Starting in 1962, the Union of French Film Critics organized International Critics’ Week at the Cannes Film Festival to showcase the first or second feature films of emerging directors. To celebrate the 40th edition of this event, the Harvard Film Archive is offering a selection of American independent films from past Critics’ Weeks. A kind of mini-retrospective of the American independent cinema, the series reminds us that “independent film” was once not just a shorter way of saying “derivative careerist hokum.”

Shirley Clarke’s great The Connection (1961; June 1 at 9 p.m.) is an adaptation of Jack Gelber’s play, the Living Theatre production of which (first mounted in 1959) was a defining cultural moment of its period. The play is about a group of junkies waiting for their connection, Cowboy. He arrives at last and everyone fixes. The two main formal innovations in the play and the film are the incorporation of performances by a hard-bop quartet (led by pianist Freddie Redd, who composed the tunes, and featuring the intense alto-saxophonist Jackie McLean) and the presence of media professionals, who are making a documentary about heroin addiction. Clarke takes the latter element to a logical extreme (impracticable in a theatrical performance) by claiming that the film we are seeing consists of footage from the documentary. The movie thus works as both a stylized portrait of Lower East Side junk culture and an attack on the presumed objectivity of cinéma-vérité.

Robert Kramer’s brave and evocative The Edge (1967; June 8 at 9 p.m.) observes the reactions among a group of American radicals when one of them says he’s going to assassinate the president. As the characters (one of them played by poet Anne Waldman) debate possible actions, a central question emerges: how will all these fictional, theoretical lives break through into the world and into history? A study of the complexities of political and interpersonal commitment, The Edge is also immersed in the contemplation of a shoreline, of woods, of a brook running over rocks: for Kramer, the issues raised by the assassination plot are inseparable from the larger concerns of finding a way to live in accordance with conscience and with nature.

Joe Dallesandro is at the center of Paul Morrissey’s classic Trash (1970; June 9 at 9 p.m.), playing a junkie involved with various women and unable to perform sexually with any of them. The title refers to both the characters and their milieu, as well as to items of furniture that the hero’s main squeeze (Holly Woodlawn) collects on the street. Morrissey’s films, like those of his mentor, Andy Warhol, are behavioral studies consumed with nuances of pose and intonation, but Morrissey foregrounds things that Warhol just takes for granted (like the flat detachment of the camera and the conflation of selfhood with performance) and is more concerned than Warhol with entertaining the viewer. Trash is a series of routines, some of them very funny, but suffused with a melancholy eroticism.

Sara Driver’s neglected Sleepwalk (1986; June 9 at 7 p.m.) is about a Manhattan typesetter (Suzanne Fletcher) whose freelance gig translating a collection of Chinese fairy tales propels her, her roommate (Ann Magnuson), and her young son (Dexter Lee) into an increasingly unreal and mysterious existence. Filmed in cool grays and blues with splashes of lurid red, Sleepwalk is as exquisite a color film noir as Allan Dwan’s Slightly Scarlet: long shadows turn the heroine’s workplace and apartment into dense neural fields, and the actors, all excellent, find unstudied ways of inhabiting Driver’s glistening frames.

When The Connection opened in New York, the negative critical response prompted Jonas Mekas to write a great diatribe against critics in his column in the Village Voice. “As far as cinema goes, you are deaf, blind, and dumb. . . . Your reviews are complete jokes. . . . What function and, tell me, what criteria are behind a criticism which dismisses The Connection and, on the same page, praises a third- or fifth-water Hollywood or foreign movie? . . . All you write is your own vanity and ignorance.” Come armed with these and similar excoriations: each film in the series will be presented by a Boston-area film critic. Sarah Morris will introduce The Connection, I’ll be at The Edge, and Phoenix film editor Peter Keough will handle Trash.

Issue Date: May 31- June 7, 2001