Halter Ed - From the third eye: the Evergreen review film reader

Introduction
Ed Halter

The Angry Young Film Makers
Amos Vogel

Jazz on a Summers Day
Jerry Tallmer

The Magic Box
Jerry Tallmer

Dragtime and Drugtime; or, Film la Warhol
Parker Tyler

Someday What You Really Are is Going to Catch Up with You
Michael ODonoghue

13 Confusions
Amos Vogel

The New American Cinema: Five Replies to Amos Vogel
Daniel Talbot, Parker Tyler, Annette Michelson, Richard Schickel, Gregory J. Markopoulos, with additional reply from Jonas Mekas

Chappaqua
Lawrence Shainberg

Turning the Camera into the Audience
Nat Hentoff

Norman Mailers Wild 90
Lita Eliscu

Warhols Nude Restaurant
Stefan S. Brecht

Vietnam Dj Vu: A Film Review of Godards La Chinoise
Lita Eliscu

The Edge
Lita Eliscu

Sex and Politics: An Interview with Vilgot Sjman
John Lahr

The Sixth New York Film Festival
Sidney Bernard

A Way of Life: An Interview with John Cassavetes
Andr S. Labarthe

Lola in LA: An Interview with Jacques Demy
Michel Delahaye

The Day Rap Brown Became a Press Agent for Paramount
Amos Vogel

Solanas: Film as a Political Essay
Louis Marcorelles

Easy Rider: A Very American ThingAn Interview with Dennis Hopper
L.M. Kit Carson

Participatory Television
Nat Hentoff

Rochas Film as Carnival
Frieda Grafe

Rimbauds Desert as Seen by Pasolini
Wallace Fowlie

Mister Freedom: An Interview with William Klein
Abraham Segal

Destroy, She Said: An Interview with Marguerite Duras
Jacques Rivette & Jean Narboni

The Man Who Lies: An Interview with Alain Robbe-Grillet
Tom & Helen Bishop

Do They or Dont They? Why It Matters So Much
Parker Tyler

Mandabi: Confronting Africa
Julius Lester

Seeing America First with Andy Warhol
Dotson Rader

It Could Only Happen in California
Dotson Rader

Womens Lib: Save the Last Dance for Me
Tom Seligson

Have You Seen It All, Dennis Hopper?
L.M. Kit Carson

Woodstock: An Interview with Michael Wadleigh and Bob Maurice
Kent Carroll

Mucking with the Real
L.M. Kit Carson

Film and Revolution: An Interview with Jean-Luc Godard
Kent Carroll

We: A Manifesto
Dziga Vertov

Papatakis: Tiger in a Think-Tank
Parker Tyler

Hollywoods Last Stand
Tom Seligson

Fonda, My Buddy
Seymour Krim

Eros and the Muses
Jerome Tarshis

The First Annual Congress of the High Church of Hard Core
Robert Coover

News from Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen
Sara Davidson

Those Homophile Husbands
Parker Tyler

Pasolinis Decameron
David Hamilton

Film: Freaks and Fellini
Nat Hentoff

Perverse Chic
Tom Seligson

A Transit to Narcissus
Norman Mailer

Banner for the Grove Press International Film Festival flying over the Evergreen Theaters marquee on East 11th Street in Manhattan

The first piece of writing on cinema to appear in the pages of Evergreen Review was The Case of James Dean by French filmmaker and philosopher Edgar Morin, featured on the cover of Evergreen No. 5, Summer 1958. The article was excerpted from Morins study The Stars: An Account of the Star-System in Motion Pictures, published by Grove in 1960.

Introduction

Ed Halter

Published by Grove Press from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Evergreen Review is remembered as one of most important and influential journals of radical thought and politics, produced during the heyday of the American counterculture. Under the direction of Barney Rosset, Grove and Evergreen helped change the course of American publishing. Grove and Rosset grew famous for a long string of legal battles against censorship, fighting successfully to distribute banned books like D.H. Lawrences Lady Chatterleys Lover, Henry Millers Tropic of Cancer, and William S. Burroughss Naked Lunch, and promoting international authors like Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, and Jean Genet to American readers.

But Evergreens substantial contribution to the literature of cinema has been largely overlooked, and Groves decisive role in the development of film culture has been nearly forgotten. During a turning point in film historywhen the primacy of Hollywood was challenged by television and the music industry, international directors, and the American undergroundEvergreen ran over a hundred essays and interviews about cinema. During this same period, Grove also branched out from traditional book and magazine publishing to become a groundbreaking film distributor, releasing new films from some of the eras most important international directors. One of its titles, the Swedish import I Am Curious (Yellow), had a profound impact on the role of government censorship in motion picture exhibition, creating far-reaching changes in the American film industry as a whole.

Evergreen published the bulk of its film writing from 1967 to 1972; these same years saw some of the most tumultuous political events of the latter half of the 20th century. As society unraveled, then found new shape, Evergreen rode a bubble whose buoyant currency was the utopian dream of revolution. Vigorous, smart, and politically engaged, Evergreens articles about cinema read like documents from not just another time, but another world: an alternate universe in which Jane Fonda and Dennis Hopper are the only movie stars worth mentioning, directors cite Mao Tse-tung and Eldridge Cleaver as primary influences, film festival soirees end in police raids, and sexual explicitness is seen as an act of political rebellion.