Tuesday: The First Wave

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The most prominent early figure in this project to establish a new species of film language was Maya Deren, whose 1943 film Meshes of the Afternoon (co-directed with her then-husband Alexander Hammid) effectively marks the beginning of a new genre of filmmaking that is personal and lyrical, and whose concerns are primarily formal and expressive rather than narrative. The impact of Meshes of the Afternoon and Deren’s subsequent films — not only on the avant-garde, but on all of cinema — cannot be overstated. In addition to her immeasurable influence as an artist, theorist and lecturer, Deren’s efforts to create screening opportunities for her films and her role as a general advocate for avant-garde films were a direct inspiration on several generations of filmmakers and programmers, whose film societies and cinemas created a distribution and exhibition network that brought non-industrial films to new audiences in New York and around the country.

The filmmakers who came to prominence around Deren and in the wake of the creation of film societies like the legendary Cinema 16 were a remarkably diverse group whose films shared little besides an emphasis on personal expression and the “poetic”, and the stylistic influence of filmmakers such as Deren, Jean Cocteau and Joseph Cornell. Stylistically, the underground of the period encompassed the dynamic visual music of Marie Menken, the surreal narratives of Sidney Peterson and James Broughton, the dance-inspired compositions of Deren and Shirley Clarke, innovative animation by Harry Smith and Robert Breer, the heated psychosexual explorations of Kenneth Anger and Gregory Markopoulos as well as the Beat aesthetic of Christopher Maclaine and the intense visual expressions of a young Stan Brakhage. From the very beginning, this tradition embraced honest expression from women and sexual minorities, with the origins of both queer and feminist cinema traditions inextricably intertwined with this period of filmmaking. Filmmakers working in the underground in the 1940s and 1950s rejected the conventions of Hollywood to provide uncensored, unencumbered and sometimes unhinged depictions of the lives they knew and the art they wanted to make. Notable, of course, for their formal adventurousness, these films were also intensely personal: handmade, often autobiographical, bracingly raw and direct. The avant-garde was not just a style or a movement, but a way of making films, a redefinition of what cinema might be, how it can be made, and who can be permitted to make it.

This series seeks to explore the filmmakers who created the traditions in which later filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol and Hollis Frampton would work. Between Deren’s first films in the 1940s and the early 1960s when experimental film reached its highest level of productivity and most visible status, a new cinema was created by a loosely affiliated movement consisting of some of the greatest and most innovative artists to pick up a film camera. While the works of some of these filmmakers, Deren and Anger in particular, are (deservedly) taught in film courses and can be seen with some frequency at experimental film venues or can be found on video, the majority of these films, in spite of their remarkable achievements and influence, remain criminally underseen. The films of Gregory Markopoulos, who, like Anger, began making major cinema as a teenager, have been out of circulation for decades, and this screening provides an extremely rare opportunity to see a broad selection of his early films. Although Marie Menken’s influence was, paradoxically perhaps, as great on the kinetic formalist Brakhage as it was on the minimalist/conceptualist Warhol, her own films — astonishingly visceral, virtuosic explorations of light and color — remain little seen and underappreciated. Shirley Clarke is known today for her verité feature-length films of the sixties (Portrait of Jason and The Connection in particular), but it was her dance-inspired films such as A Moment in Love that established her as a major artist and a unique voice in film. Curtis Harrington, a beloved cult figure whose films (Night Tide, in particular) made on the fringes of the industry are treasured by genre enthusiasts, is also granted a rare screening of his gorgeous surrealist-inspired, dreamlike early short films.

This series can only be an introduction to the origins of the experimental and independent film movement in America. The purpose of these screenings is both to present a selection of masterful films that are simultaneously accessible, challenging and aesthetically exciting still today, as well as to provide an overview of the range and scope of an important, endlessly innovative period of filmmaking. AH