Sandra Schulberg, Northern Lights, and the Rise of American Independents
Northern Lights
Expressively using film grain like pointillist brushstrokes to depict its vast, wintry landscape, the low-budget black-and-white 1978 feature Northern Lights, a drama about immigrant farmers in North Dakota trying to organize a union in the 1910s, was a highlight of this year’s New York Film Festival’s Revivals section. The film’s artistry is matched by its political timeliness; Northern Lights paired well with a new film in the festival, Brett Story’s and Stephen Maing’s Union, about the similar struggles of present-day Amazon workers.
The revival of Northern Lights was actually a return to NYFF for the film, which had its New York premiere in 1979 as part of a seminal event in the history of American independent film. The nascent Independent Feature Project (IFP), operating under the aegis of The Film Fund, teamed up with the Film Society of Lincoln Center to present a six-day NYFF sidebar event, American Independents: A Festival of American Independent Feature Films, to draw attention to the growing number of provocative, low-budget films being made all around the country. American Independents included six new feature films and nine older titles, with screenings in the Paramount Theater, a few blocks south of Lincoln Center. It ran from September 22 to 27, as a leadup to the main festival.
The lineup consisted of these six new films: Alambrista! (dir. Robert Young), Bush Mama (Haile Gerima), Gal Young ‘Un (Victor Nunez), Heartland (Richard Pearce), Northern Lights (John Hanson and Rob Nilsson), and The Scenic Route (Mark Rappaport). The nine older titles were: Badlands (Terrence Malick), Crazy Quilt (John Korty), Glen and Randa (Jim McBride), Ice (Robert Kramer), Killers Kiss (Stanley Kubrick), Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (Melvin Van Peebles), The Cool World (Shirley Clarke), The Brig (Jonas Mekas), and Trash (Paul Morrissey).
The festival was spearheaded by Sandra Schulberg, the producer and indie film advocate who got a grant in 1978 from the National Endowment for the Arts to support a public exhibition of significant American independent films. At the time the NEA grant came through, Schulberg was in North Dakota, working on the DIY distribution of Northern Lights. After barnstorming through North Dakota with a 35mm print, showing the film at local theaters, the team brought it to the closest big city—Minneapolis. Describing their grass-roots efforts, director John Hanson wrote “We contacted Scandinavians, political groups, cooperatives, farm organizations, labor unions, old people’s organizations, colleges, schools, film societies, every conceivable interest group that might embrace the film. We had preview screenings in private screening rooms, we held a sneak preview at the Film Society at the University of Minnesota, we did mailings, tacked up posters all over the city, did as many radio and tv interviews as we could set up. In short, we tried to cover all the bases we could, appeal to every conceivable interest group.” While Northern Lights was hardly a box office hit in Minneapolis, the distribution efforts, along with the film’s apparent originality, set off a chain of events that led to international success. A ten-page feature story about Northern Lights in the left-wing magazine Mother Jones prompted an invitation from the Belgrade International Film Festival. The film was then invited to Cannes, where it won the Camera d’Or prize as Best First Feature.
The Cannes prize gave Northern Lights enough caché to merit inclusion in the NYFF American Independents festival. While the sidebar festival only occurred once, it put the Independent Feature Project on the map. The IFP grew steadily, eventually launching affiliate organizations around the country (most notably Film Independent in Los Angeles, which hosts the Spirit Awards). The Independent Feature Project in New York is now Gotham Film & Media Institute; its activities include the publication of Filmmaker Magazine, and the high-profile Gotham Awards. The NYFF sidebar, which was supplemented by a twenty-film IFP market in midtown that Schulberg curated, morphed into a separate annual event, Independent Film Week, which for many years was a major launchpad for works-in-progress and recently completed films. Schulberg relinquished day-to-day management of the IFP in 1980 to produce John Hanson’s next movie, Wildrose, but she remained on the Board for the next 23 years to help ensure it stayed true to its mission.
In 2010, she was elected president of the nonprofit Laboratory for Icon & Idiom (which she had cofounded with Jill Godmilow in 1984 to produce their movie, Waiting for the Moon) and launched its IndieCollect campaign to save films. So far, IndieCollect has restored more than 80 films, including Northern Lights. I talked to Schulberg about her work on Northern Lights in 1978 and ‘79, and the creation of the American Independents festival. It is fitting that her organizational efforts in bringing together a disparate group of maverick filmmakers mirrored the collective spirit that was Northern Light’s subject.
Sandra Schulberg
What was your role on Northern Lights? You were helping to produce it, and also get it distributed?
Yes, I had raised the finishing money, and got very involved in submitting it to Cannes. We had no distributor. We were taking the film to theaters ourselves, which meant starting in North Dakota and then branching out to Minneapolis and other cities.
So how would you define your role–as a mix of distributor and producer?
Well, I was in production, but we had no choice but to work to get our movies out. Peter Adair had done that with Word is Out (1977), and Jill Godmillow with Antonia: A Portrait of a Woman (1974), and Jerry Bruck had done it with I. F. Stone’s Weekly (1973). The filmmakers were taking the movies straight to theaters.
I remember there used to be a newsletter that would list filmmakers and when they were traveling. There was a whole group of independent filmmakers who just drove all over the place with their 16mm or 35mm prints.
We had 35mm, so we were lugging those heavy cans. But we really had no choice and, and that's what gave rise to the founding of First Run Features in 1980, because we were going theater to theater. That's why we approached Fran Spielman at New Yorker Films about whether she would leave Dan Talbot [at New Yorker Films] and come be our theatrical film booker. To our delight and surprise, she said yes, and we built First Run Features around her.
You have to have a playable film, but the other piece of it is you have to know the theater owners and bookers around the country to get a film placed. And Fran was extremely experienced. First Run became our own film distribution collective. I was very inspired by the Filmverlag der Autoren, which was a collective in Germany. They were all directors, including Werner Herzog, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, Percy Adlon, and Alexander Kluge with one producer, Laurens Straub, who acted as the impresario. They were distributing their own films. I met a lot of them in Rotterdam in 1977 and they wound up writing a lovely telegram to us at the start of the IFP conference. I mean, we felt very much in solidarity with what they were doing. They were the New German Cinema. We didn't use the term New American Cinema because that had been used by Jonas Mekas and the people around Anthology Film Archives and The Film-makers’ Cooperative, and we didn't want to steal their messaging. So we went with American Independent Cinema.
Cover of program booklet.
Before the American Independent Cinema sidebar festival and conference and market in 1979, we were just struggling still to get our films booked more widely. John Hanson, Rob Nilsson, and I had been booking the film. We premiered it in Crosby, North Dakota, where it was filmed, and then we were just trying to take it to theaters. I got the news in the summer of 1978 while we were on the road that we’d gotten a grant from the NEA to get this going. So in the end of 1978 I went back to New York to open the office and start working on that.
We got funding in 1978 from both the NEA and NYSCA to create a festival that would start in 1979, a public showcase. We had the support of Nancy Sher at NYSCA. It was always meant to be a three-pronged event, where there was a public screening [the NYFF event], there were private market screenings, and there was an organizing conference.
We became excited about the idea of the New York Film Festival becoming the platform for showing more of these films. We had experienced a lot of frustration in the previous few years with the Festival selecting just a tiny handful of American independent films, and we didn't feel that was actually reflective of what we felt was a growing movement coming out of 1960s activism to democratize and decentralize feature filmmaking. Not just documentaries but feature length fiction films. There were very few festivals at that time, and the New York Film Festival was very important. They were important gatekeepers. And we were, we felt we were being, you know, dissed. We were being shut out.
So you met with [New York Film Festival director] Richard Roud, and you’ve said there was some resistance.
I had tremendous respect for Richard, but he came out of a more avant-garde, you know, Sight and Sound background. He just wasn’t seeing many of these films, and he apparently didn't have huge respect for them. They did agree, slightly under duress, to host the sidebar. I developed a very long list of candidate films that we all screened, and in the end, he opted to approve ones that had been showcased (with the exception of Gal Young ‘Un) in international festivals, films that already had that imprimatur, which was important to him. The New York Film Festival prided itself on bringing films from festivals around the world to New York City. He felt that was part of his mandate, to bring a film that might have been shown at Cannes or at Berlin or even Rotterdam. So it made sense. Although we were very frustrated that we couldn't show more of the new films, his idea of showing older indie films was a good idea. This was a happy compromise, providing historical context and showing a range of films. He suggested many of the older titles, but we were very happy to get Melvin Van Peebles’ film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song into the mix. That was a big achievement, because that was such a revolutionary film. Killers Kiss and The Brig were an important part of the whole American independent tradition, including the New American Cinema and everything that Jonas Mekas had been working so hard to achieve. We were standing on his shoulders as well.
So what’s your memory of the impact of the event? It took place at the Paramount Theater, leading up to the New York Film Festival.
The list of journalists who of saluted the films was very impressive. And many of the screenings were sold out. I think it made a big impact. But of course, they didn't want to do it again. But it was very good for us to have the imprimatur of the New York Film Festival to announce our arrival as a movement, not just one or two films, but really as a new era in independent film, Off-Hollywood film, and we built on that with the IFP market. The market was the real driver of the ultimate success of the Independent Feature Project. We knew we needed foreign support. Many of us had only gotten support for our films by showing them abroad, because no one wanted to show them here. We premiered Alambrista! (1978) at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the very first Camera d’Or award. It was an American indie film directed by Robert Young that I was the associate producer of. So I was crucial in submitting the film and getting the film into Cannes. I was building relationships with the people who were running the Critics Week and Directors Fortnight and even Gilles Jacob, who was the impresario of the main festival. And then the next year, I made sales of Alambrista! around the world after we won the Camera d’Or award and then Northern Lights was selected the next year and also won the Camera d’Or. So I was again in the position of handling the international sales. I didn't intend to become a foreign sales agent, but you had no choice. People came up to us, the filmmakers, and wanted to make distribution deals. And so I just jumped in with both feet and learned how these agreements are written and made deals.
I knew that we were not going to attract foreign buyers, distributors, and major television acquisition executives and co-financiers to come all the way to New York to see six films that they'd already seen. So the market, these twenty additional films that we showed privately at Magno, were crucial to attracting these foreign buyers. They came; French arthouse distributors, German art television network acquisitions, people who not just acquired films in those days, but they also co-financed American indie films. Buyers came to the market because we were showing twenty films that they'd never seen before.
And the Independent Feature Project market is what remained, it became the centerpiece of the IFP.
For many years, we showed basically every new feature film made in the previous year until there got to be so many that we couldn't, and then we shifted to showing works in progress. It has evolved, yeah, but that became the driver. And then, of course, when the Spirit Awards and then the Gotham awards were created, that also became a driver for both organizations (now Film Independent and Gotham) in terms of profile, visibility, prestige and, of course, fundraising.
What was the life for Northern Lights internationally? It’s such an American story, but it’s so artistic…
Exactly. I made deals for the release of the film theatrically in France, in the Scandinavian countries.in Italy, Germany, and the UK. It had quite a profile abroad. It was shown at other foreign festivals. It’s a stunning film. You could describe it as a docudrama or a political film, but it had that striking black-and-white photography. It was really viewed as a work of art. It was recognized internationally as a classic art film.
And now, years later, it's getting a new life. And again being boosted by the New York Film Festival.
It's so wonderful that they're giving it this platform. As you know, all the attention in the spotlight is on the new films, and the revival section at the New York Film Festival is much less heralded, but it's nonetheless, for us and for this film, absolutely fantastic. It’s also important that for IndieCollect and the few other entities that are trying to save important American independent films, it's really important that events like this be successful. You know, every new film this week is an old film a year from now. And if you don't have a society, a culture that prizes work that was gone before, then film culture becomes very short lived and short sighted. It doesn't have depth.
[Note: the restored Northern Lights has been picked up for distribution by Kino Lorber, and will open theatrically early next year. The filmmakers of Northern Lights spoke, along with the filmmakers of Union, on this Film Comment podcast.]