In releasing the DVD of his Winter Oranges in 2000, a film set on Sagi Island just off the coast of Hiroshima and concerning encounters between the islanders and a group of tourists,  filmmaker Rob Nilsson wrote on the liner, “Only when art is non-political can it be radical. Only when it transcends all political systems and stands for the human heart, the rights of the individual, the reality of human contradiction…and that highly charged, chaotic, largely misunderstood mystery we choose to call love, can it fulfill its cathartic responsibility.”
   This might seem an odd introduction to the early work of indie filmmaker Rob Nilsson, three of whose films are part of a Cine Manifest retrospective this month at Anthology Film Archives. Nilsson was an original member of Cine Manifest, San Francisco’s 1970s Marxist film collective. He is still making films at quite a brisk pace, working collaboratively and wrestling with the place of politics in art. Winter Oranges came about from an invitation to Nilsson from Sagi Poiesis II, a filmmaking workshop that brought him together with young Japanese actors and artists to create a film by what Nilsson calls “direct action cinema.”
   “Direct action” owes as much to John Cassavetes’ cast improvisations, the 60s-era high wire jazz of Sonny Rollins and Coltrane, and the production mobility and expanded editing made possible by digital filmmaking and cinema vérité as it does to Marx. And it owes directors like Bergman, to whom reviewers compared Nilsson’s first feature visually for its bleak winter landscapes. More importantly for Nilsson, Bergman imposed upon himself the discipline of filmmakers from unfree societies who, constrained from portraying politics openly, have made their most compelling and perhaps  most deeply subversive stories about human beings. As early as Signal 7 (begun in 1983), despite subplots about a union vote and a union-themed stage play, Nilsson was articulating his aversion to “excessive plot” and his desire for “film [that] could be made from the inside instead of [an] external story hovering over it.”
   Winter Oranges is also clearly a direct descendant of Cine Manifest, a group comprising Eugene Corr, Peter Gessner, John Hanson, Judy Irola, Stephen Lighthill, Nilsson, and Steve Wax – and most enduringly for Nilsson, composer/filmmaker David Schickele, who didn’t actually join the collective but worked on many of their films. Except for Gessner, who left the group before its dissolution and became a private investigator, all the original members still work in some aspect of cinema – in film studies, PBS and network television, and as filmmakers on both coasts and in the Wisconsin heartland.