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| Film Culture (magazine) | |
|---|---|
| Title | Film Culture |
| Editor | Jonas Mekas |
| Editor title | Editor |
| Frequency | Semiannual (varied) |
| Category | Film |
| Firstdate | 1954 |
| Finaldate | 1996 |
| Country | United States |
| Based | New York City |
| Language | English |
Film Culture (magazine) was an independent American periodical devoted to avant-garde film, experimental cinema, and critical discourse, founded and edited by Jonas Mekas. The magazine operated from 1954 into the 1990s and became a central forum linking filmmakers, critics, programmers, collectors, institutions, and festivals across New York, Paris, London, and elsewhere. Its pages featured manifestos, reviews, interviews, manifest scholarship, and artist projects that intersected with the activities of museums, cinémathèques, and academic programs.
Founded in 1954 by Jonas Mekas with collaborators associated with the New American Cinema Group, Film Culture emerged amid debates shaped by the postwar trajectories of Cannes Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, Soviet Montage Theory, Cahiers du Cinéma, Die Neue Sachlichkeit, and the rediscovery work of the British Film Institute. Early issues responded to exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, retrospectives at the Cinematheque Française, and screenings at the Anthology Film Archives. Contributors engaged arguments linked to the legacy of Sergei Eisenstein, D. W. Griffith, Fritz Lang, Luis Buñuel, and Jean-Luc Godard, while interfacing with the practices of filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger, Michael Snow, Andy Warhol, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Through the 1960s and 1970s the magazine chronicled intersections with performance scenes around Fluxus, festivals like New York Film Festival, and programming at the Tate Modern and Palais de Tokyo.
The editorial collective included activists and critics associated with the New York Avant-Garde, with Jonas Mekas as the primary editor and collaborators drawn from networks linked to P. Adams Sitney, Pauline Kael, Catherine Texier, Stanley Kubrick (as subject of criticism), Susan Sontag, Andrew Sarris, and scholars from institutions such as Columbia University, New York University, Harvard University, and the University of California, Los Angeles. Filmmakers who contributed writing, manifestos, or artist pages included Bruce Baillie, Hollis Frampton, Maya Deren, Joseph Cornell, G. W. Pabst (as historic reference), Peter Kubelka, Jonas Mekas (as contributor), and Yvonne Rainer. Critics and poets who published in its pages ranged from Gertrude Stein (historic citation) to Allen Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, Marshall McLuhan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rivette, André Bazin, Susan Sontag, Robert Bresson (as subject), Werner Herzog (as subject), and Stanley Cavell. The magazine also showcased work by curators and programmers affiliated with the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA, and the Guggenheim Museum.
Articles encompassed film theory, festival reports, screenplay fragments, manifesto pieces, and artist projects that conversed with movements and figures including Surrealism, Dada, Italian Neorealism, German Expressionism, French New Wave, American Independent Cinema, and the work of John Cassavetes, Elia Kazan, Robert Altman, Orson Welles, and Akira Kurosawa. The magazine foregrounded debates over authorship and auteurism connected to François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, and Agnès Varda; experimental practices related to John Cage and Merce Cunningham; and cross-disciplinary exchanges with poets and visual artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, and Roy Lichtenstein. Coverage included examinations of preservation concerns addressed by the Library of Congress and the British Film Institute National Archive, legal controversies adjacent to United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc., and technological shifts from celluloid to video aligned with institutions like Eastman Kodak and companies such as Sony.
Film Culture influenced programming at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, Cinematheque Française, Anthology Film Archives, Tate Modern, and the Institut Lumière. Its discourse impacted cinephile culture tied to festivals like Sundance Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, and Berlinale, and helped shape university curricula at Yale University, Princeton University, and The New School. Reception ranged from laudatory endorsement by figures such as Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael to critique from defenders of mainstream cinema like Roger Ebert. The magazine also provoked polemics involving Paramount Pictures and fostered networks that supported restorations of work by Dziga Vertov, Robert Flaherty, F. W. Murnau, and rediscovery projects tied to archives including the National Film Registry.
Published in New York City, Film Culture’s frequency varied from irregular pamphlets to semiannual issues, with distribution through independent bookstores, museum shops, university bookstores, and specialist vendors associated with Third Man Books style outlets and film societies like the New American Cinema Group and the Film-Makers' Cooperative. Subscriptions reached readers in the United States, Europe, and Japan, with notable circulation among members of the Cahiers du Cinéma readership, subscribers to Sight & Sound, and institutional subscriptions at Harvard Film Archive, British Film Institute, and Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique. Production involved small press printers in Manhattan alongside collaborations with typographers and designers connected to Push Pin Studios and galleries such as Leo Castelli Gallery.
The magazine’s archives, correspondence, and original layouts are held across multiple repositories, including collections at the Anthology Film Archives, Library of Congress, Museum of Modern Art Library, New York Public Library, and university special collections at Columbia University and University of Wisconsin–Madison. Film Culture’s back issues, editorial files, and artist multiples have been used in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, retrospectives at the Film at Lincoln Center, and research projects supported by grants from foundations such as the Guggenheim Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Its influence persists in contemporary journals and platforms that document independent and experimental film, informing scholarship appearing in Film Quarterly, Screen, Cineaste, and in university presses including Oxford University Press and University of California Press.
Category:Film magazines published in the United States Category:American avant-garde and experimental films