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This chapter describes the soundscapes of selected performances at the London-based Film Society and examines the reasoning behind some of its decisions concerning the sonic presentation of films. With a guaranteed income from subscriptions, the Film Society operated from a number of London cinemas from 1925 until 1939, and under club conditions showed films that they felt were artistically or technically worthy but had little commercial prospect or that risked censorship. The society’s financial stability enabled it to experiment with accompaniments and to employ approaches that might have proved unacceptable in commercial cinemas. These ranged from the conventional (pianists, orchestras, or records) to the less usual (speakers or complete silence), and single performances often embraced some permutation of these.

This chapter discusses Amos Vogel, who was one of two (the other was his wife Maria) who sought to show avant-garde films in New York. Their idea for a film society came from their time as being patrons of New York City's most influential avant-garde filmmaker, Maya Deren. The Vogels then tried showing films that they knew were not being seen with any regularity in the city, leading to their Cinema 16 to becoming unique and significant.

This chapter explores the impact of Soviet cinema and film theory on British film and literary culture in the 1920s, and the routes through which knowledge of Soviet film and theory entered Britain. It discusses the development of writing about cinema and the establishment of film fora, including film societies. It pays particular attention to the formative impact not only of the film aesthetics of Soviet film, but also the censorship that sought to suppress it. Censorship decisively shaped the development of film culture: cinematic institutions such as Close Up (the journal that published the first English translations of articles by Eisenstein), the Film Society (founded in 1925), and the cross-national Workers’ Film Societies of the thirties, emerged as more or less direct responses to censorship, attempting to bypass local and governmental controls of film exhibition.

This chapter describes the establishment of The London Film Society. The new Society had, for its immediate object, the showing of both new and old films of unusual interest to a limited membership on Sunday afternoons during the winter seasons. It also sought to provide safe harbor for films from censorship of performances open to the public. In its first season the Society presented thirty-nine films, including twenty screened for the first time in England. The Society enjoyed its privileged position, taking advantage of it to show a wide variety of films, including the notorious L'Age d'Or (1930), by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali. Association with the Film Society also brought Barry her moment in the limelight of the British social scene and a new job at the Daily Mail.

In August 1929, British Talking Pictures released a part-talking feature called The Crimson Circle. This early British sound feature was a re-working of the German silent film Der rote Kreis (directed by Friedrich Zelnik in 1928). Recorded using a sound-on-disc process, the rejuvenated Crimson Circle had dialogue sections (directed by Sinclair Hill) interspersed within a synchronised soundtrack of music and sound effects devised by the Austrian composer Edmund Meisel, notorious for his propulsive accompaniment to the German release of Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1926). Neither the print nor the discs from The Crimson Circle are known to survive, but aspects of the lost soundtrack can be glimpsed from surviving documentary evidence and by comparison with Meisel’s extant film scores and soundtracks.

This chapter examines the entry of Hal Ashby to the field of film editing. During the 1955 shooting of the film The Naked Hills, his friend Bill Otto took him along to watch. Determined to make the most of the opportunity, Ashby volunteered to carry cans of film and soon was hired as an assistant editor. Ashby's entry into the editing world marked the start of a period when work took precedence over everything else. After this first editing job, Ashby applied to the Society of Motion Picture Film Editors (SMPFE) in order to join the union. His first film editing mentor was Bob Swink.

One of Schuman's original dreams for Lincoln Center was a summer festival that would take advantage of the Center's air-conditioned halls. In 1967, Schuman's Lincoln Center Festival became a reality. He also explored the possibility of composing a major work for the nation's bicentennial, but his early efforts came to naught. At the same time, two of the constituents at Lincoln Center—the ones devoted to Music Theater and Repertory Theater—indicated problems in their ability to operate. Schuman proposed the possibility of a film constituent and a chamber music constituent, much to the frustration of some of the directors of the Center. This chapter also looks at Schuman's success as a public speaker and Rockefeller's early intimations that Schuman was running the risk of being let go.

This chapter examines Hal Ashby's second directorial assignment in Harold and Maude. It discusses Ashby's directorial style and the deterioration in his relationship with Joan Marshall. Though it is unclear when they filed for divorce, Ashby and Joan received a final judgment of dissolution of marriage on May 26, 1971. Ashby's second film, being so steeped in death, was booked by student film societies and repertory cinemas and gradually became a cult phenomenon.

For the first time in more than 30 years, Schuman had no institutional affiliation. At first, he filled his days with much-needed rest. Soon, however, he was eager to get involved in new projects. One involved the activities of National Educational Television, an organization that had employed Frankie and her skills; another was a start-up business (Videorecord Corporation of America) that was trying to develop video programs for the classroom. Schuman also contemplated writing his memoirs at this time, but he abandoned his efforts and was content to nurture the early lives of two of his institutional children: the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. By this time, the new campus for Juilliard at Lincoln Center was ready for occupation, and his relationship with Juilliard president Peter Mennin—already somewhat chilly—took a turn for the worse, in part exacerbated by Schuman's own stubbornness. Schuman undertook trips to Puerto Rico and Japan at this time.

The introduction explains the recent coining of “avant-doc” to represent the increasingly common tendency for independent filmmakers to work in between the histories usually designated by “avant-garde film” and “documentary.” This is followed by a historical review of the many intersections between documentary and avant-garde film since the dawn of cinema itself, when Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey became the avant-garde of photography by introducing photographic motion study to document animal and human motion. The 1920s saw the early evolution of the City Symphony, a form now claimed by both documentary and avant-garde history. In the 1940s/1950s, the American film society movement brought documentary and avant-garde together for audiences. And the emergence of cinema-verite filmmaking in the 1960s reinvigorated documentary history and instigated new developments within the avant-garde that continue to be felt, for example, in the burgeoning contemporary cinema of Place. The introduction concludes with brief sketches of the twenty-three interviewees.

This introductory chapter discusses how Germaine Dulac played a groundbreaking role in the evolution of the cinema both as art and social practice. Over the course of her film career (1915–42), Dulac directed more than thirty fiction films, many marking new cinematic tendencies, from Impressionist to abstract. A careful study of Dulac's life and work establishes the importance of her voice in the diffusion and legitimization of French film and film culture, as evidenced through her prolific writings and lectures. She also played a prominent role in several cultural organizations such as the Society of Film Authors (SAF), the French Federation of Cine-Clubs (FFCC), the International Council of Women (ICW), the International Educational Cinematographic Institute(IECI), and the League of Nations' International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC), among others.

Drawing on ecomedia studies, this chapter sheds light on Ecocinema, an itinerant project of film exhibition that is powered by solar energy. This ecological initiative, with origins in the Netherlands and the project Solar Cinema, started operating in 2008 in Uruguay and soon after in other countries of Latin America. By using vans with solar panels mounted to their rooftops, which operate a 100 per cent solar-powered screening system, Ecocinema travels to places and sites where cinema does not exist. Through the presentation of this project, this chapter looks at the genealogy of itinerant cinemas in Latin America and traces the themes related to alternate models of exhibition. Providing an alternative of green practices, within an industry whose processes of production, distribution, and exhibition are largely ecologically unsustainable, Ecocinema seeks to reach sustainability and moreover to raise awareness about the environmental crisis and educate about ecological means of energy production and consumption. Furthermore, the chapter reflects on the practice of cinema projection and its inextricable relationship with light, in the case of solar-powered projection with sunlight. It concludes by contemplating environmental politics and justice within the context of Latin America and the possibilities of greening cinema practices and responding creatively to the emerging contemporary ecological problems.