SCMS 2026 Conference

26. März 2026 Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Chicago

Vortrag von Henning Engelke, Professor für Kunstgeschichte, an der Abteilung Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttheorie / Gender Studies / Kuratorische Praxis.

All archival problems are ideological problems: The Survey of American Independent Film (1973–74)

In the spring of 1973, Anthology Film Archives in New York hosted a meeting to discuss plans for “The Survey of American Independent Film,” an NEA-funded film preservation project. Anthology’s founder Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney, its managing director, had invited a group of people who, in different ways, had contributed to shaping the American experimental film scene since at least the 1940s: the filmmaker/film scholar Jay Leyda, the filmmaker Lewis Jacobs, the Los Angeles gallery owner Clara Grossman, the poet and critic Parker Tyler, and Amos Vogel, founder of the film society Cinema 16. Also present were two young curators, Callie Angell (Anthology) and Charles Silver (MoMA). What emerged in the discussion was a view of independent/experimental film that included anonymous films, political films, unfinished films, student films, and failed films. It exceeded and contrasted with Anthology’s narrow focus, at this time, on a canon of “monuments of film art” (Sitney) by mostly white male filmmakers.

The project never went beyond its initial phase and is virtually forgotten today. But it also marks, as I will argue, a critical juncture in the history of archiving, historicizing, and theorizing experimental film. Drawing on archival sources, including the sound recording of the 1973 meeting, this paper traces how funding opportunities, personal networks, institutional policies, and historical contingencies shape archival practices and historiographical perspectives. It also looks at how the Survey intersected and contrasted with other contemporaneous projects such as “The Oral History of the Independent American Cinema” at SUNY Buffalo, and Cecile Starr’s “Women’s Independent Film Exchange.” The tension in these projects between absence, loss, and partial recovery opens up a critical perspective on current debates on materialist historiographies and the complexities of the process of how “value is selectively ascribed to specific films” (Alfaro).