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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...

In the Spring of 1964, Los Angeles theater manager Michael A. Getz was arrested and placed on trial for screening Kenneth Anger‘s Scorpio Rising. Below are several articles the Underground Film Journal has found that follow the progression of the case.

From the Los Angeles Times, March 3, 1964:

Festival Entry Scheduled for Cinema’s Screen

“Hallelujah the Hills,” American entry at the first New York Film Festival last September, will begin an engagement at the Cinema Theater on Wednesday.

The comedy also represented the U.S. at Cannes, Montreal, Locarno, Mannheim, and London.

This comedy which stars Peter H. Beard, Sheila Finn, Marty Greenbaum and Peggy Steffans was shot in Vermont.

“Scorpio Rising,” a short subject will accompany the feature.

From the Los Angeles Times, March 21, 1964:

Anger’s ‘Fireworks’ Screening at Cinema

The Cinema Theater has added “Fireworks” by Kenneth Anger to its current bill featuring “Hallelujah the Hills.

The 16th annual Boston Underground Film Festival will once again terrorize all of New England with a wide selection of international atrocities that span the globe from Japan to Belgium to the fest’s own backyard. The fest will run March 26-30 at the Brattle Theater.

The fest will open with the supernatural teen comedy All Cheerleaders Die by the dynamic directing team of Lucky McKee and Chris Sivertson, which will then be followed by the cult 1974 Japanese nunsploitation flick School of the Holy Beast by Norifumi Suzuki.

Other feature films screening at the fest include: The American warrior documentary My Name Is Jonah by Phil Healy and Jb Sapienza; the pre-apocolyptic party of Doomsdays by Eddie Mullins; The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears by Belgian extreme filmmakers Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani; the collegiate conspiracy of Jerzy Rose’s Crimes Against Humanity; Jeremy Saulnier’s twist on the revenge thriller,...

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,...

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.

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.

Boston's Hallelujah the Hills release their sophomore album Colonial Drones today. If you were one of the 73 people who listened to and liked Collective Psychosis Begone, the debut, you'll like this one too. I did, and I do. It's more of the same indie angst and angular guitars, with cellos and trumpets thrown in for good measure. Members of Titus Andronicus help out. If anything, the new one is a little more focused, and lead singer/songwriter Ryan Walsh's songs are acerbic, and sometimes quite humorous in a self-deprecating way. They remind me of a slightly more ramshackle Beulah, with typically literate, sadsack lyrics:

Church bells ringing out commercials for Jesus

Future ex-girlfriends all promise to leave us

Life is tough. But at least it's tuneful.