The New American Cinema Movement of the 1960’s

By James Heddle.

In 1974, as faculty member in the University of Wisconsin’s Communication Arts Department, I produced and hosted a twenty-one part television series entitled ‘The New American Cinema’ at the PBS affiliate in Madison, a town then proud to be called ‘the Berkeley of the Mid-West.’

The half-hour segments profiled with interviews and illustrative film clips some of the leading experimental filmmakers and film critics of the ’60’s and ’70’s. They were the odd-balls and innovators whose irreverence for prevailing artistic, technological and critical conventions led them to breakthroughs that form the foundation for high-tech multi-media graphic and acoustic effects we take as commonplace today.

Working in cooperation with Ralph Sandler, who was then Director of the Wisconsin Union Theatre, I raised the funding to bring to Madison for public lectures and screenings a roster including: Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Will Hindle, Gene Youngblood, Bruce Baillie, Scott Bartlett, John Whitney, Stan VanDerBeek, Shirley Clarke, P. Adams Sitney and Nam June Paik. They were the leading filmmakers, critics, historians and theoreticians who founded a movement fusing traditional art forms with the then-just-emerging electronic media. They tell the story of their movement in their own words, illustrated by extensive excerpts from their ground-breaking works.

Preserved archival tapes of this unique historical TV series – produced in 1974 – have now been transferred to digital form and the interviews transcribed.  

The purpose of this project is to make available the unique historical material comprising this series in three forms: (1) Transcripts of the interviews, together with my own context-setting commentary and biographical portraits; (2) Re-editing of the studio interviews (3) A new documentary synthesizing the elements of the series into a historical compendium offering a perspective on the ‘New American Cinema’ of the ‘Sixities in relation to today’s on-line, multi-media landscape.

The editorial approach is that these pioneers created a ‘wedding of Psyche and Techne’ – the mythical God and Goddess of mysticism and technology – and in the process forged an intermedia syntax the influence of which is visible on every contemporary film, video and computer screen. The resulting book/DVD/documentary package will make the work and insights of these artists and thinkers available to a new generation of media-makers.

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