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Davis / Film Society Movement in the U.S. All pictures courtesy ofthe author. Film and Photo League Screens "Distinguished Films." Film & History Vol. 24, No's. 3-4, 19947 BEN DAVIS QM®IÊ>iM®IK)T i©M®LA^i Beginnings of the Film Society Movement in the U.S. .n the early and middle 1920s, small, dynamic groups of cinéphiles in Paris and London began championing film as the seventh art, le septième art, in reaction to the commercialism of their movie industries and the prevailing condescension towards movies as mere entertainment spectacles. This alternate cinema movement first arose in 1917 in Paris with the writings of an early film critic, Louis Delluc, in the weekly journal Le Film. ' One of the ideas that he and Ricciotto Canudo, another early film critic and theorist, proposed was that of an alternative exhibition outlet, the ciné-club (or film society as it was later called in England), which would screen historically and artistically important films that were kept off the mainstream screens. These were mostly foreign films, experimental films, and older classics, unavailable to the public 8 Davis / Film Society Movement in the U.S. because they were regarded as competition or as noncommercial by the film industry, or as censorable by the moral guardians of the time.2 Through making such films available to the public, the ciné-clubs would help educate audiences in the artistry of the cinema. The ciné-clubs evolved into nonprofit membership organizations that held weekly or monthly screenings of noncommercial important films. This concept was put into practice first in Paris in 1920 by a group of artists, intellectuals, and film workers, who established the Club des Amis du Septième Art (or CA.S.A.)3, and later in London in 1925, by a similar group of cinéphiles, who set up the London Film Society.4 These film societies in Paris and London eventually developed a limited, but educated, audience for noncommercial films and stimulated the development of regional societies.5 In America, the film society movement began in earnest in the early 1930s when American cinéphiles, influenced by the European movements, organized two groups in New York. Technically, the first film society in the United States had appeared earlier, in 1919 in Woodstock, Maryland.6 Its impact, however, seems to have been restricted to a small area and, perhaps, to a limited period of time. Another ciné-club, the International Film Arts Guild, was established in October 1925 in New York City by Symond Gould, who ran Sunday screenings on a subscription basis at the George M. Cohan and Central theaters. But, because of competition, Gould transformed the Guild within a year into the other type of alternate exhibition outlet that existed at that time, the more entrepreneurial specialized theater (later to become known as the "art house" or the "little cinema" movement), and began regular screenings of noncommercial films at the Cameo Theatre in Times Square.7 Although both the specialized theater and the film society concentrated on screening important films of limited box office appeal, the former was the alternate exhibition counterpart to the mainstream movie house while the latter was a nonprofit organization created and maintained as a collaborative work of love by a group of cinéphiles. The specialized theater, a for-profit enterprise owned and operated by an entrepreneur, held regular screenings in its own movie theater. The nonprofit, collaboratively operated film society, on the other hand, usually held its weekly or monthly screenings in space supplied by a generous host agency, often a university. Within four years Symond had established a minichain of specialized theaters with a second site in Greenwich Village in 1927 and a branch in Philadelphia in 1929." Finally, in New York City, over a decade after the first ciné-club appeared in Paris, both the Film Forum and the Film Society were founded during January, 1933. The Film Society, whose first screening (at the Essex House on Film & History Vol. 24, No's. 3-4, 1994 Central Park South) reflected its elitism, was headed by Julien Levy-who had recently opened an important center of surrealist art. The mass...

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