This entry is derived from the 1971-72 New York State Council on the Arts Annual report.

https://arts.ny.gov/sites/default/files/Annual%20Report%201971%20-%2072.pdf

Film, TV/Media, Literature

In 1970-71 the much enlarged legislative appropriation for the Council allowed initial support for television, video, and media projects as well as increased assistance in connection with film showings, filmmaking, poetry, and literature. The number and kinds of such activities made possible by Council support continued to increase and diversify in 1971-72.

In regard to film, it was a year when more people than perhaps ever before had opportunities to experience the medium's extraordinary variety through programming at centers that ranged from the Circle Film Forum and the Millennium Film Workshop to the Whitney Museum of American Art, and through organizations as varied as the Film Society of Lincoln Center, statewide public library systems, and the Plattsburgh Film Society. It was a year of unusually productive filmmaking achieved through the MediaEquipmentResourceCenter.

It was a year when experimentation and exploration by independent video artists was freed from closed-circuit systems in out-of-the-way places and began to reach broad audiences by coaxial cable. The Council's activity as one of the few sources of aid for such research and development, and the growth of interest in TV's unexplored potential combined to increase requests for assistance far beyond its means, but commitment to independent television and public television continued in a substantial and significant manner. It was a year in which public New York State appearances and workshop participation by writers and poets more than doubled as did the audiences for them, and one in which especially strong Council support was given to the imaginative work of the Teachers and Writers Collaborative and the St. Mark's Church In-the-Bowery Poetry Project. Small circulation magazines again received aid from the Council's grant to the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines in 1971-72, rounding out a support program that affected both creative accomplishment in and broadened public acquaintance with the communication arts.