It regularly presented work by filmmakers such as Ken Jacobs, Nick Zedd, 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.
Lasting for 19 years, The Collective came to embody the under-defined moment between the canonized generation of "the essential cinema" and the transfiguration of film as "new media" embraced by the institutional hierarchy of the art world and subject to the theoretical, critical and economic tidal forces therein.
Run as a multi-disciplinary venue, The Collective continuously engaged in a recovery of the recent past, championing the marginal and positing alternative film histories.
By "maintaining and constantly questioning an exploratory attitude rather than by embalming predigested classical canon", Michelson stated, The Collective emerged in the 1980s as the "liveliest" New York film venue of its time.
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.