Collective for Living Cinema

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The Collective for Living Cinema was an outpost of avant-garde cinema located on White Street in Lower Manhattan in the United States of America. It regularly presented work by filmmakers such as Ken Jacobs, Johan van der Keuken, Yvonne Rainer, Christine Vachon, Dziga Vertov and many others who created films that were outside of the commercial mainstream in the United States. It also published a number of scholarly journals on film. Many of the founders studied film at SUNY Binghamton together, where they developed a particular interest in the avant-garde.

In the late 1980s, the Collective was forced to move from its 52 White Street location (due to legal and financial issues related to the building's certificate of occupancy and the NYC building codes for motion picture theaters) to a new space across the street. With rising costs, the gentrification of TriBeCa, and the debt incurred in creating a new theater, the Collective closed its doors in the early 1990s. The last home of the Collective, at 41 White Street, is now The Flea Theater.

Many people affiliated with the Collective for Living Cinema were or have gone on to be quite influential in media, such the late Alf Bold, the former programmer of the Arsenal Kino in Berlin, Judith Shulevitz, the columnist for the New York Times and Slate, and John Sloss, the attorney and film producer who has produced more than 40 films, including Far From Heaven, Before Sunset, Personal Velocity, and The Fog of War.

Others are noted artists such as the filmmaker Lizzie Borden, who very appropriately taught film editing at the Collective.