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Illustrations by Chantall Veerman.Every few years, a projection screen is installed in a clearing near the Greek village of Lyssarea, in Arcadia. Hundreds of red beanbags and pillows dot the field, with benches at the rear and a 16mm film projector atop its wooden stand. As the sun sets over the craggy Peloponnese, the projector whirs to life and spectators settle in for open-air cinema. Crickets chirp. Dogs bark. The temperature falls. Moths prepare for an epic frenzy.Without any opening credits, a flash of light floods the screen and then cuts to black. This is the Temenos. Long sections of black film leader advance and then strobe with clear leader, until sustained illumination bathes the audience. Dark again, the projection surface dissolves into the sky as our eyes readjust from the brightness. Finally, an image appears on the screen: the torqued body of a naked man glistening in warm light,...

From Rebekah Rutkoff’s Double Vision: The Cinema of Robert Beavers, published by MIT Press.From the Notebook of.... © Robert Beavers, courtesy Temenos Archive.First CONTACTIn February 1967, eighteen-year-old Robert Beavers took Icelandic Air’s New York to Reykjavík flight, the cheapest route between North America and Europe, and disembarked in Luxembourg City. On a train to Brussels the next morning, a student initiated a brief conversation: he asked Beavers if he believed in God. The young man accidentally left his multicolored scarf behind, and Beavers kept it for many years: a memento of a disarming exchange with a stranger in a foreign place. The memory of first contact with Europe was sealed by color.In Brussels, Beavers submitted a film precis to Jacques Ledoux, the Belgian Royal Film Archive curator, for a competition connected to the upcoming edition of the Knokke-le-Zoute experimental film festival (also called ExPRMNTL), the sporadic...

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook.NEWSNostalgia.Industry experts warn that digital cinema files are not being properly maintained (“You have an entire era of cinema that’s in severe danger of being lost”), emphasizing the importance of amateur preservation efforts like Rarefilmm, recently profiled on Notebook.After a caucus week of intra-union meetings, negotiations between IATSE and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers continued, with their current contract set to expire on July 31. This week’s discussions focused on specific proposals from each of the 13 West Coast locals, starting with the International Cinematographers Guild, Local 600.Vision du Réel has announced the full program for its 55th edition, running April 12 to 21 in Nyon, Switzerland. The competition slate includes mostly first features.In PRODUCTIONLittle Shop of Horrors.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. To keep up with our latest features, sign up for the Weekly Edit newsletter and follow us @mubinotebook.Newsa Different Man.IATSE, Teamsters, and the Hollywood Basic Crafts unions began bargaining jointly with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers after a thousands-strong rally in Los Angeles. In Variety, IATSE president Matthew Loeb discusses the union’s priorities and the threat of another strike after the current contract expires on July 31.In an open letter, Carlo Chatrian, the outgoing artistic director of the Berlinale, and Mark Peranson, the festival’s head of programming, respond to the backlash that followed the closing ceremony, at which a number of award recipients called for a ceasefire in Gaza: “This year’s festival was a place for dialogue and exchange for ten days; yet once the films stopped rolling, another form of communication...

The Sparrow Dream (2022).The filmmaker Robert Beavers writes in a notebook every day. In and of itself, this is hardly exceptional; the journals of important artists can be found in plenty of museum archives. But for Beavers, one of whose major works is entitled From the Notebook of… (1971/1998), the practice is very much part of the films themselves. The act of writing also appears frequently in the films proper, including shots of his tidy and elegant script, and the closely-miked sound of scribbling. The notebook is a space where his artistic impulses are worked out, and a surface on which his thoughts and sensations are inscribed. Take this entry, from April 1, 1998, as Beavers was re-editing Notebook: “First reel is nearly complete. Has it already become too cluttered, too heavy? The only moment of delight is when the bird’s wings are heard with the view of the camera shutter in action.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSAbove: Joan Micklin Silver on the set of Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979). Trailblazing filmmaker Joan Micklin Silver, best known for films Hester Street (1975) and Crossing Delancey (1988), has died. In an interview with Film Comment in 2017, Silver described the will she possessed as a woman filmmaker who wished to spotlight stories about female relationships and women's labor: "I didn’t want to feel like the woman director. I wanted to feel like one of many women directors."The 71st edition of the Berlin Film Festival will be replacing this year's physical event with a virtual European Film Market in March, and a "mini-festival with a series of onsite world premieres" in June.The International Film Festival Rotterdam has also announced the lineup for this year's hybrid multi-part 50th edition, to be presented between February 1-...

The dominant theme with this selection of short films seems a bit off the mark since, as I’ve remarked elsewhere, this year’s selection has more narrative and narrative-adjacent works than I’ve noticed in past iterations. But it’s true, Wavelengths 4 does focus on aspects of performance, and this is the first time that overt humor has reared its head, which is something. In previous years I might have used this space to talk about the series as a whole, or make some kind of assessment about where the field looks like it may be going. But as someone who is now attempting (clunkily) to do programming myself, I will only say, it’s a hard job, and as always, Andréa Picard is to be congratulated for pulling it all together. Oh, I have included an extra review, of a Wavelengths short playing elsewhere in the festival. Enjoy.

In a letter dated June 1, 1962, the newly formed Film-Makers’ Cooperative offered their first list of films that were available to rent. Fourteen filmmakers were represented.

The need to form a cooperative distribution center for what were then called “independent filmmakers” was made in a series of meetings in the autumn of 1960. The meetings were organized by Jonas Mekas and Lew Allen; and included New York City-based filmmakers such as Robert Frank, Shirley Clarke, Adolfas Mekas, Ben Carruthers, Peter Bogdanovich and others. These informal meetings would eventually coalesce into the formation of the New American Cinema Group.

On September 30, 1960, Jonas Mekas presented The First Statement of the New American Cinema Group manifesto. One of the items in the manifesto stated that filmmaker Emile de Antonio was entrusted with the task of forming the distribution center, although there’s no record of de Antonio’s actual involvement beyond that.

The distribution center...

Breathdeath by Stan Vanderbeek (1963).

At the Exprmntl 3 film competition at Knokke-le-Zoute, Belgium in 1963, Breathdeath tied for 2nd place with Gregory Markopoulos‘s Twice a Man. Both men took home $2,000 in prize money.

In An Introduction to the American Underground Film, Sheldon Renan classifies Breathdeath as a “protest film,” which was a minority of underground film genre at the time. Renan also describes Breathdeath as a “collage of film technique” and considers it Vanderbeek’s best film. Throughout the book, Renan gives different completion years, both 1963-64 and just 1964. Although, in the film’s on-screen text, Vanderbeek gave the film a 1963 copyright. (See below.) (Stephen Dwoskin’s Film Is also gives Breathdeath a completion year of 1964; as does the film’s listing on the Film-makers’ Coop website.)

According to a document published in Scott MacDonald’s Canyon Cinema, in 1970, Breathdeath was one of five films acquired by the Australian National Library’s study collection.

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...

In 1966, as the underground film wave was sweeping the country, a Boston off-shoot of New York City’s Film-Makers’ Cinematheque opened at a performance space at 53 Berkeley Street. Underground films were shown on weeknights, while on the weekends the space transformed into a music venue called The Boston Tea Party.

The Cinematheque and the Tea Party were founded and run by a controversial figure named Mel Lyman, a harmonica player and the leader of a hippie commune in Boston’s Fort Hill neighborhood. Lyman has also been considered a cult leader on par with Charles Manson, except Lyman’s followers never actually murdered anyone. According to the book Apocalypse Culture, Lyman claimed to be an extraterrestrial and was seemingly obsessed with “ruling” the country’s underground culture.

Whatever Lyman’s background, the Cinematheque showed some cool films, according to the actual flyers from that time period below. Click each poster...

In the 1970s, the experimental filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos wrote a piece called “Towards a Complete Order of the Temenos.” In the years that followed, he began to take all of his previously made films and tear them apart frame by frame, taking the pieces and parts — along with newly shot footage and black and white leader — to create what would be his final project, Eniaios. The career-spanning contents of the film were combined and alternated to form an epic flicker film encompassing a lifetime of materials and ideas. The project, an 80-hour cycle of films, was completed but not […]...

An Early Clue to the New Direction: Queer Cinema Before Stonewall, a series opening today at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and running through May 1, is "an unapologetic, unmitigated, mesmerizingly diverse assembly of 23 feature-length movies and 25 shorts that constitutes a kaleidoscopic portrait of self-discovery and shame," writes Wesley Morris in the New York Times. "This gamut covers a lot of ground, too: the winking mannerism of Alfred Hitchcock (Rope), the dimensional experimentalism of Gregory Markopoulos (Twice a Man, with a young Olympia Dukakis), the serene classicism of Vincente Minnelli (Tea and Sympathy), the icebox psycho-expressionism of Ingmar Bergman (Persona)." We're gathering previews. » - David Hudson...

An Early Clue to the New Direction: Queer Cinema Before Stonewall, a series opening today at the Film Society of Lincoln Center and running through May 1, is "an unapologetic, unmitigated, mesmerizingly diverse assembly of 23 feature-length movies and 25 shorts that constitutes a kaleidoscopic portrait of self-discovery and shame," writes Wesley Morris in the New York Times. "This gamut covers a lot of ground, too: the winking mannerism of Alfred Hitchcock (Rope), the dimensional experimentalism of Gregory Markopoulos (Twice a Man, with a young Olympia Dukakis), the serene classicism of Vincente Minnelli (Tea and Sympathy), the icebox psycho-expressionism of Ingmar Bergman (Persona)." We're gathering previews. » - David Hudson...

How does one write (critically) about ‘’a [truly interpersonal] reminiscence of a lifetime’’? Such was one of the questions I was posed to answer after experiencing Simulacrum Tremendum, by the Philippine filmmaker, poet and trained pianist Khavn de La Cruz. Marking Rotterdam Film Festival programmer Gertjan Zuilhof’s farewell, Khavn was granted the opportunity to screen and musically accompany his thirteen-hour long ‘’reminiscence,’’ as the director described it afterwards. And that’s what he did. Without a single break, Khavn live-scored the diary film he shot from 1994 to 2016. To make fragmented films is, in its essence, to make films democratically. Every glance or shot has the potential to find its exceptional viewer. Each one contains a possible moment of interpersonal glory. Why interpersonal, you might ask? Because at this particular one-time event, I was the only spectator who didn’t miss a second of the screening. So, interpersonal in the sense of...

How would you program this year's newest, most interesting films into double features with movies of the past you saw in 2015?Looking back over the year at what films moved and impressed us, it is clear that watching old films is a crucial part of making new films meaningful. Thus, the annual tradition of our end of year poll, which calls upon our writers to pick both a new and an old film: they were challenged to choose a new film they saw in 2015—in theatres or at a festival—and creatively pair it with an old film they also saw in 2015 to create a unique double feature.All the contributors were given the option to write some text explaining their 2015 fantasy double feature. What's more, each writer was given the option to list more pairings, with or without explanation, as further imaginative film programming we'd be lucky to catch...

Rushes collects news, articles, images, videos and more for a weekly roundup of essential items from the world of film.Guy's CollagesThe Criterion Collection is highlighting the collage work by The Forbidden Room co-director Guy Maddin.Richard Linklater's SXSW Opening Night FilmVery exciting news for fans of Richard Linklater (sure to be a much larger number after the wide success of Boyhood): his next feature, Everybody Wants Some, will be the Opening Night Film of the 2016 South by Southwest Film Festival.Berlinale's RetrospectiveSpeaking of festival lineups, the Berlin International Film Festival has announced its first major programming strand for 2016: their retrospective will be dedicated to German cinema in 1966.Rosenbaum's Ten Best Movies of the 90sIt feels like every week Jonathan Rosenbaum (the latest guest, by the way, on the podcast The Cinephiliacs) has republished a fabulous piece of criticism on his website. Most recently, it's his essential...

The art magazine Frieze has opened up its archives, making back issues dating back nearly 25 years freely available. We're highlighting past articles on David Lynch, Andy Warhol, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jonas Mekas, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Olivier Assayas, Peter Watkins, Gregory Markopoulos, Luchino Visconti, Dario Argento, Stan Brakhage, Eric Rohmer, Guy Maddin, Todd Haynes, Volker Schlöndorff and Christian Petzold. Also in today's roundup: Interviews with Woody Allen and Andrew Bujalski, an appraisal of Joshua Oppenheimer's documentaries, a Philippe Garrel retrospective, a conversation about Ken Loach, a remembrance of Pierre Cottrell and more. » - David Hudson...

The art magazine Frieze has opened up its archives, making back issues dating back nearly 25 years freely available. We're highlighting past articles on David Lynch, Andy Warhol, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Jonas Mekas, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Olivier Assayas, Peter Watkins, Gregory Markopoulos, Luchino Visconti, Dario Argento, Stan Brakhage, Eric Rohmer, Guy Maddin, Todd Haynes, Volker Schlöndorff and Christian Petzold. Also in today's roundup: Interviews with Woody Allen and Andrew Bujalski, an appraisal of Joshua Oppenheimer's documentaries, a Philippe Garrel retrospective, a conversation about Ken Loach, a remembrance of Pierre Cottrell and more. » - David Hudson...

In today's roundup of news and views: Jonathan Rosenbaum on Charles Chaplin, Pedro Costa and Nicholas Ray; Adrian Martin on David Cronenberg; Michael Atkinson on Aleksey German; La Furia Umana on George Miller, Michael Mann, Lewis Klahr and Ernie Gehr; World Picture on Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gregory Markopoulos, Zal Batmanglij, David Lean and Spike Jonze; Parallax View on Luis Buñuel; Jacques Rancière on Chris Marker; Julius Banzon on Tobe Hooper; a batch of articles on Orson Welles; Tony Williams on Mary Pickford; an interview with Monte Hellman; a conversation between Jonas Mekas and Hans Ulrich Obrist—and more. » - David Hudson...

In today's roundup of news and views: Jonathan Rosenbaum on Charles Chaplin, Pedro Costa and Nicholas Ray; Adrian Martin on David Cronenberg; Michael Atkinson on Aleksey German; La Furia Umana on George Miller, Michael Mann, Lewis Klahr and Ernie Gehr; World Picture on Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gregory Markopoulos, Zal Batmanglij, David Lean and Spike Jonze; Parallax View on Luis Buñuel; Jacques Rancière on Chris Marker; Julius Banzon on Tobe Hooper; a batch of articles on Orson Welles; Tony Williams on Mary Pickford; an interview with Monte Hellman; a conversation between Jonas Mekas and Hans Ulrich Obrist—and more. » - David Hudson...

The Centerpiece Presentation of this year's Japan Cuts in New York will be the North American premieres of Shingo Wakagi's Asleep and Masaharu Take’s 100 Yen Love. The star of both films, Sakura Ando, is also this year’s honored recipient of the Cut Above Award for Outstanding Performance in Film. More goings on: Joel McCrea and Bruce Labruce in New York, Iranian cinema in Los Angeles, Gus Van Sant and Nicholas Ray in Portland, Allan Dwan in Melbourne, Polish cinema in London, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy throughout the UK, Agnieszka Holland in Berlin and Gregory J. Markopoulos in Basel. » - David Hudson...

The Centerpiece Presentation of this year's Japan Cuts in New York will be the North American premieres of Shingo Wakagi's Asleep and Masaharu Take’s 100 Yen Love. The star of both films, Sakura Ando, is also this year’s honored recipient of the Cut Above Award for Outstanding Performance in Film. More goings on: Joel McCrea and Bruce Labruce in New York, Iranian cinema in Los Angeles, Gus Van Sant and Nicholas Ray in Portland, Allan Dwan in Melbourne, Polish cinema in London, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy throughout the UK, Agnieszka Holland in Berlin and Gregory J. Markopoulos in Basel. » - David Hudson...

Ashley Clark, who's curated Space Is the Place: Afrofuturism on Film, the series that opened at New York's BAMcinématek yesterday and runs through April 15, picks out a few highlights for the Guardian, including John Coney's Space Is the Place with Sun Ra, Ngozi Onwurah's Welcome II the Terrordome, John Akomfrah's The Last Angel of History and Terence Nance's An Oversimplification of Her Beauty. Also, more on Walerian Borowczyk, an overview of the career of producer and director James B. Harris, a major Frederick Wiseman retrospective in Chicago, noir westerns such as Robert Wise's Blood on the Moon and Budd Boetticher's The Tall T in San Francisco and films by Gregory J. Markopoulos in Los Angeles. » - David Hudson...

Ashley Clark, who's curated Space Is the Place: Afrofuturism on Film, the series that opened at New York's BAMcinématek yesterday and runs through April 15, picks out a few highlights for the Guardian, including John Coney's Space Is the Place with Sun Ra, Ngozi Onwurah's Welcome II the Terrordome, John Akomfrah's The Last Angel of History and Terence Nance's An Oversimplification of Her Beauty. Also, more on Walerian Borowczyk, an overview of the career of producer and director James B. Harris, a major Frederick Wiseman retrospective in Chicago, noir westerns such as Robert Wise's Blood on the Moon and Budd Boetticher's The Tall T in San Francisco and films by Gregory J. Markopoulos in Los Angeles. » - David Hudson...

We open today's round of news and views with reviews of three newish books, one telling the wild story of North Korea's Kim Jong-Il as a kidnapping producer, another measuring the impact on Hollywood of the death of William Desmond Taylor in 1922, plus a collection of criticism by Gregory J. Markopoulos. Also: Reassessing David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars, a list of under-appreciated films by John Ford, an interview with Wim Wenders, a Věra Chytilová primer—and Kristen Stewart has joined Michelle Williams and Laura Dern in Kelly Reichardt’s forthcoming untitled drama. » - David Hudson...

We open today's round of news and views with reviews of three newish books, one telling the wild story of North Korea's Kim Jong-Il as a kidnapping producer, another measuring the impact on Hollywood of the death of William Desmond Taylor in 1922, plus a collection of criticism by Gregory J. Markopoulos. Also: Reassessing David Cronenberg's Maps to the Stars, a list of under-appreciated films by John Ford, an interview with Wim Wenders, a Věra Chytilová primer—and Kristen Stewart has joined Michelle Williams and Laura Dern in Kelly Reichardt’s forthcoming untitled drama. » - David Hudson...

Editors Adrian Martin and Girish Shambu have begun rolling out the fifth issue of Lola, wherein you'll find essays on European directors in Hollywood in the 1940s and 50s (Michael Curtiz, Anatole Litvak, Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Curtis Bernhardt, William Dieterle, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak and Fred Zinnemann) and more. Also in today's roundup of news and views: Greil Marcus and Don DeLillo on Bob Dylan, an interview with Manoel de Oliveira, a 1963 essay by Gregory J. Markopoulos, an oral history of Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff, David Lynch's lessons on filmmaking and more. » - David Hudson...

Editors Adrian Martin and Girish Shambu have begun rolling out the fifth issue of Lola, wherein you'll find essays on European directors in Hollywood in the 1940s and 50s (Michael Curtiz, Anatole Litvak, Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Curtis Bernhardt, William Dieterle, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak and Fred Zinnemann) and more. Also in today's roundup of news and views: Greil Marcus and Don DeLillo on Bob Dylan, an interview with Manoel de Oliveira, a 1963 essay by Gregory J. Markopoulos, an oral history of Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff, David Lynch's lessons on filmmaking and more. » - David Hudson...

First in New York and then in Los Angeles, Serge Bromberg will be presenting new restorations of films made by Charles Chaplin between 1915 and 1917. More goings on in the next few days: Darren Aronofsky and Patti Smith in New York, Andy Warhol and Bruce Conner in Los Angeles, James Benning and Richard Linklater in San Francisco, Orson Welles and Lav Diaz in Seattle, the Austin Asian American Film Festival, plus Gregory J. Markopoulos in Vienna and Alexandra Navratil in Zurich. » - David Hudson...

First in New York and then in Los Angeles, Serge Bromberg will be presenting new restorations of films made by Charles Chaplin between 1915 and 1917. More goings on in the next few days: Darren Aronofsky and Patti Smith in New York, Andy Warhol and Bruce Conner in Los Angeles, James Benning and Richard Linklater in San Francisco, Orson Welles and Lav Diaz in Seattle, the Austin Asian American Film Festival, plus Gregory J. Markopoulos in Vienna and Alexandra Navratil in Zurich. » - David Hudson...

News.

As reported yesterday, the Toronto International Film Festival has begun unveiling its 2013 lineup, beginning with Gala and Special Presentations. An exciting heads-up and major opportunity for young filmmakers: Tribeca Film Festival is collaborating with the Imagination Series: Film Competition for a filmmaking contest in which screenwriters and directors pitch their conceptual take on a short script by Geoffrey Fletcher (Precious). Five ideas will be produced, and the resulting films will be shown at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival. With a chance to write and direct an instant-entry at Tribeca, the contest catch phrase makes it sound almost too easy: "No experience required. Just imagination." Lumière is soon to be releasing their 6th issue in print (check the Table of Contents here). Online you can find a piece on Gregory J. Markopoulos by our own David Phelps, as well as a conversation with Nathaniel Dorsky conducted by Francisco Algarín Navarro and...

The Floating Cinema 2013: Extra-ordinary | A Weekend Of Anger: The Films Of Kenneth Anger | Robert Beavers | Brighton's Big Screen/The Duke's at Lewes House

The Floating Cinema 2013: Extra-ordinary, London

This cinema will come to you, if you're situated alongside a London canal. It's an appealing initiative, which began last year but returns with a new design, converting an old industrial barge into an eclectic touring show. You can step on to the boat for an intimate show of specially commissioned works and Michael Smith's new film about the River Lea plays later this month. There's also a horror weekend at Granary Square in King's Cross (9 & 10 Aug), and a fancy-dress screening of Tim Burton's Frankenweenie outside 3 Mills Studio, where it was made (23 Aug).

Various venues, Sat to 30 Sep

A Weekend Of Anger: The Films Of Kenneth Anger, London

That Anger is considered a pioneer of both salacious celebrity...

Temple of Schlock has the skeevy ad mat for 1977′s Too Hot to Handle, of which I’ve appropriated part of the image just because I think the site needs a half-naked lady on it today.

More stories about the films and filmmakers at Migrating Forms this week: CinemaScope on Ben Rivers and Sylvain George; Jonathan Rosenbaum on Raul Ruiz; and n+1 on Harun Farocki.

Courtney Sell writes about his inaugural AssDance Film Festival.

Cartoonist Sam Henderson reprints an old review of his of Robert Downey Sr.’s Up the Academy, a film I really want to see again and see if deserves the maligning it typically gets.

Robert Koehler has several dispatches from the Post-Sarkozy Cannes: Moonrise Kingdom; After the Battle; Rust & Bone; Mekong Hotel; Paradise: Love.

The always awesome J. J. Murphy reviews Amy Seimetz’s Sun Don’t Shine, saying “the real surprise turns out to be...

In the 1980's the Greek-American filmmaker Gregory Markopoulos began showing his decades of experimental film work in a remote area of the Greek Pelopenesse he called the Temenos.  The Greek meaning for the word Temenos is "a piece of land set apart."  Markopoulos screened his career's work with new work from his partner, the filmmaker Robert Beavers. During the 1960's, Markopoulos took off from the U.S. to head to Europe, removing himself from the New American Cinema movement that he and his films ("Du Sang, de la volupté, et de la mort," "Swain," and "The Illiac Passion") had helped constitute, along with Jack Smith, Andy Warhol and others.  He made the move with Beavers, who now manages the Temenos Archives in Switzerland that house Markopoulos's body of work and his own films. In 1992, Markopoulos passed away, and since 2004, Beavers has been heading to the Temenos every four years to.

First things first. There's an announcement from last week to catch up with: "Aldo Tambellini's Black Films and pioneering experimental works by four other filmmakers — Ian Hugo, the international banker-turned-artist who worked with Anaïs Nin; Mike Kuchar; Gregory Markopoulos; and Jud Yalkut — will soon be saved through the 2012 Avant-Garde Masters Grants from the National Film Preservation Foundation and The Film Foundation." Martin Scorsese, who began the initiative in 2003 through seed money from The Film Foundation: "There's no other program of its kind. I'm thrilled that the work of such artists as George Kuchar, Shirley Clark, and Kenneth Anger has been preserved and — equally important — made available so audiences can actually see these extraordinary films."

On a somewhat related note, Marilyn Ferdinand has put out a call regarding For the Love of Film: The Film Preservation Blogathon, taking place in just a couple of weeks now: "Bloggers, we need to...

The National Film Preservation Foundation and The Film Foundation have awarded their annual Avant-Garde Masters Grants for 2012. The overall grant award, which equals $50,000, will help restore and preserve an impressive selection of classic experimental and avant-garde films from the 1950s and ’60s by five legendary underground filmmakers: Mike Kuchar, Gregory Markopoulos, Ian Hugo, Aldo Tambellini and Jud Yalkut.

This year’s grant award will be split among five different archivist organizations, each one working on a different filmmaker’s work.

Three filmmakers will have one film each preserved: The Temenos will be preserving Cycle VII of Gregory J. Markopoulos’ epic 22-cycle film Eniaios; Anthology Film Archives will be preserving one of Mike Kuchar‘s more obscure works, Green Desire (1965); and the Trisha Brown Dance Company will be preserving Jud Yalkut’s Planes (1968), which features choreography by Trisha Brown.

Meanwhile, the Library of Congress has been awarded the opportunity to preserve...

The Miners' Hymns (2011) is "an elegant, elegiac found-footage work from Bill Morrison, best known for his silent-film reverie Decasia," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "A miner himself of a type, Mr Morrison has dug into the archives of the likes of the British Film Institute to cull primarily black-and-white images so rich, so alive with dirty faces, shadows and the occasional pit pony that they resurrect a world that for many has long been lost to history." It screens from today through Tuesday at Film Forum with three of Morrison's shorts, previewed by Cinespect's Ryan Wells. Release (2010) "uses found footage of the 1930 release of Al Capone from Philadelphia's Eastern State Penitentiary," while Outerborough (2005) "gorgeously catches a ride on a trolley making its voyage across the Brooklyn Bridge from Manhattan. Morrison gives us a split screen with two perspectives: a camera facing Brooklyn, another looking back at Manhattan.

"He died destitute." In the new Artforum, P Adams Sitney remembers George Landow, explaining towards the end of the piece how and why the late filmmaker changed his name to Owen Land. But for now: "Our friendship predated our memory: We had been born in the same apartment building in New Haven, just 32 days apart, both the only children of parents in their late 30s. Together as teenagers we had pored over the films of Brakhage, Maya Deren, and Gregory Markopoulos; read Joyce, Beckett, and Ionesco aloud to each other. But there were many times when he retreated into his illness and refused to see me or any of his friends…. He was even widely believed to have died shortly before his suspended work in progress Undesirables (Condensed Version) (1999), a satire on the pretensions of avant-garde filmmakers." He didn't actually die, though, of course, until June 8 of this year. He...

Underground Us film-maker who later parodied his early experimental work

A question that one should never ask an experimental film-maker is: "What is your film about?" George Landow, who has died unexpectedly aged 67, would probably have responded: "It's about eight minutes." Along with many other "structural" American film directors in the 1960s and 1970s, Landow – who changed his name to the semi-anagram Owen Land in 1977 – rejected linear narrative, giving primacy to the shape and essence of film. "I didn't want to make films that were narrative. I found the whole traditional narrative approach was really non-visual," he commented.

This is demonstrated in the self-explanatory title of Landow's Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc (1966). What he called "the dirtiest film ever made" consists of four identical images of a blinking woman, off-centre, made to appear as a loop without a beginning and end, giving prominence...

Avant-garde director best known for Hallelujah the Hills

Adolfas Mekas, who has died aged 85, was the director of Hallelujah the Hills (1963), perhaps the most light-hearted, amusing, innovative, allusive and freewheeling film to come out of the New American Cinema Group established in 1962. One of the clauses in its manifesto reads: "We believe that cinema is indivisibly a personal expression. We therefore reject the interference of producers, distributors and investors until our work is ready to be projected on the screen." Mekas, his older brother Jonas, and other avant-garde members of the group, such as Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, Shirley Clarke and Gregory Markopoulos, lived by this doctrine in all their film-making.

Shot in black and white in 16mm, Hallelujah the Hills, which cost only $75,000 from concept to can, was directed, written and edited by Mekas, with Jonas as assistant; a young friend, David Stone, as first-time producer; Stone's wife, Barbara,...

Alessandro Cima wrote a new article inspired by my old “What’s an Underground Film, Anyway?” post. In it, Cima argues that the definition of “underground film” should include “a requirement of hostility.” I like what Cima is saying and I get where he’s coming from, but I haven’t decided if I totally agree with him yet. While I certainly like a little hostility in my underground films, the problem is that sustained hostility can a) get tiring; and b) leads to burnout. But, good stuff to contemplate in the article. (P.S. Driving or walking by a row of StarWagons never gets not-exciting to me.) Donna k. muses on why more filmmakers don’t tour with their films like Brent Green does. For what it’s worth, here’s my short answer: Most filmmakers don’t create the ancillary product that would make touring profitable. Green has it all: Music,...

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.

So, I’m currently working on a big research project, the results of which won’t be seen unless you happen to be poring through Bad Lit’s sister site the Underground Film Guide — and the way that site is woefully under-updated, why would you?

The Ufg, as I like to call it, is a database project of underground filmmakers and films. Recently I decided to halt adding new entries and to make the old filmmaker entries I previously uploaded more comprehensive. One way I’m doing that is going through books on underground film and, if a filmmaker is written up in each book, I’ll add that book’s info to the filmmaker’s profile. If you’re interested and want an idea of what I’m talking about, go look at John Waters’ entry and scroll down to the book section.

One book that is a tremendous...

Jan. 16

8:00 p.m.

Anthology Film Archives

2nd Ave at 2nd St.

NYC, NY

Hosted by: Anthology Film Archives

Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) may not be considered an “underground” film, but it sure as hell looks like one, belonging to the avant-garde tradition of the “trance film,” a term coined by the writer P. Adams Sitney in his book Visionary Film.

Sitney doesn’t actually write about Vampyr in Visionary Film, but he pulls his definition of a “trance film” from another film writer, Parker Tyler. In his book The Three Faces of Film, Tyler wrote:

The chief imaginative trend among Experimental or avant-garde filmmakers is action as a dream and the actor as a somnambulist.

That was true in 1960. Sitney traced the evolution of the “trance film” from the classic German Expressionist silent film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to the work of American avant-garde filmmakers like Kenneth Anger...

The decades-old cliché goes, watching other people's home movies is hell frozen over. Strangely, this is true only if you know the people, and it's their vacation in Tahoe that you're forced to sit through after a few cocktails and a bellyful of spinach lasagna, as they narrate the landscapes and sigh at their own kids' antics and wistfully recall the best restaurant sea bass they've ever eaten. As Daffy Duck said, I demand that you shoot me now.

Removed from that cloying context, though, home movies are raw and beautiful cinema, mysterious, bewitching and filled with the melancholy for the passage of time, as anyone who has seen "Capturing the Friedmans" (I mean that heartbreaking 8mm footage of the roof-dancing girl, whose demise tipped the whole family into doom), or Ken Jacobs' "Urban Peasants" (family home movies, edited together without intervention) knows. In fact, the allure of old...