A filmmaker collective arose because participants rejected network TV news footage

Evidence

Newsreel was conceived at a late December conclave of some thirty filmmakers. Jonas Mekas convened the meeting, prompted by students from the young filmmaker Allan Siegel’s Free University course; having made a class project documenting the October 1967 March on the Pentagon, they were appalled by the news footage shown by network TV. Some pushed for a collective newsreel service to cover demonstrations and other “happenings” from a participant point of view. Mekas envisioned an analog to the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and forestalled attempts to define a mission (“let things take their own course”). — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1164

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Fits ‘Grafting & Growth’ structural concern: cooperatives (like tree root grafts) enable emergence without centralized mission — Mekas’s ‘let things take their own course’ is an anti-planned infrastructure.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s test case: what institutional conditions (cheap film equipment, Free University courses, existing coop models) seeded new media collectives. — connects to: A signature protest video’s demands had no collective authorship behind them — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 459