Distribution Center for Experimental Films

Curtis Harrington

The postwar revival of the experimental film movement in the United States, which Lewis Jacobs wrote about in detail in the Spring, 1948, issue of the Hollywood Quarterly, has resulted in the formation of a coöperative distribution center to extend the distribution of these films through film societies, universities, art museums, and galleries, and all interested groups and private individuals. The organization has been named Creative Film Associates, and represents the attempt of the film makers to get together on a coöperative basis to insure the widest possible circulation of their work.

Already available for rental from Creative Film Associates is its Program I, which includes Film Exercises 4 and 5 by John and James Whitney, Fragment of Seeking by Curtis Harrington, Meta by Robert Howard, and Escape Episode by Kenneth Anger. Also available are a program of films by Maya Deren – Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land, A Study in Choreography for Camera, and Ritual in Transfigured Time – and Kenneth Anger's much-discussed Fireworks. Further releases are to be made in the near future. For the convenience of those who wish to rent an evening's program of experimental works without facing the almost impossible task of assembling a group of films from a wide variety of sources – usually, heretofore, from the individual film makers themselves – several of the films have been put together by Creative Film Associates to form a balanced, forty-five-minute program, which is available at a rental rate lower than the total of fees for each film rented separately.

Creative Film Associates has also established the Creative Film Foundation, which will attempt to preserve and make available as many of the earlier experimental films as may be recovered (for many of the negatives and prints of the experimental films made in the '20s and early '30s have since disappeared), or obtained through the kindness of the film makers who still own their negatives. In the latter category, the films of Man Ray – L'Étoile de Mer, Emak Bakia, Les Mystères du Château de Dé – and Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapich's Life and Death of a Hollywood Extra are soon to be released by the foundation. A further activity of the associates has been the establishment of the Creative Film Press, which will publish a series of monographs on various aspects of the creative film.

As Lewis Jacobs concluded in his article, "the future for experimental films is more promising than ever before", and the organization of Creative Film Associates represents one of the first concrete steps taken by the film makers as a group to implement the promise by making experimental films readily available from a central source. As a nonprofit organization, developed and operated on a coöperative basis by the film makers themselves, Creative Film Associates will return all revenue from the rentals to the artists, in order to insure the production of new films. It is hoped that by this method enough films may continually be produced to create a steady supply of new works, so that film centers and other interested groups may expect to have regular experimental film showings throughout the year. This will, of course, contribute to the continued development of the cinema as an independent art form.

More detailed information about the films available from Creative Film Associates, and the activities of the organization, may be obtained by writing to Creative Film Associates, 6215 Franklin Avenue, Hollywood 28, California.

Personal Chronicle: The Making of an Experimental Film

Curtis Harrington

"An art in which youth is barred from practicing freely is sentenced to death in advance. The moving picture camera should be like a fountain pen, which anyone may use to translate his soul onto paper. The 16-mm. film presents the only solution, and in this I think America should take the initiative.... It offers an opportunity of trying for miracles." – Jean Cocteau, "Focus on Miracles", New York Times Magazine, 24 October 1948.

My new film, Picnic, which at this writing is completed except for the sound score, is the fifth film I have made in approximately seven years. The films that go before it include a version of Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher (1942), Crescendo (1943), Renascence (1945), and Fragment of Seeking (1946). The first...