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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.

This week’s Must Read comes from donna k., whom I link to a lot every week. But her description this time about how Brent Green’s sculpture To Many Men Strange Fates Are Given was created is unbelievably fascinating. After reading this, you’ll have a new appreciation on how your LCD monitors work — and how visionary Green is.Curator and filmmaker Brenda Contreras has launched a new blog that you need to check out. Her first big post about seeing some experimental filmmakers — Bruce McClure, Marie Losier and Ricardo Nicolayevsky — is a great read already.Preservationist Mark Toscano writes about preserving Lous Hock’s 1975 film Studies in Chronovision.At the Filmmaker website, Eddie Mullins gives a great review to a new DVD box set of Robert Downey Sr.’s early films called Up All Night With Robert Downey Sr. and includes Babo 73, Chafed Elbows and more.Superstar...

Robert Downey Sr.’s films are ribald, socially-conscious, highly experimental works that make Richard Lester’s oeuvre seem polite and Godard’s plot-heavy. Though he achieved cult success with 1969’s Putney Swope, some of Downey’s other, more radical works from the period are arguably more interesting, and their revival by way of an Eclipse box set is exceptional news. Up All Night With Robert Downey Sr. brings together five early films which show the director at his unhinged best, and if nothing else should prove a hedge against Downey becoming a mere footnote to his more famous son’s career.

A part of New York’s avant-garde film scene in the 60s, Downey screened his works alongside underground icons Shirley Clarke, Bruce Conner and Kenneth Anger. What he shared with his contemporaries was a patent disregard for convention and an ability to make films on the cheap. He cast his friends and family,...

It really doesn't get more irreverent and outlandish than the cult films of Robert Downey Sr. and let's face it, every cinephile worth his salt loves an excuse to talk about the underground filmmaker's outré classic "Putney Swope."

And so one of the more strange and wonderfully offbeat box sets to come to DVD late last month was Criterion's Eclipse set dedicated to the unconventional works of Robert Downey Sr. titled, "Up All Night With Robert Downey Sr."  The father of Robert Downey Jr. and a satirical, experimental and counter cultural filmmaker in New York in the late 1960s, many of Downey Sr.'s vehmently uncommercial and mischievous pictures have been virtually awol for decades outside of small, appreciative arthouses like New York's Anthology Film Archives.

Often featuring taboo and trangressive topics, shot on shoestring budgets (guerilla style without permits), utilizing non-actors, told with often whimsical aesthetics ("Chafed Elbows" is mostly visualized via 35 mm photographs,...

by Steve Dollar

Something like the Dead Sea Scrolls of 1960s (and '70s) underground comedies, the five films assembled in the new Criterion Collection Eclipse set Up All Night with Robert Downey Sr. have been out of sight for so long that their release this week marks a major rediscovery. Deliriously imaginative and madly subversive, black-and-white romps like Babo 73 and Two Tons of Turquoise to Taos Tonight deploy manic pacing and counter-cultural absurdity to critique Mad Men-era America while inhaling deeply on their own stoned grooviness. "I've paid my dues," exclaims one of Downey's impish observers, played by actor friends or maybe someone he met at a phone booth, "why should I pay my debts?"

The best-known feature, Putney Swope, achieved cult status for its outrageous satire of Madison Avenue, proposing what happens when a white, patrician agency is taken over by a black militant who renames it "Truth and Soul Inc.

Well we're back again with the bumper crop of must-have DVDs and Blu-rays for the month of May – from historic Italian epics to underground American sensations to a chilly, expressionistic film noir to movies where Raquel Welch plays a Vegas showgirl fleeing a murderer – we’ve got them all hear for you. So look on below to see what's worth your money this month....

"1900" (1976) Blu-ray

Why You Should Care: At the time of its release, Bernardo Bertolucci's historical epic was said to be the most expensive (requiring the financial commitment of three major studios – 20th Century Fox, Paramount, and United Artists) and ambitious ever mounted in Italy. It's a tale of two friends (played by Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu), born on the same day at the dawn of the 20th century, and the way that their lives crisscross, intersect, and diverge wildly over the rocky course of history.

By Aaron Hillis

Lists are breezy reads, but there can be an unfortunate disposability to the data because arbitrarily numbered "Ten Best" somethings or "Five Things You Should Know About" whatevers literally demonstrate quantity's domination over quality. And now that I've sucked all the fun out of the room, here's a practical but otherwise unranked list of ten auteurist gems . nine of which are already on DVD . that deserve their layers of dust blown off. (Sorry, "Zero Effect" and "11 Harrowhouse," but the list dictates the rules!)

"One From the Heart" (1982)

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola

The fires of over-ambition still smoldering in his belly after "Apocalypse Now," Francis Ford Coppola's follow-up was a decadent fiasco that bankrupted him, and might have seemed at the time as if the director had returned half-mad from the Filipino jungles. Epically staged on the Zoetrope studio lot, Coppola's hypertheatrical Vegas romance-cum-musical fantasy stars...