In 1974 James Heddle, then a faculty member in the University of Wisconsin's Communication Arts Department, produced and hosted a twenty-one part television series entitled the New American Cinema at the PBS affiliate in Madison, a town then proud to be called 'the Berkeley of the Mid-West.'
The half-hour segments profiled some of the leading experimental filmmakers and film critics of the '60's and '70's. They were the odd-balls and innovators whose irreverence for prevailing artistic, technological and critical conventions led them to breakthroughs that form the foundation for high-tech multi-media graphic and acoustic effects we take as commonplace today.
This unique historical TV series - produced in 1974 and soon to be re-issued by Syntropia Press as a book and DVD set - features eleven of the leading filmmakers, critics, historians, and theoreticians who founded a movement fusing traditional art forms with the then-just-emerging electronic media.
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Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas, Will Hindle, Gene Youngblood, Bruce Baillie, Scott Bartlett, John Whitney, Stan VanDerBeek, Shirley Clarke, P. Adams Sitney and Nam June Paik.
These pioneers created a 'wedding of Psyche and Techne' - the mythical God and Goddess of mysticism and technology - and in the process forged an intermedia syntax the influence of which is visible on every contemporary film, video and computer screen.
Interviewed by award-winning filmmaker and media educator James Heddle, they - the people who are truly the Ancestors of the current explosion of the Do-It-Yourself Media Revolution - tell the story of their movement in their own words, illustrated by extensive excerpts from their historic, ground-breaking works.
The educational DVD series comprises twenty-one exclusive 28-minute programs featuring 11 leaders of the New American Cinema Movement of the 1960's.' The book will combine transcripts of the interviews with biographical updates and commentaries by the editor.
