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Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSNext week, we are holding a launch event for Issue 3 of Notebook in London. Join us at the Ica London on September 28 for a screening of a new 4K restoration of Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, followed by a conversation between issue contributor Erika Balsom and critic Simran Hans. We are sorry to say that the event is now sold out, but you can still enter our competition to win a pair of tickets. Lee Kang-sheng’s Instagram seems to indicate that he and Tsai Ming-liang shot another installment of their ongoing Walker series in Washington, DC: a few images are posted here.REMEMBERINGPressure.Horace Ové has died aged 86: His debut Pressure (1975) is considered the first full-length feature by a Black British filmmaker; it centers on a Trinidadian teenager living with his family in West London,...

1963 was a pivotal year in the history of avant-garde film in the United States. In Visionary Film, P. Adams Sitney calls it “the high point of the mythopoeic development within the American avant-garde.” He explains:

[Stan] Brakhage had finished and was exhibiting the first two sections of Dog Star Man by then; Jack Smith was still exhibiting the year-old Flaming Creatures; [Kenneth Anger‘s] Scorpio Rising appeared almost simultaneously with [Gregory Markopoulos‘s] Twice a Man. The shift from an interest in dreams and the erotic quest for the self to mythopoeia, and a wider interest in the collective unconscious occurred in the films of a number of major and independent artists.

(An inclusive list of American avant-garde films made/released in 1963 can be found here.)

On Christmas Day of 1963 began the weeklong third edition of Exprmntl, a competition of worldwide avant-garde films held in Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium. The two previous Exprmntl competitions took place in 1949 and 1958. Exprmntl...

Cult filmmaker and performance artist Jack Smith, whose most famous work is 1963's Flaming Creatures, didn't like the term "underground." But his work could hardly have been more subterranean — featuring elements that would draw accusations of pornography, crafting no-budget trash manifestations of a nascent queer aesthetic, hosting art events that couldn't hope to make money. In "a film essay concerning the works of Jack Smith," Jerry Tartaglia produces a similarly unsellable artifact with Escape From Rented Island: The Lost Paradise of Jack Smith. Far from an introduction to Smith's oeuvre (Mary Jordan did that in 2006's Jack Smith and...

Tony Conrad, 1983. Photo by Joe Gibbons.Tony Conrad, who passed away on April 9 aged 76, was a vital figure in the fields of both filmmaking and music. His work in each is often characterized by its visceral power, its clear-eyed critique of Western art traditions, its interest in social questions and relations of control, its technical virtuosity and wit.Conrad was an indisputable innovator. His film works, beginning with The Flicker (1966) and continuing through, the Yellow Movies (1973), Film Feedback (1974), the ‘cooked film’ and ‘pickled film’ series, and many others, pushing the medium to its inner and outer limits: exploring the potential of long durations, stroboscopic effects, the physical properties of celluloid, the relation of filmmaker to spectator, the relation of film to other arts and to history. Conrad also created a vast number of video works, reflecting the same incisive energy. Too seldom referred to in contemporary writing about experimental film,...

Dailies is a round-up of essential film writing, news bits, videos, and other highlights from across the Internet. If you’d like to submit a piece for consideration, get in touch with us in the comments below or on Twitter at @TheFilmStage.

Pedro Costa tells Grasshopper Film his 10 favorite films of the last 10 years.

Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, Jodie Foster, and Paul Schrader give an oral history of Taxi Driver at THR:

We had one screening at the studio in a small screening room for some friends, and then it was shown to the studio. I don’t recall what my friends said, but people were kind of perplexed. I believe it was the next day that the studio saw it and there was a smiling kind of reaction that was very brief. Then I heard word that they were concerned that women wouldn’t like the film. Then,...

Photo by Sophie BeeIn the display window of a used record store, you can see covers for albums that don’t exist. They bear titles like Flaming Creatures or Heaven and Earth Magic, familiar to aficionados of experimental film, alongside lurid designs by local artist Tom Carey. This exhibit can mean only one thing: the film festival has come to Ann Arbor. Just down the block is the Michigan Theater, which has been operating since 1928. For one week every spring, its spacious main auditorium and cozy screening room host an intimidating array of avant-garde programming. The selections are eclectic in subject matter, submitted from all over the world, and interspersed with recently restored prints of older works. This practice means that no presentation is predictable. The only constant that carries across the festival is the artists’ collective push against the traditional boundaries of their medium.An example of this ethos...

Filmmaker Charles Pinion is most well-known for his garish video splatter movies, like Twisted Issues and We Await. However, embedded above is his one completed foray into working with celluloid, the subdued (for him) fever dream known as Madball. A naive, well-kept young man enters a nightmare world of odd, depraved creatures that make his — and maybe yours — brain bleed.

The making of Madball and how it falls into Pinion’s directing career can be read in Part Two of the Underground Film Journal’s epic interview with the filmmaker. But, the skinny of it is that after making his first feature film on video, Twisted Issues, in Gainesville, Florida, Pinion moved to New York City and made this little film experiment before moving back into features.

The film fits in nicely with the New York City underground film tradition of it’s time. The lo-fi quality seems to be...

Landmark and controversial Gay movies at Lacma On March 23, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will be screening two film programs inspired by its current Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit: "America’s Most Wanted: The Queer Underground," featuring Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures, Jean Genet's Un Chant d'Amour, and Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising; and "Temptations: My Hustler and Mala Noche," featuring Andy Warhol's My Hustler and Gus Van Sant's Mala Noche. The screenings are free of charge. The 26-minute Un Chant d'Amour is Genet's sole film; considering its theme and stylistic approach, the film, as to be expected, faced censorship issues at the time of its first screening in the U.S. in 1966 (sixteen years after it was made). The Lacma release (see below more information on each film) describes Un Chant d'Amour (aka "A Song of Love") as "an iconic landmark of queer cinema for its lyrical,...

Jonas Mekas, 'the godfather of avant-garde cinema', talks to Sean O'Hagan about working with Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali and Jackie Kennedy

Jonas Mekas, who will be 90 on Christmas Eve, has an intense memory of sitting on his father's bed, aged six, singing a strange little song about daily life in the village in which he grew up in Lithuania.

"It was late in the evening and suddenly I was recounting everything I had seen on the farm that day. It was a very simple, very realistic recitation of small, everyday events. Nothing was invented. I remember the reception from my mother and father, which was very good. But I also remember the feeling of intensity I experienced just from describing the actual details of what my father did every day. I have been trying to find that intensity in my work ever since."

We are sitting at a table in...

The avant-garde director's new film is a woozy homage to Homer and gangster movies. He explains his vision

Even with a new film to sell, Guy Maddin is not your standard-issue eager-to-please director. "So many people are baffled," he says, with well-practised irony. "The movie will be crystal-clear upon your third viewing." This is Keyhole, Maddin's ninth full-length film since 1988; and against all the odds it's secured a theatrical release in the UK. Most of Maddin's work simply doesn't get to Britain, so resolutely has he followed his own path.

If you know him at all, it is probably for his ballet film Dracula: Pages from a Virgin Diary, or just possibly My Winnipeg, his heartfelt docu-essay tribute to his Canadian hometown. More energetic cineastes may remember 2003's The Saddest Music in the World, Maddin's most determined shot at the mainstream, an elaborate parody musical starring Isabella Rossellini. The...

It might seem like an obtuse question, but does a film festival that puts “underground” in its name under any sort of obligation to screen only “underground films”? And — as Bad Lit, the self-proclaimed Journal of Underground Film asked a few years ago — who’s deciding what’s an underground film, anyway?

First popularized in the 1960s, the term “underground film” was typically applied to the movies coming out of the New York City avant-garde and experimental scene. More importantly, the term implied that these films had elements that were dangerous to normal society.

Watching an underground film, it was assumed one could witness degenerate acts such as the queer vamping of Jack Smith‘s Flaming Creatures or the black mass rituals of Kenneth Anger‘s Invocation of My Demon Brother, or — hopefully — bare boobs.

Eventually, though, the degeneracy of the ’60s underground film scene gave way to the more formal,...

On Feb. 11, 2012, the Microscope Gallery in Brooklyn, New York screened long lost films by iconic and hugely influential underground filmmaker Jack Smith was screened. This footage has been restored by Jerry Tartaglia and Daniel Feinberg, and was funded by the Barbara Gladstone Gallery.

In the above video, first you’ll have to wade through two intros by Film-makers’ Cooperative director Mm Serra and Coop founder Jonas Mekas who were on hand for a special celebration honoring the 50th anniversary of the Coop. Then, the Smith footage is very brief, but absolutely gorgeous to behold. Seeing these in person must have been an incredible treat at this event.

And it’s worth it to listen to some important underground film history by Mekas about his early relationship with Smith. Eventually, they would have a falling out over Mekas’ distribution of Smith’s classic film Flaming Creatures.

However, Mekas discusses here their...

Transsexual characters promote positive discussion, regardless of who plays them. But trans actors need more opportunities

"He's playing a transsexual," said Ben Stephenson, controller of drama commissioning, as the BBC announced that Sean Bean would star as Simon, an English teacher with an "alter ego" named Tracie in legal drama Accused. "[It's] a brilliant story," Stephenson told the Broadcasting Press Guild, "untold, I think, on mainstream television." Bean's appearance is the latest to raise an issue constantly debated within certain circles: should trans roles on screen be played by trans people?

Critiquing stereotypical portrayals in Whipping Girl, Julia Serano stated that "in a world where transsexual and intersex works of art … are not considered mainstream enough to be nominated for Emmys and Pulitzers, the facade presented in [HBO drama] Normal … profoundly shapes audience opinions about transsexual and intersex people". The problem, argued Serano, was that Normal appropriated gender-variant experiences without including transgender perspectives,...

Reaction on Twitter and Facebook to yesterday's late-breaking news that the Village Voice had laid off J Hoberman, a staff writer since 1983 and chief film critic since 1988, was swift and harsh. The New York Times' Ao Scott's comment that "the Village Voice has been mostly irrelevant for years, Except for J Hoberman and a few others" is one of the milder comments, though he did add that the paper's "now worth less than its cover price," which, of course, is $0. Following the waves of fury, some who might be in a position to know have suggested that Hoberman will "land on his feet" and I know I'm not alone in sincerely hoping he does.

Today's must-read, then, is "A History of Film Criticism at the Village Voice," which Hoberman wrote back in October 2005 on the occasion of the alternative weekly's 50th anniversary. As far as I can tell, you can't...

In the wake of yesterday's news that J. Hoberman, longtime senior film critic for The Village Voice, had been laid off from the publication, the critic has sent a letter to current Voice staffers. Hoberman also posted the letter on his personal website and sent it around to colleagues and friends. Here's the letter: Dear colleagues, Yesterday afternoon I learned that my position at the Village Voice had been eliminated. I’ve been a staff writer at the Voice since 1983, a regular film reviewer since 1978, and sold my first free-lance piece (an article on Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures) as a virtual toddler back in 1972. In fact, I grew up reading the Voice–in addition to spending most of my working life in its employ. But, nothing lasts forever, and I’ve had a pretty good run in what, for me, was the greatest job imaginable. I learned nearly everything...

If it’s Christmas Eve, that can only mean one thing: It’s Jonas Mekas‘ birthday! He turns 89 today. The legendary underground film diarist and activist was born on this day in 1922 in Semeniskiai, Lithuania. From humble, faraway beginnings, Mekas would of course later land in New York City in 1949 and change the course of artistic cinema forever. To celebrate Mekas’ special day, watch an excerpt from one of his recent works, My Mars Bar Movie, a reminiscence of an NYC hangout.

In the ’50s, Mekas would found the magazine Film Culture with his brother Adolfas, become the official film reviewer for the Village Voice and host avant-garde film screenings in the city. But, Mekas kicked the underground into high gear in the ’60s by helping craft the New American Cinema Manifesto, forming the Film-makers Cooperative, getting arrested for screening “obscene” films like Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures and, in the ’70s,...

Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men (1957) "has become a cultural touchstone, a time capsule of American justice before the civil rights era and the expansion of civil liberties in the 1960s," writes Thane Rosenbaum for Criterion, which releases a new DVD and Blu-ray this week. "Its influence has been vast, and it established Lumet's reputation as an artist at the forefront of social change."

"The crown jewel of the Criterion disc's extras has to be the original television broadcast of 12 Angry Men, written by [Reginald] Rose and directed by Franklin J Schaffner for Studio One in 1954," notes Bill Ryan, and he compares and contrasts the two productions at considerable length. With its "sterling image and extensive extras," this package scores DVD Beaver's "highest recommendation and will be noted in our Year End Poll."

Today and Friday, MoMA is featuring three programs of work by Jack Smith (Flaming Creatures, 1963). Bradford Nordeen for the...

Tomorrow and Tuesday in Los Angeles, Redcat will be presenting Two Nights with Ernie Gehr: Early Films and New Digital Works. "It's an eye- and mind-expanding lineup," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "It also provides a condensed primer to some of the issues at stake in American avant-garde cinema, which, partly because of its historical opposition to the dictates of commercial mainstream moviemaking and partly because it resists commodification (unlike, say, abstract painting, oppositional cinema doesn't rack up big sales at Sotheby's), has been relegated to the status of museum pieces and festival marginalia."

Also in La, the Museum of Contemporary Art opens two exhibitions today, Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles and Kenneth Anger: Icons, both on view through February 27.

For the Voice, Melissa Anderson meets Mario Montez, "featured player in Jack Smith's polysexual fantasia Flaming Creatures (1963), Andy Warhol's first drag-queen superstar,...

Underground film-maker with a bent for the tawdry and camp

If ever there were an exemplar of Susan Sontag's definitions of camp, it would be the work of the underground film-maker George Kuchar, who has died of prostate cancer aged 69. Although Kuchar was unknown to Sontag at the time she wrote Notes on Camp (1964), she could have been referring to his no-budget pictures with her general description of camp as being "serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious. The essence of camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. Camp sees everything in quotation marks. The ultimate camp statement is it's good because it's awful."

Around the time of Sontag's seminal essay, there emerged a series of influential "outrageous" camp films such as Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963), which depicted a transvestite orgy, Andy Warhol's Blow Job (1963) and Kenneth Anger's gay biker movie...

Raw, half-naked violence explodes across the screen in a gritty tableaux of sweaty brutality in Guy Maddin‘s short film Sissy-Boy Slap-Party, a film for which a title was never more accurate. Sailors in repose on an island paradise seemingly have no worries of war or danger — until a playful gesture is interpreted as an act of willful aggression. Soon, the innocent act of slight slapping becomes a relentless and unforgiving orgy of open-palmed face-smacking.

Sissy-Boy Slap-Party lends itself easily to comparison’s to Jack Smith’s legendary Flaming Creatures, from the loose plot structure to the washed-out exposures to the faux B-movie set and costuming to the homoerotic action. But, the film really takes a departure from its inspiration through Maddin’s ecstatic and frantic editing when the slap party begins in earnest.

The film has a terrific rhythm to it as Maddin speeds up the editing to hyperkinetic speeds,...

This year's Experimenta at the Lff is full of fascinating, taboo-busting and just plain beautiful films, says curator Mark Webber

Curating experimental work for a film festival that prides itself on attracting the broadest possible audience is not without its challenges. "I used to go screenings and people would be yawning or you'd hear witty comments like 'Has it started yet?'," says Mark Webber, who programmes for the London film festival's Experimenta strand. "You get nervous about showing challenging work because of that kind of reaction. But it was always a bit of a mission of mine to reach people who wouldn't normally encounter this sort of film. At the Lff, there are certain people who follow this work regularly but a lot of it is that nebulous festival audience we don't see throughout the year. But people who come to these screenings seem to be receptive. They stay...

A recent retrospective on the cult film-maker revealed his inspiration – a dazzling 1940s diva who could not even act

Jack Smith and Maria Montez were made for each other. They never met. Sadly, she had died before he started making films – drowning in her bathtub in Paris at the age of 39 on 7 September 1951. Yet her spirit imbued his first movie, Buzzards over Bagdad, which reimagined her teaming with Jon Hall and Sabu in Arabian Nights (1942), one of the garishly fantasies that earned Montez the nickname "the Queen of Technicolor".

Indeed, she inspired many of the works contained in the Ica's recent landmark season, Jack Smith: A Feast for Open Eyes, and even acted as a posthumous beard for his avant-garde manifesto, The Perfect Filmic Appositeness of Maria Montez, which appeared in the Winter 1962 edition of Film Culture and laid out Smith's vision for a new Queer cinema. In so doing,...

This week’s Absolute Must Read is Robert Koehler’s mind-blowing essay on film criticism and film advocacy. Structured around the offerings of the Los Angeles Film Festival, Koehler really hits on the core problem about film writing on the web. Here’s the key part of the article: “This is ideology, all right: The Ideology of advertisers, the force that most fundamentally drives ‘their’ criticism. It informs movie websites and blogs as much as the papers, by the way, as more and more websites are propelled forward by the hits metric that advertisers gauge in order to determine whether or not they want to invest in a given site.” (For the record: “A criticism of advocacy” is a good description of Bad Lit. And I run tons of ads!)A great “must read” contender is this funny Pittsburgh City Paper article about the FBI releasing — then retracting — their report...

This is the 8th post in a series covering the most outrageous moments in underground film history. You can follow the entire series here.

Film: Flaming Creatures

Director: Jack Smith

Year: 1963

Jack Smith‘s iconic underground film Flaming Creatures is outrageous for two reasons. One, for what’s actually included in the film. Two, for what happened whenever it screened publicly.

Originally a photographer and a performance artist, Smith began his cinema career as a performer in the films of director Ken Jacobs, who was one in a long list of close friends with whom Smith would later become completely alienated from. He also wrote several articles about movies for Jonas Mekas‘ Film Culture magazine. Again, Mekas being someone Smith would later break away from.

Smith did eventually begin making his own films, such as Scotch Tape (1960) and Overstimulated (1961), but in 1963 he finished his most notorious epic, Flaming Creatures. Shot...

While there hasn’t been an explosion of documentaries made about the great underground filmmakers, the fact that any have been made about these groundbreaking, but still mostly obscure to the general public, directors seems like a great accomplishment.

Plus, these seven documentaries listed below are all available for easy viewing on DVD or VOD, which is more than can be said for many of the subjects’ actual movies.

Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis, dir. Mary Jordan. (Amazon | Netflix) Jack Smith is one of the most complicated figures in underground film history, but Jordan’s documentary provides an in-depth portrait of this reclusive artist who ended up alienating his closest friends and ardent supporters. Turning his back on the film world after directing one of the most notorious movies ever made, Flaming Creatures, Smith would go on to be an admired performance artist who would act sporadically in others’ art films.

Welcome to the first Underground Film Links post of 2011! I predict it’s going to be an amazing year for these! (So, get to work…)

This week’s must read is a fine list of resolutions for filmmakers put together by Scott Macaulay of Filmmaker Magazine. This is one of those articles I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy, but they’re really great suggestions. Since the year ended, there are, of course, lots of lists going around. First, In These Times has a round-up of the 10 Best Political Documentaries, which covered some pretty big issues. R. Emmet Sweeney of TCM’s Movie Morlocks has his Top 10 Genre Movies of 2010, of which I’ve only seen The Crazies and thought was great as well. SF360 has a mess of Top 10s in its annual survey of Bay Area critics. This is notable particularly since Jonathan Marlow of the S.F.

Can a film be both beautiful and terrifying at the same time? If that description fits any film, then it certainly fits Raymond Salvatore Harmon‘s haunting Der Erlkönig, an adaptation of the gothic horror poem by Goethe. A father frantically dashes through the forest while, cradled in his arms, his dying son sees the supernatural Erlking about to whisk him away.

Out of all the films I’ve seen by Harmon, this is the first one that has a clear, strong narrative. It still features his typical hallucinatory layering/double-exposure effects, but with a hint of the Brothers Quay and Jan Svankmajer puppetry. (Harmon lists both filmmakers as a direct inspiration in his official synopsis on Vimeo.) But, also, the washed-out-ness of the film also calls to mind the blurry menace of Jack Smith’s classic Flaming Creatures.

What makes the film so unsettling is both the decaying, creepy...

Having heard the arguments on both sides of the online piracy debate for years, my own personal feelings — for the most part — fall on the anti-piracy side.

The debate really came to a head in the underground film world a few weeks ago after the non-profit site UbuWeb was hacked. UbuWeb is a website that started by hosting orphaned and out-of-print films and videos, embedding them for free to watch.

My own feelings about UbuWeb are mixed. First thing, I don’t consider them to be a piracy site. Also, I’m generally supportive of their efforts, which allows for otherwise impossible-to-see films and videos to be viewed. For example, Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures, one of the most influential underground films of all time, will probably never get a proper DVD release thanks to all kinds of rights issues. Other than random arthouse theater screenings, UbuWeb is really the...

Flaming Creatures midnight screening

Jonas Mekas’ Movie Journal: The Rise Of The New American Cinema 1959-1971 is essential reading for anybody interested in underground film. The book contains excerpts from the “Movie Journal” column Mekas wrote for the Village Voice alternative weekly newspaper for a dozen years. Also included in the book are a couple of movie posters and newspaper ads from that era, which I’ve scanned and uploaded to a photo gallery. If you click on each image in this post, it will take you to an embiggened version of it so you can look at them in better detail.

It’s tough for me to pick an absolute favorite poster out of the bunch, but I inserted the most striking above. It’s for a special midnight screening of Jack Smith’s classic Flaming Creatures. I’m guessing from the date on the poster and the year the film was completed,...

Carolee Schneemann on 'Fuses' from Film Studies Center on Vimeo.

"Discerning moviegoers will barely have time to catch their breath this week amid the eclectic and heady mix of film festivals, retrospectives, classic movies and other cinematic treats screening around town." The town is Los Angeles and at the top of Susan King's roundup for the Times is the Counter Culture, Counter Cinema: An Avant-Garde Film Festival: "The opening program will feature Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures, José Rodriguez-Soltero's Lupe and Carolee Schneemann's Fuses. Schneemann and Jonas Mekas, pioneers in the avant-garde, will participate in a panel discussion after the screening. Ken Jacobs, another veteran filmmaker, is also a guest at the festival." Today through Saturday.

Underground film history is a living, breathing creature. That’s why I keep hard pimping my Underground Film Timeline project. While the actual Timeline right now is a somewhat dry recitation of facts and film titles, if one delves into the history deeper, it’s really clear to see how the medium has evolved from the 1920s to the 2010s.

Actually, to give an example of what I mean, I’m going to show a reverse chain of inspirations from a modern day film all the way back to the ’20s.

The modern film I picked is one I write about all the time and recently came out on DVD: Joshua von Brown’s Altamont Now, a raucous film about a pseudo-punk rock star with delusions of grandeur who threatens to start a nuclear Rockalypse. The film was a huge hit on the ’09 festival circuit and was just released by Factory 25. (Rent or Buy.

To some delicate souls it might seem a trifle peculiar and even off-putting that the man who directed the 1980 Maniac, an exploitation picture that many considered beyond the pale in its creepy misogyny and all-around anti-social intensity, should now be invited to curate, as they say, a series at the Lower East Side temple of art cinema, Anthology Film Archives. But anyone with even a passing familiarity with the eclectic, subversive aesthetic of the Archive and its founder Jonas Mekas—the visionary who championed Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures back when it was considered by many to be not only not art, but thoroughly pernicious and irredeemable trash by any "decent" standard—would not be in the least surprised. Director and DVD entrepreneur William Lustig, founder of the groundbreaking DVD label Blue Underground, has made it his mission in life in recent years to enlighten movie lovers of all stripe...

Self-serving link first again: My latest index-y type project on Bad Lit is the DVD Underground, a list of DVDs and DVD box sets of classic underground films. This is part of my timeline project. So, please check it out. But, more importantly, check these out: Here’s a fantastic interview you have to read: Miss Rosen chats with filmmaker, photographer, exhibitor and general all around underground troublemaker Anton Perich. Plus, the piece is illustraed with Perich’s wonderful B&W pictures of Candy Darling, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andrea Feldman, a.k.a. Andrea Whips. Can you identify the filmmaker in the photo at this groovy ’60s San Francisco Country Joe and the Fish performance? Seriously, the blogger over there wants to know. Making Light of It has some very cool stills from Philippe Grandrieux’s La Vie Nouvelle, that appears to be some sort of homage to Wavelength or something.

Journalist Alex Goldblum has posted an audio interview, embedded above, with actress Judith Malina about her experience appearing in Jack Smith’s seminal 1963 underground film Flaming Creatures. Although the film was made close to 50 years ago, Malina has a good recollection of the filming, including Smith’s more outrageous directions. Word of warning: Malina’s comments play over scenes of the actual film, which are Nsfw as they include male and female nudity.

The nicest part of the interview is the glowing terms with which Malina describes Smith, who was known as a very difficult person to get along with. But, Malina only speaks of him as a great artist who worked with actors the way painters work with paint. (That’s a somewhat paraphrase of her comments.) Even when Smith asks her to commit an outrageous act, Malina apparently didn’t hesitate.

I’m not enough of a scholar...

First the history, then the list:

In 1969, Jerome Hill, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas decided to open the world’s first museum devoted to film. Of course, a typical museum hangs its collections of artwork on the wall for visitors to walk up to and study. However, a film museum needs special considerations on how — and what, of course — to present its collection to the public.

Thus, for this film museum, first a film selection committee was formed that included James Broughton, Ken Kelman, Peter Kubelka, Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney, plus, for a time, Stan Brakhage. This committee met over the course of several months to decide exactly what films would be collected and how they would be shown. The final selection of films would come to be called the The Essential Cinema Repertory.

The Essential Cinema Collection that the committee came up with consisted of about 330 films.

The camp sensibility of public access TV — typically unintentional — and the camp sensibility of ’60s underground cinema — totally intentional — collide with all the ferociousness of two freight trains ramming into each other at top speed in the night in The Threee Geniuses: The Re-Death of Psychedelia DVD.

The Threee Geniuses was a cult public access show produced for 10 years in L.A. by Dan Kapelovitz, Jon Shere and Tim Wilson. Although I haven’t watched a ton of public access, but I believe I can confidently say that no other public access show in the history of cable TV, in fact probably no other show in the history of television, period, ever looked like what the Threee Geniuses put on.

Maybe you haven’t seen much public access either, but you know the drill: Cheap video. Cheap, barren sets. Fringe characters either sitting in cheap chairs talking about monotonous subjects...

The term “underground film” has never enjoyed a popular definition. Oh, some writers have attempted formal definitions, but I doubt there will ever be one that is popularly agreed upon. It’s not even a term that can be agreed upon to be used. But, it is used and I personally have billed this site “The Journal of Underground Film,” so I thought I’d give my general perception of what “underground film” might mean to contribute to an ongoing dialogue about it.

And I prefer to consider writing a post like this as contributing to a dialogue because I do not have any interest in trying to build a definition myself. However, what I can say is that “Underground film” is not a genre. Actually, what leads me to use the term “underground” is that it feels to me to be a catch-all for other genres.

Avant-garde, experimental, poem,...

Joe Dante presenting "The Movie Orgy" in L.A., a rare stateside appearance of Japanese auteur Hirokazu Kore-eda for a retrospective in New York and the Fantastic Fest in Austin are just a few of the events that serve as the perfect antidote for the endless stream of summertime sequels and toy-based franchises.

More Fall Preview: [Theatrical Calendar]

[Anywhere But a Movie Theater]

[Breakout Performances]

92Y Tribeca

While the 92Y Tribeca is taking a well-deserved break in August, the cinema space comes roaring back in September, beginning with hosting the Fifth Annual NYC Shorts Festival (Sept. 10-13), followed by a late night "Labyrinth" sing-along complete with trivia and a costume contest (Sept. 25-26), and a Michael Winterbottom double bill of "Code 46" and "24 Hour Party People" (Sept. 30)...In October, the 92Y Tribeca will premiere "Zombie Girl: The Movie" (Oct. 2), the doc about 12-year-old filmmaker Emily Hagins and her quest to make a zombie movie, followed by hosting the Iron...

Movieheads who like to consider themselves as alternative still often shrink from the demands and new thinking required of even the oldest and most conventional "avant-garde" film, a situation that the ubiquity of the DVD format hasn't done very much to mitigate. So be it: the hardy envelope-pushers in the crowd have enjoyed unforeseen access to the quasi-genre's history by now (the DVD menu format is a peerless mode of presentation for motley underground shorts, to be surpassed only, I suppose, once quality streaming-tube clips can be curated and thrown onto our mega TVs instead of our laptops). If you count Image's "Unseen Cinema" mega omnibus and Facets' "The Lawrence Jordan Album" among your prized media possessions as I do, then the good work of the National Film Preservation Foundation will already be on your radar: their robust, elaborately documented orphan-film collections (newsreels, shorts, home movies, etc.) have often featured avant-gardisms,...

By Michael Atkinson

"Our starved instincts have been clamoring for centuries for more and more substitutes," Henry Miller once wrote, "and as a substitute for living the cinema is ideal." There may not be a single filmmaker that Miller's cynical observation describes better, sans the cynicism, than Jack Smith, famed New York avant-gardist, gay downtown gadfly, rebel performer and temperamental film artist. All Smith ever wanted was to create a new world for himself, separate from the mundane, ugly and unjust world he saw around him, and if we know his name today, it's because he largely succeeded. Mary Jordan's documentary "Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis" (2007) is, for a new generation with heretofore unprecedented access (on DVD) to the entire legacy of experimental film, a smashing introduction into the world of mid-century, iconic D.I.Y. rooftop moviemaking, where penniless idiosyncrats could become world famous with a borrowed camera,...