Conclusion

The practices that Porter espoused during his filmmaking career, while ill suited to the structure of Hollywood studios and the representational system that it supported, did not disappear. Even within this Hollywood system, informal collaborations were, and still are, common either at specific stages of production or by personnel performing complementary tasks (producer and director, for example). However, collaboration from the beginning to the end of a project and overlapping responsibilities have been more unusual. Buster

Keaton was one of the rare figures who seemed at ease with this approach— both in his work with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle and later in his features, when he often shared directing credit and maintained a crew of creative collaborators from project to project. William Powell and Emeric Pressburger forged a more formal collaborative team, which flourished in England between 1942 and 1951.

Not surprisingly, the collaborative approach to filmmaking has flourished best outside of a Hollywood-type situation. We often forget that Sergei Eisenstein had a co-director, Grigori Alexandrov, on October and Old and New . Avant-garde films of the 1920s characteristically relied on a collaborative working method. Ballet mécanique was made by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy. Un Chien andalou by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, Entr'acte by René Clair and Francis Picabia. To the extent that these films stand either in opposition to—or as alternatives to—large-scale capitalism, with its characteristic system of organization, we must consider how these films were made as much as the formal alternatives that they espoused.

In recent years, American "Independents" seem torn between two opposing impulses: on one hand collaboration, on the other a conception of the film "artist" that is grounded in nineteenth-century romanticism, one that requires all elements of a film to be subservient to a single vision. Thus many filmmakers have found collaboration a practical and comfortable way to make films. Richard Leacock and D. A. Pennebaker, the Maysles brothers (often with Charlotte Zwerin), Julia Reichert and James Klein: these are some of the many partnerships of greater or lesser duration. Likewise, it is characteristic of these working relationships that the participants perform a multiplicity of tasks—producing, camerawork, editing—and often distribution as well.

The tradition of independent filmmaking has also been used by individual filmmakers seeking greater freedom from commercial formulas. Stan Brakhage, John Sayles, and Emile de Antonio are some of the many independent filmmakers who seek near total control over their filmmaking.^[75] Without disputing the often progressive accomplishments of these three filmmakers, it would seem that alternative methods of working have had much to offer. Although collective approaches to filmmaking, such as those practiced by Newsreel in the 1960s and 1970s, offer a more radical approach to the organization of work than the pairings mentioned above, their theoretical attractiveness seems fraught with particular difficulties. Compromise and political infighting, rather than synthesis, often seem to be the result. Collaboration at its best can be dialectical—the synthesis of two points of view, two sets of skills, and two personalities that become more than either individual. This was, I believe, how Porter liked to work. It was a way that acknowledged his own strengths and weaknesses.

Independent, avant-garde, or alternative filmmakers have also continued to use some of the representational procedures of the early silent period, albeit

within a modernist framework.^[76] This was particularly true in the 1920s, for instance with the use of overlapping action in October . Chase and magic scenes in many French and American early films were reworked in Entr'acte , which also celebrated their peculiar methods of manipulating real time. The repeated shot of a woman mounting a staircase in Ballet mécanique likewise recalls those first vitascope projections with their continuous band of film. Jump cuts in Breathless and other films by Jean-Luc Godard evoke those in turn-of-the-century creations.

Although contemporary filmmakers such as Ken Jacobs pay explicit homage to early cinema in their work, evoking its affinities with the contemporary avant-garde, Porter's films and filmmaking practices can act as a broader touchstone. Independent cinema is committed to developing alternative, even oppositional, forms of expression and different ways of making cinema (filmmaking, exhibition, and reception), not simply to imitating the dominant, Hollywood-oriented cinema.^[77] Given such goals, Porter's resistance to the proto-Hollywood storytelling methods of Griffith and others makes him a significant figure in what has come to be called "our usable past."