Film collectives framed high culture as a pacification tool serving elite interests.

Evidence

Even before Chicago, Newsreel had launched an attack on the New York Film Festival as an elitist Lincoln Center production that “for all its pretentions to High Culture [served] as a cheap screening system for foreign and domestic films”—a “sop” for an alienated intellectual elite “in much the same way that anti-poverty programs pacify the disaffected poor.” Published in the Freep, their unsigned manifesto declared an intention to “stop this Festival by any means necessary.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1282

Categorization

• XREF: Practically a preview of the ‘artists as advance guard of gentrification’ thesis: Newsreel already suspects high culture is a sop for the disaffected — the logic the book extends to real estate.
• CANDY: A manifesto declaring the intent to ‘stop this Festival by any means necessary’ over elitist screenings is a deliciously absurd period artifact.