Amy Taubin on “New York, 1962–1964: Underground and Experimental Cinema”

AN UTTERLY AMAZING and needed sequence, “New York, 1962–1964: Underground and Experimental Cinema,” curated by Thomas Beard and Dan Sullivan at New York’s Movie at Lincoln Heart, contains twelve packages of flicks—quick ones, lengthy ones, and ones in between—all made by filmmakers dwelling and dealing in New York in these years, all of them programmed on the time by the late Jonas Mekas on the peripatetic Filmmakers Cinematheque, all of them not less than talked about by Mekas in his Village Voice “Film Journal” column, and nearly all of them at one time or one other distributed by the Filmmakers Cooperative. It was a world that few folks knew existed past the filmmakers themselves, their good mates, and a few devotees like me and my then-husband, the theater writer-director Richard Foreman. The 2 of us had wandered right into a screening on the Charles Theatre on Avenue B within the late Nineteen Fifties and, figuratively talking, by no means left. Individuals usually ask me what it was wish to see underground movies within the early ’60s, and I all the time say that, more often than not, there weren’t many individuals within the viewers, however I nearly all the time noticed one thing that excited me and adjusted what I believed a film might be. I had all the time cherished motion pictures, however these have been totally different. I can nonetheless really feel their radical distinction as we speak, even because the web and telephone cameras have made the class of “avant-garde” or “experimental” ridiculously overpopulated. Maybe one of many methods to outline that distinction is by the sense of danger one felt in these motion pictures. You have been conscious that movie was costly, and it was a big gamble each time you uncovered a body of 16 mm or 8 mm. You needed to have a imaginative and prescient, follow it, after which make what you ended up with cohere in a kind that maybe nobody had ever seen earlier than. These works have been film-specific at a second when the aesthetic of medium specificity had permeated each style of artmaking. And since they’re medium-specific, you haven’t actually seen them in the event you’ve solely watched them on YouTube or UbuWeb, the place most of them look and sound like shit.

The sequence consists of works which might be a part of Anthology Movie Archives’ Important Cinema assortment; many of those present at Anthology about every year. However many don’t. It is a uncommon alternative to see, for instance, Jack Smith’s unfinished Regular Love—though it gained’t be the journey it was when Smith himself projected it, narrated it, and as soon as forgot the take-up reel so the movie (digital camera unique) unspooled all around the flooring. At 120 minutes, it occupies the whole thing of Program Six, and on Saturday performs back-to-back with Smith’s masterpiece, Flaming Creatures, and Ken Jacobs’s Blonde Cobra, a movie for which the time period “underground” might have been invented. Amongst different rarities: Nathaniel Dorsky’s lyrical Ingreen, sharing a invoice with Andrew Meyer’s Shades and Drumbeats and some of the influential movies within the historical past of homosexual cinema, Gregory Markopoulos’s Twice a Man. If you’re unaware of the diploma to which the historical past of avant-garde cinema is inextricable from the historical past of LGBTQ+ cinema, the movies simply talked about—together with Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, Andy Warhol’s Blow Job and Display screen Exams (Reel 16), and Barbara Rubin’s Christmas on Earth—make the case.

My recommendation: See every part, but when your time and monetary assets are restricted, use them on the aforementioned Christmas on Earth and Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World. For a few years, Clarke’s movie was solely obtainable in a scratched and torn 16-mm print. Fortunately, it’s now restored in 35 mm, which is how it will likely be proven at Movie at Lincoln Heart. The primary fiction function to be shot totally on location in Harlem, The Cool World was primarily based on a novel by Warren Miller and tailored for the display screen by Clarke’s frequent collaborator Carl Lee. It stars Hampton Clanton as a youngster who, heartbreakingly, will get caught up in a tradition of gangs and weapons. The movie is as a lot a doc of uptown avenue life simply earlier than the interval of Black Energy as it’s an early landmark of American neorealism. Essentially the most transgressive and transcendent film within the sequence and within the historical past of American underground movie, Rubin’s Christmas on Earth is a double (superimposed) 16-mm projection, the smaller picture framed contained in the bigger. The sound is a stay radio (or was meant to be stay radio), in order that the previous tense of the picture would all the time collide with the current tense of the sound. Made when Rubin was solely seventeen, the movie is a direct, aggressive countermove to the phallic imaginative and prescient that dominated American avant-garde movie, and flicks typically. Christmas on Earth opens with a close-up of a vagina, its panorama unfold throughout the bigger of the 2 superimposed photographs in order that it turns into each a spatial and temporal body, and a centerpiece from which the motion points. Rubin had initially considered calling the movie Cocks and Cunts. Or vice-versa. There isn’t any narrative, merely a sequence of sexual couplings seen in close-ups and lengthy photographs: males and males, girls and girls, a canine and a cat playing around, sometimes a girl and a person. The motion is filmed in two diametrically opposed kinds. In a single, our bodies are painted black, with breasts and genitals outlined in florescent white, in order that the couplings appear ritualistic. Within the different, the lighting is shiny and direct, and no matter thriller or eroticism has been prompt is thereby eliminated. A movie that should be seen to be believed, it’s hardly ever seen because of the twin projector set-up. (Ignore bootleg DVDs; they’re worse than ineffective.) This Sunday at 2 p.m. could be your once-in-a-lifetime alternative.

— Amy Taubin

“1962–1964: New York Underground and Experimental Cinema” runs at Movie at Lincoln Heart in New York from July 29 to August 4 and coincides with the Jewish Museum’s exhibition “New York, 1962–1964” and Movie Discussion board’s sequence “1962…1963…1964.”