The New York co-op makes an unfashionably practical case for independent cinema: keep the rights with the maker, keep the catalogue open, and do the work of getting films shown.
In Jonas Mekas’s account of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative’s early years, the distribution office and the bedroom occupied the same Manhattan loft. The films and filmmakers took most of the space. Mekas slept under his editing table. What he had offered as a temporary home for the venture lasted five years.
It is an irresistible image, but the important detail is not the discomfort. A distribution centre had become necessary. Making the work had not produced a dependable way to show it, even within the existing world of adventurous cinema. The Co-op’s answer was to organise that missing part themselves.
A refusal becomes a system
In his brief history for the Co-op, Mekas recalls a gathering of independent filmmakers in September 1960 that formed the New American Cinema Group. Investigating distribution became his assignment. His account identifies Cinema 16’s rejection of Stan Brakhage’s Anticipation of the Night as a decisive provocation: even a distributor associated with the avant-garde could decide that a film did not belong.
That is Mekas’s founding account, not a neutral adjudication of the rejected film or a complete history of Cinema 16. Its force lies in the problem it describes. Replacing commercial taste with a more adventurous taste still leaves somebody deciding which work may enter circulation. The argument was not only for different selections, but for a different relationship between selection and access.
Mekas dates the meeting to discuss a filmmaker-run distribution centre to January 7, 1962. Around twenty filmmakers came to his loft. The history is full of names that would become fixtures of experimental cinema, but the proposed mechanism was less glamorous than a movement: a place to deposit work, make it discoverable and arrange for it to travel.
The distinction survives in the Co-op’s published membership terms. It states that there is no barrier to submitting work for distribution. Members retain their rights, set their rental prices and can withdraw their films. Distribution is non-exclusive, provided any other distributor’s arrangement permits it. The organisation lists both film gauges and video and digital formats among the materials it accepts.
These are not interchangeable promises. Keeping copyright protects ownership; non-exclusivity leaves another route open; setting a rental price gives the maker a say in the transaction. None guarantees an audience. Together, though, they make distribution something other than handing over a film and waiting for an intermediary to decide its future.
Open admission is not an automatic screening
The financial terms are equally useful to read without romance. At the time of writing, the membership page lists annual dues of $40 and an equal split of rental income: half to the filmmaker, half to the Co-op for overhead. It also says filmmaker royalties are paid on request. These are published terms, not evidence of what any particular member earns; prospective members should check the current arrangements directly.
The overhead matters. A cooperative does not eliminate the work between a film and its audience. It chooses how that work is organised and paid for. Someone still has to maintain a catalogue, answer a booking enquiry and establish what can be supplied. The alternative to a conventional distributor is not necessarily the absence of distribution labour.
The rental request page makes this visible in a small collection of fields: title, artist, format, screening date, number of screenings, institution or venue, and contact details. Its warning is explicit: submitting the form neither guarantees availability nor confirms a rental. A staff member follows up with the next steps.
That qualification is the hinge of the whole arrangement. A catalogue entry means that a work can be sought out; it does not mean every copy or format is available on every date. Nor does admission to a catalogue require a museum, festival, college or film society to programme the work. The Co-op’s open door changes one point of access. It cannot abolish all the decisions, budgets and practical limits farther along the route.
For a programmer, this suggests a more deliberate kind of browsing. The question is not simply whether a title exists, but which version or format can be booked, for what event, and with whose confirmation. For a filmmaker, it makes the distinction between representation and a promised screening unusually plain. Both are healthier expectations than treating catalogue inclusion as an audience already secured.
Keeping a film available is not the same as saving it
There is another distinction worth protecting. Distribution and preservation meet in the wish for a film to remain accessible, but they are not synonyms. A successful booking tells us that a work can be supplied for an event. It does not, by itself, tell us how its original materials are being cared for over decades.
A separate New York institution, Anthology Film Archives, describes that longer task in specific material terms. Its preservation programme, established in 1972, involves controlled storage, inspection and repair, and the migration of vulnerable media. Its account discusses new polyester-based negatives, projection prints and digital transfers—not merely putting a title in an online list.
Crucially, Anthology distinguishes its in-house film transfers for access from archival or preservation masters. A digital version may let more people see a work without constituting the last word in its preservation. That is not an argument against digital access. It is an argument against asking one file to stand in for every technical and custodial obligation a film carries.
The distinction also prevents a false division of labour. Anthology exhibits and lends films as well as preserving them; organisations can perform overlapping roles. The point is to name the work accurately. A screening, a rental catalogue and a preservation element each answer a different question about a film’s continuing life.
The Co-op’s membership and rental pages are therefore more revealing than a slogan about artistic freedom. They locate decisions: who owns the work, who sets the price, who confirms the booking, what remains uncertain. They do not demonstrate that every member finds an audience or that the organisation has solved the economics of experimental cinema. They show a structure through which filmmakers can participate without surrendering all control over circulation.
Mekas under the editing table is the image that stays. But a durable alternative cannot depend on somebody sleeping badly forever. It needs terms, administration and other people willing to arrange screenings. A film’s independence is tested not only in what it refuses to resemble, but in whether there is still a workable route from its maker to a room where it can be seen.
