Radical political filmmaking funded by establishment institutions like the AFI

Evidence

A 1968 manifesto (published not in the underground press but highbrow Film Quarterly) argued for hard propaganda: “Changing minds, altering consciousness, seems to us to come through confrontations, not out of sweet/reasonable conversations.” Ice was already in the planning stage; Kramer began filming after the NYFF. If the movie was designed to fulfill Newsreel’s revolutionary mission, it inspired no small amount of grumbling among Kramer’s Newsreel colleagues once it became known that, thanks in part to a recommendation from Dan Talbot, rich kid Kramer had received a $15,000 grant from the American Film Institute. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1652

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to reader’s test case: institutional funding and patronage were part of the material conditions enabling the avant-garde, contrasting with claims that scenes arise purely from below.