Experimental and Avant-Garde
Cinema in the 1940s

LAUREN RABINOVITZ

After movie culture, and a greater number of people experienced new types of cinema. A perceived difference emerged between Hollywood fare and independent or foreign cinemas, an opposition that theater exhibitors and critics alike promoted in the practice of differentiating customer groups for their movies. Within this divergence, independent cinema (any movies made independently from or outside of Hollywood production studios) developed a widespread film culture similar to that of the prewar European cine club movement.¹ While such a model for film culture held sway in the United States in the 1930s among leftist cultural-political clubs like the Workers Film and Photo League (WFPL) and the John Reed Clubs, it reemerged after the war as the model for a system of alternative cinema as art rather than of cinema conceived as a political weapon.

The European Exodus and Other
War-Related Developments