In the United States, a new spirit was also abroad by the 1960's; but it would manifest itself on the outskirts of mainstream cinema, in the virtually unknown tradition of the American avant-garde. The dominance of Hollywood had been so thoroughgoing as to obscure the existence of this late offshoot of the European experimentalism of the silent era. 'Underground film' was a term coined by the press to define the independent film activity that peaked in the Sixties in America - particularly in the state of New York. Until the end of the Sixties, most states and cities had direct censorship of all films that were publicly exhibited, and often charged filmmakers heavily for viewing and judging their works. This system remained immovable until all film censorship was deemed unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in the latter Sixties.
The underground movement was not united by one type or genre of film-making, but by the necessity for filmmakers to stand in solidarity against the harassment of the police raids and mockery of the gutter press. This unification provided the very essential social relationships which comprised an audience, as well as the physical exchange of film-making equipment and even actors - many film makers acted in each other's respective films. Most of them came to film from other art disciplines; the essential motivating force was self-expression and the use of film was another and a fresh new medium in which to convey and explore individual concerns. In this they followed the fine example of the earlier Dadaists and Surrealists, some of them also themselves film artists, who had shocked the established European art world of the 1920's.
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| Dancer and experimental director Maya Deren was eons ahead of her time. |
The new forms, images and content appeared as a sort of rebellion that was confronted by the usual reaction against the new, as well as the decidedly more political confrontation with the censorship that it 'illegal' to have public showings of uncensored films or to charge admission. Working on and showing films had to function much as the 'underground resistance did during the ear - signs and markings on lamp posts, word of mouth in the new film-making community and empty warehouses as cinemas. An additional factor was that after the war years, film material and equipment became cheaper and accessible to more people, so it was suddenly easier for an artist to acquire a new camera to make films with.
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| From Rogosin's On the Bowery, a film demonized by critics for showing the darkside of 1956 New York |
Prior to the barrage of underground films produced in the Sixties, there were individual attempts to free cinema expression, most notably by Maya Deren (1906-1961), a dancer, whose first film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) attempted to express her own personal sense of duality, at times by presenting two disparate images of herself simultaneously on screen. Deren also began to lecture and write about the personal individual film. She hired a small theater, the Provincetown Playhouse on Greenwich Village's MacDougal Street , to showcase her films and with the monies received from the screenings, aided and assisted fellow independent filmmakers, among which were the iconoclast Kenneth Anger and Stan Brakhage.
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| A leading light in motion graphics and computer animation - John Whitney |
In 1957, Californian filmmaker Robert Pike, who after several failed attempts to have his films distributed decided to distribute his own works and founded the Creative Film Society. He also distributed the films of other West Coast filmmakers including the Whitney brothers' 'motion graphics,' Jordan Belson's new animation, Bruce Conner's film decoupages made from 'found footage' and Curtis Harrington's filmic drama prose.
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| The woman on the flying trapeze - in Mekas' 12 minute short Notes on the Circus (1966) |
These attempts, small as they might seem, laid the groundwork for the most important initiative for the presentation and distribution of independently made films, the formation of the New York Film-Makers Cooperative. This cooperative was the gathering together of many film artists, not only for film production but also to handle the exhibition of their work. For its time, the unity and the collective policy permitting all films, of any content or style, to be supported, screened and distributed without bias. There was no such pre-selection policy and the organizational matters and labor were handled by the directors themselves.
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| Annette Michelson takes the long way home in Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania (1972) |
Its moving spirit, Jonas Mekas (b.1922) was a poet, writer and filmmaker. His own films were composed in a free-diary like style : Notes on the Circus (1966) or Reminiscences Of a Journey to Lithuania (1972). Mekas also wrote for the widely read and influential newspaper The Village Voice and his weekly column, reviewing the new independent films, drew considerable attention to the new film movement. Along with his brother Adolfas, also a filmmaker, Jonas Mekas founded in the year 1955, the first serious edged magazine that focused on all aspects of cinema, Film Culture.
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| Lionel Rogosin's second feature, the intoxicating Come Back, Africa (1959) |
By the Sixties, the break from conventional Hollywood films became clearer. The battle had commenced when the Underground films began to be shown by the New York Filmmakers Cooperative. One of the most memorable of their screenings was the first airing of Jack Smith's lubricious Flaming Creatures (1963);a fantasy film that focuses on an all-out Boschian love-in that takes course inside of a grotty Manhattan warehouse.
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| Mekas' magazine for the true cineaste |
Another maverick in the name of Lionel Rogosin (1924-2000) who had a long marriage with independent cinema, would go beyond his own film making practice. His establishment of New York's Bleecker Street Cinema as a premier of Underground work and his activities in international distribution - initially supplying much material for ventures, such as the pioneering New Cinema Club in London - combined to sustain the wide interest he had first attracted for alternative American film-making with the prize-winning reception of his On the Bowery (1955) at the 1956 Venice Film Festival.
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| Mr. Lionel Rogosin |
On the Bowery is a gritty and potent narrative about a transient's encounters with street-life debauchery and dereliction in New York's lower depths, and used non-actors from that actual environment. 1959's Come Back Africa, was shot in much the same style - though in large measure clandestinely, among black South Africans oppressed by apartheid. Rogosin's subsequent works have focal points on the black experience in America, but the emerging radicalism of their content - Black Roots (1970) a film centering on the reminiscences of black musicians gathered in a room discoursing about their experiences in America - traces developing militancy and has been accompanied by an increasing conservatism of form.