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As the leaves crunch underfoot and the wintry chill intensifies, you may realize: it’s time to think of a good gift for that friend of yours who’s already packed their shelves to the gills with Blu-rays and back issues of Cahiers du Cinéma. Have no fear. Covering books, home video, music, posters, and apparel, here are some gift ideas for the dearest cinephiles in your life.Books And MAGAZINESFireflies Press recently published Pier Paolo Pasolini: Writing on Burning Paper: a beautiful set of two complementary volumes to honor the filmmaker’s centenary. The smaller book includes a revised translation of his poem “Poet of the Ashes,” while the larger volume includes tributes from 20 contemporary artists and critics, including Catherine Breillat, Jia Zhangke, Luc Moullet, Angela Schanelec, and Mike Leigh.Written by Karen Han, Bong Joon Ho: Dissident Cinema is a mid-career monograph covering the Korean auteur’s features,...

Jonas Mekas, a towering figure in New York’s avant-garde film scene and a pioneering force for film preservation, died today at age 96. His death was announced by Anthology Film Archives, the still-active archive and theater he cofounded in Manhattan’s East Village 48 years ago.

“Jonas passed away quietly and peacefully early this morning,” Anthology Film Archives wrote in a statement posted on Instagram today. “He was at home with family. He will be greatly missed but his light shines on.”

Director and friend Martin Scorsese said, in a lengthy statement released today (read it below), said, “Jonas Mekas did and meant so much to so many people in the world of cinema that you’d need a day and a night to just begin. He was a prophet. He was an impresario. He was a provocateur in the truest and most fundamental sense – he provoked people into new ways...

In December 1954, Jonas Mekas and his brother Adolfas published the first issue of Film Culture magazine. Initially hostile to American avant-garde filmmaking, the magazine eventually evolved into the avant-garde’s greatest champion in print.

Sources vary on the publication date of the first issue, with some placing it in 1955, and others in 1954. While the cover carries a publication date of January 1955, in an interview with Amy Taubin, Jonas clearly states that the first issue was published in December 1954. You can watch the interview with Jonas where he states this below.

The cover also lists many of the articles that appeared in this first issue. These are:

Erich von Stroheim: “Queen Kelly: Walking Down Broadway”

Orson Welles: “For a Universal Cinema”

Hans Richter: “Film as an Original Art Form”

Edouard L. De Laurot: “Towards a Theory of Dynamic Realism”

Herman G. Weinberg: “The New Films”

George N.

Adolfas Mekas made his mark in American independent filmmaking with this avant-garde comedy that shook up film festivals circa 1963. Although it is said to have inspired Andy Warhol, it’s its own animal entirely, eighty minutes of cinematic frivolity that’s too sincere to be a parody of the filmic conventions it so happily celebrates.

Hallelujah the Hills

Blu-ray

Kino Classics

1963 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 82 min. / Street Date October 30, 2018 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Peter Beard, Sheila Finn, Martin Greenbaum, Peggy Steffans, Jerome Raphael, Blanche Dee, Jerome Hill, Taylor Mead, Ed Emshwiller.

Cinematography: Ed Emshwiller

Film Editor: Louis Brigante, Adolfas Mekas

Costumes: Bathsheba

Original Music: Meyer Kupferman

Produced by David C. Stone

Written and Directed by Adolfas Mekas

Trying to describe Adolfas Mekas’ Hallelujah the Hills is a real chore. It is avant-garde in a way that no longer seems all that ‘avant,’ yet its impact in 1963 was very strongly felt in independent filmmaking everywhere.

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...

Stone worked as a producer, director, distributor and exhibitor in London and the Us.

Producer, director, distributor and exhibitor Barbara Stone, who worked in London and the Us, has died aged 83.

Stone was perhaps best known for founding the Gate Cinemas and Cinegate Film Distribution with her husband David Stone, who died in 2011.

The Gate Cinemas was one of the UK’s best-known independent cinema chains in the 1970s and 1980s. It started with the acquisition of the former Classic cinema at Notting Hill Gate in 1974, which was renamed the Gate, followed by the Gate 2 in Brunswick Square in 1978 and...

In 1983, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, along with Media Study/Buffalo, created a touring retrospective of avant-garde films, primarily feature-length ones and a few shorts, which they called “The American New Wave 1958-1967.” To accompany the tour, a hefty catalog was produced that included notes on the films, essays by film historians and critics, writings by major underground film figures and more.

The retrospective was created at a time when financially viable independent filmmaking was on the rise, such as films made by John Sayles, Wayne Wang and Susan Seidelman. According to the co-curators of the retrospective, Melinda Ward and Bruce Jenkins, the objective of the tour was to:

provide a more adequate picture than conventional history affords us of a rare period of American cinematic invention and thereby prepare a coherent critical and historical context for the reception of the new work by the current generation of independent filmmakers.

Selections from Andrei Tarkovsky, Agnes Varda, Hou Hsiao-hsien.

The Film Society Of Lincoln Centre has announced the line-up for the Revivals section of the New York Film Festival showcasing digitally remastered, restored, and preserved works by celebrated filmmakers.

Two filmmakers from the festival’s Main Slate line-up will also have works in the Revivals section. Agnes Varda, whose Faces Places will screen in this year’s main selection, gets a slot with her feminist musical One Sings, the Other Doesn’t that opened the 15th festival in 1977.

Philippe Garrel’s Lover For A Day will appear in the festival’s Main Slate and he has two films in Revivals: Le Revelateur from 1968 and L’Enfant Secret from 1979.

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Daughter Of The Nile screened at the 26th New York Film Festival 30 years ago and returns in Revivals, alongside Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice (NYFF24, pictured) and Adolfas Mekas’ Hallelujah the Hills from the first...

It’s a given that their Main Slate — the fresh, the recently buzzed-about, the mysterious, the anticipated — will be the New York Film Festival’s primary point of attraction for both media coverage and ticket sales. But while a rather fine lineup is, to these eyes, deserving of such treatment, the festival’s latest Revivals section — i.e. “important works from renowned filmmakers that have been digitally remastered, restored, and preserved with the assistance of generous partners,” per their press release — is in a whole other class, one titanic name after another granted a representation that these particular works have so long lacked.

The list speaks for itself, even (or especially) if you’re more likely to recognize a director than title. Included therein are films by Andrei Tarkovsky (The Sacrifice), Hou Hsiao-hsien (Daughter of the Nile, a personal favorite), Pedro Costa (Casa de Lava; trailer here), Jean-Luc Godard (the rarely seen,...

Scorpio Rising by Kenneth Anger. Completed in 1963.

The film opens with a title card of Anger’s production company. It reads “Puck Film Productions”, along with the tagline “What fools these Mortals be!” The film’s title appears about a minute and a half into it, which is studded onto the back of a man’s motorcycle jacket. Beneath the studded title is the filmmaker’s name, Kenneth Anger. The film concludes with the word “End” on a man’s belt, followed by the same opening Puck Film Productions title card.

While none of the on-screen participants are credited on the film, the booklet accompanying Fantoma’s DVD restoration of the film gives these credits:

Bruce Byron (Scorpio); Johnny Sapienza (Taurus};Frank Carifi (Leo); John Palone (Pinstripe); Ernie Allo (The Life Of The Party); Barry Rubin (Pledge); Steve Crandell (The Sissy Cyclist)

The DVD booklet also gives a release year...

T he 64th edition of Berlin International Film Festival that kicks off today has strong Indian presence with ten Indian films screening in various sections. The festival will be held from February 6-16, 2014.

Imtiaz Ali’s Highway and Jayan Cherian’s Papilio Buddha, which is in contention for the Teddy Award, will be screened in the Panorama section.

Pushpendra Singh’s Lajwanti, K. Hariharan and Mani Kaul’s Ghashiram Kotwal (1976) and Jessica Sadana & Samarth Dikshit’s Prabhat Pheri will be screened in the Forum section.

The Forum Expanded section will see the screening of Blood Earth directed by Kush Badhwar and Mount Song directed by Shambhavi Kaul.

Avinash Arun’s Killa and Gaurav Saxena’s Rangzen will be screened in the Generation K Plus section, targeted at children and young audience of the festival.

Satyajit Ray’s Nayak will be screened as a part of the Berlinale Classics section.

Here...

A still from Mount Song

The 9th Forum Expanded section in the Berlin International Film Festival will screen Kush Budhwar’s Blood Earth and Shambhavi Kaul’s Mount Song. The Forum Expanded section this year focuses on mid-length films.

Based in Kucheipadar, Orissa, Blood Earth is a documentary that ‘explores the relationship between music, struggle, and cultural responses to violence via word and sound’. Directed by Ftii alumnus Kush Budhwar, it won the Adolfas Mekas award at Experimenta 2013, the International Festival of Moving Image Art in Bangalore.

An Indo-us co-production, Shambhavi Kaul’s Mount Song is an avant-garde short film. It premiered in the ‘Wavelengths’ section at Toronto International Film Festival last year.

Ghashiram Kotwal, Prabhat Pheri and Lajwanti are three other films that have been selected for Berlinale Forum.

Read: Ghashiram Kotwal and Prabhat Pheri to screen at Berlinale Forum

Lajwanti selected for Berlinale Forum...

Above: Larry Rivers’ poster for the first New York Film Festival.

With the New York Film Festival celebrating its 50th edition next week I thought I’d look back on the very first festival, 49 years ago, in 1963. Whereas this year’s festival has a main slate of 33 films (as well as abundant sidebars) the inaugural event, programmed by Richard Roud and Amos Vogel, had only 21 features and a selection of shorts. The festival opened—on a Tuesday evening, September 10th, 1963—with a now-classic but then ill-received Buñuel, The Extermining Angel, and closed with a film and a director that have been all but forgotten: Dragées au poivre (Sweet and Sour), a French-Italian comedy with an all-star cast, directed by one Jacques Baratier.

Of the 21 selections—handpicked by Roud and Vogel as the year’s best—only six (masterpieces by Buñuel, Ozu, Olmi, Kobayashi, Polanski and Resnais) are currently available on DVD in the Us,...

Influential American film critic behind the 'auteur theory'

Jean Sibelius once claimed that "no statue has ever been put up to a critic". If there were such a proposal, then Andrew Sarris, who has died aged 83 from complications after a fall, would be among the first to be honoured. It was Sarris, inspired by François Truffaut's article Une Certain Tendance du Cinéma Français, published in Cahiers du Cinéma in 1954, who eight years later formulated the "auteur theory". Sarris coined that term in his 1962 essay Notes on the Auteur Theory, which he developed later in his influential book The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968.

The much-misused term "auteur" was applied mostly to film directors working as contractors for the Hollywood studios who, nevertheless, revealed their own distinctive style and personal vision. Primarily, Sarris made American critics, and eventually audiences, aware of the importance of the director. Hitherto, reviews were more focused on the stars,...

The Pawnbroker (1964)

"Sidney Lumet: Experimental Filmmaker?" That title's a grabber and the link to Fergus Daly's essay in the new Winter 2011 issue of Experimental Conversations, Cork Film Centre's online journal of experimental film, art cinema and video art, began bopping around, given a propulsive boost from Girish Shambu and Catherine Grant:

When Lumet died and tributes started to flood in from luminaries such as Scorsese, Allen and Pacino, it was easy to forget the disdain with which Lumet was often met with throughout his career, most notably the appalling attacks on him by the likes of celebrity reviewer Pauline Kael, an unaccountably influential figure in American film criticism who assassinated Lumet time and again, personally and professionally… In the final analysis, Kael's type of neurotic and unconsidered attack may be entertaining for celebrity culture devotees but in the end it has nothing to do with the cinema.

"The second-to-last interview that Pier Paolo Pasolini gave before he was murdered in 1975 (a case that still remains mysterious) and that was long believed lost has turned up," reports the New Yorker's Richard Brody. "Eric Loret and Robert Maggiori tell the story in Libération — Pasolini was introducing his work in Sweden, a round-table discussion was recorded for broadcast, then held, then lost, until his Swedish translator, Carl Henrik Svenstedt, recently found his personal recording of the talk. The Italian weekly L'Espresso has published a partial transcript of the discussion, along with the audio recording." And he's got excerpts. For example: "I consider consumerism to be a Fascism worse than the classical one, because clerical Fascism didn't really transform Italians, didn't enter into them. It was a totalitarian state but not a totalizing one."

In other news. "This month Offscreen groups together (four of the five) essays that attempt to illuminate...

Fake Fruit Factory from Guergana Tzatchkov on Vimeo.

"Every year, Librarian of Congress James H Billington personally selects which films will be added to the National Film Registry, working from a list of suggestions from the library’s National Film Preservation Board and the general public," reports Ann Hornaday for the Washington Post. This year's list of 25 films slated for preservation:

Allures (Jordan Belson, 1961) Bambi (Walt Disney, 1942) The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953) A Computer Animated Hand (Pixar, 1972) Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (Robert Drew, 1963) The Cry of the Children (George Nichols, 1912) A Cure for Pokeritis (Laurence Trimble, 1912) El Mariachi (Robert Rodriguez, 1992) Faces (John Cassavetes, 1968) Fake Fruit Factory (Chick Strand, 1986) Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) Growing Up Female (Jim Klein and Julia Reichert, 1971) Hester Street (Joan Micklin Silver, 1975) I, an Actress (George Kuchar, 1977) The Iron Horse (John Ford, 1924) The Kid (Charlie Chaplin, 1921) The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945) The Negro Soldier (Stuart Heisler,...

A terrific year for avant-garde film and video--much more so than had been forecast for 2011- -was matched by mid-year woe and commemorative celebration as a string of successive losses reminded us that many of the great, pioneering voices of the sixties and seventies (largely considered the “second wave” of cinematic avant-gardists, some limning the “New American Cinema”) were dying off, or nearing the end of their lives. 2011 brought with it the passing of Lithuanian-born anarchic filmmaker Adolfas Mekas, legendary animator Robert Breer, enigmatic prankster Owen Land (a.k.a. George Landow), visual music animator Jordan Belson, the inimitable underground camp supernova, trash enthusiast and twin extraordinaire George Kuchar, as well as Chilean-French master Raoul Ruiz and British bad boy Ken Russell, both avant-garde in their own amazing, hallucinatory (and very different!) ways. And yet, to proclaim a ceremonial changing of the guard would be...

Merry Christmas from the Bad Lit crew! Ok, that’s just me, but I wish everybody who is taking time out of their special day today a wonderful holiday and may all your dreams and ambitions come true.

So, since the birth of Jesus falls on a Sunday this year, here is an abbreviated list of links for you to enjoy. Give ‘em a graze then go back and spend the rest of your time with your loved ones.

First up, Ed Emshwiller was a ’60s underground filmmaker who doesn’t get a lot of press. He was also an accomplished illustrator whose works landed on the covers of many, many sci-fi magazines. Courtesy of Golden Age Comic Book Stories, here is a collection of alien-themed Santa Claus covers Emsh — as he was called — from Galaxy magazine in the 1950s.Here’s a touching story from Cineflyer about exiled Zimbabwe...

The eight day long 16th International Film Festival of Kerala (Iffk) is over. The festival that can claim to be one of the finest in India outdid itself in comparison to its previous editions.

A competitive festival can be evaluated by the quality of the competition films and the composition of the jury. The film that won the Grand Prize was the Colors of the Mountain (Colombia) and that of the Best Director was Flamingo no. 13 (Iran). Another winner was A stone’s throw away (Mexico). And the jury that bestowed the awards couldn’t have come any stronger—it was headed by Bruce Beresford (Australia/USA) who has made lovely Oscar winning films Driving Miss Daisy and Tender Mercies and included the amazing and gifted Tarkovsky of Turkey—Semih Kaplangolu—who has etched his name on the halls of fame with his trilogy that consists of Egg, Milk and Honey.

"The late writer David Foster Wallace defined the word 'Lynchian' as referring to 'a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former's perpetual containment within the latter.' And this seems a pretty accurate description of my morning at Lynch's house." Craig McLean's conversation with Lynch for the Telegraph about teeth for quite a while before it eventually steers to the new album, Crazy Clown Time.

And via Ray Pride, Nowness meets Lynch in Paris to chat about Club Silencio, buried "six flights below ground level at 142 rue Montmartre": "Accessed through a glittering tunnel leading off the cocktail bar, Silencio has an art deco cinema, reflective dance floor, a Fire Walk With Me-style stage, and a 50s art library featuring a selection of the director's most treasured books from Kafka to Dostoevsky — not to mention...

The BFI London Film Festival opens tonight with Fernando Meirelles's 360 and closes on October 27 with Terence Davies's The Deep Blue Sea (and you can read a roundup on both films at once right here). Sight & Sound presents a guide to "30 fine films we've already seen and (mostly) written about in the magazine or on the web" and Time Out London has set up a microsite currently featuring reviews of at least as many titles.

"When Sandra Hebron took over as artistic director of the BFI London Film Festival nine years ago, it was a more subdued affair," recalls David Gritten, "a thoughtful, well-meaning event at the National Film Theatre, primarily for the benefit of the paying public, and showcasing the best new movies from all over the world. While respected, its international profile was relatively low. Today, it's a very different creature. This year, its 55th as a festival,...

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...

With the spanking new redesign of the Notebook, the Daily returns after a rejuvenating summer break. Six weeks or so of head-clearing perspective have reminded me how much I actually do love doing this thing I do and nothing could make me more eager to get back to it than those lineups for Venice and Toronto.

Until Venice opens, the rounding up will remain relatively light. For now, though, here's more than a bit of summer reading for the waning days of the season, in order of appearance since my last entry: Assessments of this year's Cannes Film Festival dominate the latest issues of Cinema Scope and Film Comment; the current issue of the Brooklyn Rail features a collection of remembrances of Adolfas Mekas; Electric Sheep focuses on Andrei Tarkovsky; Filmmaker's new issue features this year's "25 New Faces of Independent Film"; The Parallax debuts as a downloadable Pdf; then there's...

This week’s Must Read: The Brooklyn Rail offers up a eulogy for Adolfas Mekas by gathering comments from the likes of P. Adams Sitney, Peggy Ahwesh, Ken Jacobs and other colleagues/contemporaries. Mekas passed away in May.The Guardian got a rare interview with Jean-Luc Godard who has declared that we are all auteurs now. Good.If you hadn’t heard, structural film pioneer Owen Land passed away last month, but news of his passing only came late last week. I think Lux has the best, most detailed obit for him. Although, the Office Baroque Gallery has a very passionate one — and I think initial word of Land’s death came from them.More Land: Making Light of It posts a scan of an interview with him conducted by P. Adams Sitney from Film Culture. (I actually happen to own two issues of Film Culture, one of which includes this great interview.

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,...

Photo on the right: ©Syd M

Updated through 6/3.

"Seminal avant-garde filmmaker and retired Bard College professor Adolfas Mekas, who co-founded Film Culture magazine with his brother and fellow filmmaker Jonas Mekas in 1955 and taught at Bard for 33 years, died this morning from an unexpected heart problem," reports indieWIRE's Eric Kohn. He was 85. "After immigrating from Lithuania with his brother in 1949, Mekas played a key role in the New American Cinema movement that congealed around the publication of Film Culture. He produced several experimental features, including the acclaimed 1963 love triangle comedy Hallelujah the Hills, which played at the Cannes Film Festival that year."

Richard Roud, who programed the film for the first edition of the New York Film Festival in 1963, call this story of two men in love with the same woman a "satire on the American way of life, and at the same time a hymn to the joys of youth and friendship.

At indieWIRE, Eric Kohn has reported that underground filmmaker Adolfas Mekas has passed away at the age of 85. The news was confirmed by his niece Oona. The cause of death is heart failure.

Mekas was born on Sept. 30, 1925 in Lithuania. He was the younger brother of Jonas Mekas. Both siblings had to flee their native country in 1944, but they were caught and forced into a labor camp from which they eventually escaped.

After spending some time in two displaced persons camps in Europe, the Mekas brothers made their way to New York City and settled in Brooklyn. In their newly adopted home city, they studied film with Hans Richter, founded the journal Film Culture and began making movies.

Adolfas’ most famous film is Hallelujah the Hills, an avant-garde screwball comedy. You can watch the opening segment of this film online, the full version of which is available from the distributor re:voir.

Seminal avant garde filmmaker and retired Bard College professor Adolfas Mekas, who co-founded Film Culture magazine with his brother and fellow filmmaker Jonas Mekas in 1955 and taught at Bard for 33 years, died this morning from an unexpected heart problem. He was 85. The news was confirmed by Mekas' niece, actress Oona Mekas. "He was a warm, funny, loving, great man," Oona Mekas wrote in a message sent to ...

Us film producer who became an innovative London cinema owner

David Stone, who has died aged 78, played significant roles both in radical Us film-making of the 1960s and in Britain's golden age of arthouse cinemas in the 1970s. In 1974, David and his wife, Barbara, acquired the former Classic cinema, at Notting Hill Gate, west London, which they transformed and renamed the Gate. They opened their own distribution company, Cinegate, whose first acquisition was three films by the young German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder: The Merchant of Four Seasons (1971); The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972); and Fear Eats the Soul (1974). The first Fassbinder films to be shown in Britain, these brought the Gate instant critical and box-office success at its opening in September that year.

The Gate often enjoyed success with films others had passed over, including La Cage Aux Folles (1978), and Woody Allen's Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan...

If it’s Christmas Eve, then it must be another birthday for the godfather of underground film, Jonas Mekas! He turns 88 today, having been born in the town of Semeniškiai, Lithuania on Dec. 24, 1922. To celebrate, please watch the above embedded excerpt from his classic film Walden, aka Diaries, Notes and Sketches, which comes courtesy of the distributor Re:Voir. They also sell the full version of the film.

This feels like an especially apropos film to embed today given the blustery, cold opening. However, about halfway through this excerpt, the wind and the chill eventually gives way to, like life, springtime and pretty girls.

Walden was Mekas’ first major compilation of his film diaries and covers the period of his life from 1964 to ’68. Previously, he directed the fictional narrative Guns of the Trees and a film documenting a performance of the Living Theater’s controversial play The Brig; as well as releasing short diary-like pieces,...

Embedded above is a six-minute excerpt from the classic 1963 underground film Hallelujah the Hills, written and directed by Adolfas Mekas. (I’m assuming it’s the opening based on the title credits, but one never knows.) The film is a screwball comedy about two men trying to get over the heartbreak of losing the same woman. After a madcap dash through the woods in a jeep, the pair of losers get the bad news that the love of their lives has married someone else. It’s a funny opening.

The excerpt was uploaded by the French artist video distribution company re:voir that also sells a full copy of the film. I’m not sure if their DVDs will play in the U.S., but if you’re interested you can always ask, I suppose.

Adolfas Mekas is, of course, the brother of Jonas Mekas and who has directed several films himself.