, New York, confirming this directory's listing, published its first issue in 1955 and its final, 79th, issue in 1996. Its founders and editors were Adolfas Mekas and Jonas Mekas. It carried ISSN 0015-1211. It described itself as America's independent motion picture magazine and served as the forum of the New American Cinema movement throughout its run.