The Film-Makers' Cooperative

In the fall of 1960, Jonas Mekas and Lewis Allen organized several meetings with independent filmmakers in New York City that culminated on September 28, 1960, with the group officially declaring themselves the "New American Cinema Group."

On January 7, 1961, at a contentious meeting of the Group, Amos Vogel attempted to stonewall the formation of the distribution center, claiming that his own Cinema 16 organization should be the only distributor of experimental films. However, Vogel was shouted down after it was pointed out that Cinema 16 refused to distribute Stan Brakhage's Anticipation of the Night (1958).

On September 30, 1962, Mekas presented the first draft of a manifesto for the New American Cinema Group, which included a call to form a cooperative distribution center. An excerpt from the manifesto reads:

In the course of the past three years we have been witnessing the spontaneous growth of a new generation of film makers — the Free Cinema in England, the Nouvelle Vague in France, the young movements in Poland, Italy, and Russia, and, in this country, the work of Lionel Rogosin, John Cassavetes, Alfred Leslie, Robert Frank, Edward Bland, Bert Stern, and the Sanders brothers. The official cinema all over the world is running out of breath. It is morally corrupt, esthetically obsolete, thematically superficial, temperamentally boring... As in the other arts in America today — painting, poetry, sculpture, theatre, where fresh winds have been blowing for the last few years — our rebellion against the old, official, corrupt and pretentious is primarily an ethical one. We are concerned with Man [sic]. We are concerned with what is happening to Man [sic]. We are not an esthetic school that constricts the filmmaker within a set of dead principles. We feel we cannot trust any classical principles either in art or life.

In 1966, coop founders started the Film-makers’ Distribution Center, a sister organization for theatrical release.