A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers

) into new, cinematic forms. Both filmmakers were, and remain, appalled by the conformist tendencies of American society, by what they see as the denigration of the spiritual in popular culture, and by the more militaristic dimensions of modern technologytendencies so often reflected in the popular cinema. Both have produced a body of films that sing the nobility of the individual, of the simple beauties of the natural world, and of peaceful forms of human interaction. And both have embodied their personal ideologies in institutions (Mekas: the New York Cinematheque, the New York Film-makers' Cooperative,

Film Culture,

Anthology Film Archives; Baillie: Canyon Cinema) that have attempted to maintain the presence of alternative cinema in a nation dominated by the commercial movie and television industries.

While they have a good deal in common, their work is also quite distinct. Mekas has made a permanent home in New York. His primary influences are European; indeed, one of the central quests of his films has been to maintain his Lithuanian heritage and his contact with European culture. His film style is often wildly free-form; his gestural camera movements, quick editing, and single-framing create a sense of childlike excitement about the people and places he records. His films are sensual but avoid the erotic, and in recent years they have celebrated the joys of the conventional nuclear family. Baillie's filmmaking began when he moved to San Francisco and often reflects the Eastern influences that were so pervasive on the West Coast during the sixties. While he too developed a hand-held personal style, its tendency has always been toward the meditative. Indeed, with Yoko Ono, he was probably the first modern filmmaker to explore the potential of the single-shot film, in

All My Life

(1966) and

Still Life

(1966). Baillie's films are both sensual and erotic; they seem less involved with searching for a homeland and a home than with chronicling the film poet's physical, spiritual, and erotic travels.

Neither Yoko Ono nor Anthony McCall have made films in over a decade, but their films of the late sixties and seventies use minimalist tactics as a means of providing new forms of film experience. Ono's earliest films are either single-shot slow motion portraits of actions that challenge viewers' assumptions about the correct "velocity" of film action, or serial examinations of the body that challenge the commercial film industry's fetishization of "filmic" (i.e., erotically marketable) parts of the body for periods of screen time that conform to conventional audiences' film-erotic "needs." McCall's early films are as minimalist as

Page 9

Ono's. In

Line Describing a Cone

(1973) and his other "Cone films," as well as in

Long Film for Four Projectors

(1974) and

Four Projected Movements

(1975), McCall focuses the moviegoer's attention on the projector beam (the movie projector is located in the room during these films) for relatively long periods

Line Describing a Cone

lasts thirty minutes;

Long Film for Four Projectors,

six hoursas a means of calling attention to the cinema environment and its sociopolitical implications: what does it mean that nearly all of our public film viewing involves our sitting in rigid rows of chairs looking up at the shadow products of an apparatus kept out of the view, and control, of the audience? Both Ono and McCall later collaborated with others on films that had quite overt political agendas: Ono and John Lennon made

Bed-In

(1969), a documentation of their Bed-In for peace in Montreal; McCall worked with Andrew Tyndall on

Argument

(1978), a feature-length exploration of the political implications of men's fashion advertising and of mass market media practice in general, and with several women and men on

Sigmund Freud's Dora

(1979), an examination of the gender-politics of a famous Freudian case.

Ono and McCall differ in the specifics of their politicsOno's films are internationalist, McCall's implicitly or explicitly Marxistand in terms of the viewership they address in their films. At the beginning of her career, Ono was part of Fluxus, an international group of artists functioning outside the mass media and in defiance of accepted art practice and institutions, but as her resources grew, so did her interest in addressing a much larger audience:

No. 4

(

Bottoms

) (1966) was a widely reported happening in England, and the later Lennon-Ono collaborations aimed at the huge pop music audience and beyond.

Line Describing a Cone

and McCall's other early films were designed for small groups in art gallery contexts (indeed, the Cone films and

Long Film for Four Projectors