Art in Cinema: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society

The Documents

The Documents Conversation with Jack Stauffacher, 8/14/99 [Jack Stauffacher is an accomplished, nationally known letterpress printer/book designer. His Greenwood Press in San Francisco publishes high-quality, limited-edition books.] MacDonald: What possessed your brother to start Art in Cinema? Stauffacher: Frank was always interested in film. He was interested in the arts—writers, poets, painters. And he always studied films. He was interested in British documentary in the 1930s. And he was a Hitchcock fan in those days. Before the war he got a scholarship to study art at the Art Center school in Los Angeles, and lived in Los Angeles in the mid-thirties, where he was surrounded by the film world. He got involved in set-designing classes and became more serious about making film. When he came back from LA, he started to work for the Paterson and Hall advertising agency. But his interest in film continued; it was a part of him. I can’t put my finger on how exactly Art in Cinema started, but I can set the stage. There was a special atmosphere in San Francisco at the time. After the war these eager young veterans came back, searching, thinking, feeling a responsibility to reshape the world. Their experiences during the war had made a profound mark on them. The city seemed alive with art—cinema, painting, poetry, jazz. You don’t create in a vacuum. You create around like-minded spirits. That was a unique moment for the creative artist in San Francisco. People were asking questions. Out of it came some amazing things. Frank was overwhelmed with his desire to be involved in this atmosphere, and with cinema. It just seemed to blossom naturally in him. MacDonald: At what point did he start working for the Museum of Art? Stauffacher: They never really hired him. Film was foreign to the museum. They did put on programs of documentary films about art, but it was never the kind of thing Frank did. He just asked the museum if they would like to have some more creative film programs, and they said yes. They gave him very little to work with. He had to struggle. He did it by sheer enthusiasm—and with the help of good people around him. They sold tickets and were successful in the sense that they made enough to pay the projectionist and the printing of the programs. And the director of the museum, Dr. Grace Morley, liked Frank very much, and was very supportive (these days, directors of museums are basically businessmen trying to connect with rich people, but Dr. Morley was something special). For Frank it was a labor of love. MacDonald: So far as I know, Frank was the first programmer in the United States who saw avantgarde film as something like a coherent history. He’s the first person to gear a whole series of events toward that particular history. Do you know when he was first seeing experimental work? Stauffacher: No, I don’t, and I don’t know why he was interested in experimental film. It was just his probing mind, I think. But once he got the sense of experimental film, he wanted to track it down and look at it at every opportunity. MacDonald: As I remember, the first program was listed as having been done by Frank and Richard Foster. Stauffacher: Richard Foster played an important part early on. He was basically the PR man and a very intelligent, very nice man. He was a person who could go out and get things moving. Frank was the person who was putting the programs together. Richard learned from Frank, and helped Frank on the PR level, meeting people, making connections. MacDonald: He was only involved for one year? Stauffacher: Yes, it wasn’t too long. MacDonald: What was your role early on? Stauffacher: I printed the first program. I’ve been a printer since 1934. MacDonald: Did you print the catalogue that was published after the first year? Stauffacher: I designed it and had another person, next door to my shop, print it. I think it’s a valuable document. We had Henry Miller write the introduction. I disliked the original cover, so I designed a replacement and used it on a hundred or so copies that hadn’t gone out. MacDonald: One of the reasons that I’m so interested in the history of Art in Cinema, Cinema 16, and the other film societies is their...