Visiting Professor of English Scott MacDonald, currently on leave from Hamilton and teaching with the Visual and Environmental Studies Department at Harvard, presented two "Cinema 16" shows at the Harvard Film Archive in September.
Cinema 16 was the influential New York film society credited with invigorating the city's cultural scene from 1947 until 1963 by showing large audiences a very wide range of documentaries, classics, experimental films and features from around the world. Cinema 16 was also among the first, and among the most important, distributors of alternative cinema in this country (in the late 1960s, the Cinema 16 collection was bought by Barney Rosset at Grove Press and recently was donated to the Harvard Film Archive).
MacDonald curated two shows of films that were important to Cinema 16 audiences and to those who rented films from Cinema 16. The opening show included Georges Franju's Sang de betes (1949), a surrealist expose of French abattoirs; Kenneth Anger's "psychodrama" Fireworks (1947), probably the first openly-gay American film; the photographer Weegee's Weegee's New York (c.1952); and James Agee, Helen Levitt and Janice Loeb's In the Street (1952).
The second show featured a newly struck print of the recently preserved, The Room (1959) by Carmen D'Avino, one of the era's most popular independent animators (the preservation was done by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences); Stan Brakhage's birth film, Window Water Baby Moving (1959); Canadian Norman McLaren's visual riff with Oscar Peterson, Begone Dull Care (1949), and a rare screening of Gregory Markopoulos's Psyche (1947).
MacDonald provided context for the screenings, answered questions and signed copies of his Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society (Temple University Press, 2002).
