Enter the American Underground Film Archive

 

‘The American Underground Film Archive is a project by Michigan based art company American Underground, to preserve the best of independent and underground cinema, and save the things no one else would give a second thought, putting them all up here where they should be seen. No money is made off of these, it is just out of pure love for cinema.’

 

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Further

American Underground Film Archive
Shozin Fukui
Sarah Jacobson
Richard Kern
Michael P. DiPaolo
Jon Reiss
Nick Zedd
Tracey Moffatt
Tessa Hughes-Freeland
John Lurie
COUM Transmissions
Amos Poe
Ralph Thanhauser
Win Chamberlain
Sally Pugh
Andy Warhol
Rudy Burckhardt

 

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Stills

 

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Ephemera

 

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No Wavelength: The Para-Punk Underground (1979)
by J. Hoberman

 

Drifting across the Bowery, fallout from the 1977 punk “explosion” continues to spawn art-world mutations. For the first time in the decade since the structuralists zoomed in on the stuff and ontology of film, a radically divergent group sensibility has blossomed on New York’s independent film scene. Closely linked to local art-punk, no-wave bands, these filmmaker’s parallel the music’s energy, iconography, and aggressive anyone-can-do-it aesthetic, while using the performers themselves as a kind of ready-made pool of dramatic talent.

The existence of a punk bohemia, the cross-fertilization of avant-garde rock and post-conceptual art (heralded by last May’s no-wave concerts at Artists Space), and the proliferation of sync-sound super-8 cameras have stimulated a number of young artists and musicians over the last year to produce a new wave of content-rich, performance-oriented narrative films. These are hardly seamless fictions; some are willfully, at times brilIiantly, primitive. Many of the filmmakers were initially attracted to super-8 talkies as a documentary tool, and even the most extravagant of their fictions are grounded in a gritty, on-the-street verite.

Rejecting the increasingly academic formalism that has characterized the 1970s film avant-garde, as well as the gallery-art of video, the super-8 new wave represents a partial return to the rawer values of underground of the 1960s (Jack Smith, Ron Rice, the Kuchar brothers, early Warhol). Like its precursor, the new underground’s technically pragmatic films enact libidinal fantasies, parody mass cultural forms, glorify a marginal lifestyle, and exhibit varying degrees of social content. Their populist rhetoric has a ’60s ring as well: “I want to make films that people will see and that won’t get stuck in some independent film art house,” says one. “I’m thinking of drive-ins, rock clubs, prison, and television.”

Beth B and Scott B, a look-alike pair of art school drop-outs in their mid-twenties, have been the most effective of super-8 filmmakers in getting their work around. Their “B-movies,” Black Box and GMan, turn up everywhere from P.S. 1 to Hurrah. Currently, the Bs are screening episodes from their serial-in-progress, The Offenders, at Max’s Kansas City. They call the fllm “a savage satire on society’s distortions,” and its cliff-hanger format suits their sensibility perfectly: It’s as though the film’s sinister conspiracies, femme gangs, and punk bank-robbers were just a part of the daily round of life in Lower Manhattan.

Other super-8 films have been surfacing intermittently over the last few months on the Millennium-Collective-Kitchen circuit, but the New Cinema on St. Mark’s Place has been the punk-film bailiwick. Calling itself the city’s first video-cinema, the New Cinema transfers super-8 to videotape and projects it upon a four-by-five Advent screen. The theatre’s premieres have ranged from the neo-neorealism of Charlie Ahearn’s The Deadly Art of Survival (a shoestring Enter the Dragon shot in and around the Smith housing-projects) to the guerrilliere newsreel of Vivienne Dick’s Beauty Becomes the Beast (Teenage Jesus’s Lydia Lunch as a ‘five-year-old child); from the sci-fi povera of John Lurie’s Men in Orbit (slum living-room as space-capsule) to the Quaalude surrealism of Michael McClard’s Motive (a punk psychokiller rigs the Museum of Modern Art’s men’s room to electrocute random users).

The 50-seat storefront opened in January with cofounder Eric Mitchell’s mock-Warhol, terrorist parody Kidnapped, and has been plastering its schedule across downtown walls ever since. Mitchell, 26, rivals the Bs as a pragmatic self-promoter. The Soho News tagged his theatre’s blend of super-8 and video “a kicky scam to get [foundation] money,” but Mitchell is an affable hustler. I ran into him several days after the New Cinema’s advertised “Symposium on the ‘New Narrative,’ ” and when I asked how this unlikely but impressive-sounding event had gone, he burst out laughing.

“I just saw a really funny film, The Connection,” Mitchell tells me. A connoisseur of dated bohemias, he has a small shrine to Edie Sedgwick taped up in his one-chair Lower East Side apartment, and blandly describes Kidnapped—shot last spring, shortly after Warhol’s 1965 Vinyl played the Collective—as “a 1960s underground movie happening today.”

Indeed, its 15 unedited super-8 rolls are a poverty-row rehash of the Factory’s assembly-Iine method. A few jittery extroverts, stimulated by drugs, Mitchell’s on-screen direction, and the no-wave music blaring from a plastic phonograph on the floor, jostle each other and the ever-panning camera within the cramped, harshly lit confines of the filmmaker’s living room. When not trading insults, the cast vaguely pretends to have abducted a wealthy industrialist (Mudd Club owner Steve Maas) and are half-heartedly beginning to torture him as the camera runs out of film.

Kidnapped’s follow-up, the more conventionally entertaining Red Italy, is an effective burlesque of the sort of early ’60s import Pauline Kael called “come-dressed-as-the-sick-soul-of-Europe parties.” Although Mitchell swears that his next film—a homage to Scorpio Rising, with an all-French cast—won’t star anyone from the music scene (“which is going to shreds anyway”), what’s immediately striking about the super-8 new wave is its symbiotic relationship to certain no-wave bands. Jennifer Miro (the Nuns), Arto Lindsay (DNA), Gordon Stevenson and Lydia Lunch (Teenage Jesus and the Jerks) are all film performers. James Chance’s Contortions—famous for his attack-the-audience punch-outs—form a subunit all their own. Saxophonist Chance and guitarist Pat Place have appeared in a number of movies, as has the group’s ex-organist, Adele Bertei, and present manner Anya Phillips. (The flow works two ways: Gordon Stevenson is about to release a film, filmmaker Vivienne Dick plays organ for Beirut Slump, and the Bs are set to tour Europe this summer with Teenage Jesus. Performance-artist James Nares, another former Contortion, is the auteur of the scene’s Grand Hotel—Rome ’78, a 90-minute costume drama that looks like a toga party in Little Lulu’s clubhouse and features at least half of the above-mentioned personalities.

Although 40 minutes too long, the film does have its moments. With one tooth blacked out, spindly David McDermott III plays the meglomaniacal Caesar as a sniveling, screaming six-year-old, tirelessly ranting “I am God!” on the steps of Grant’s Tomb. Meanwhile, Mitchell—scratching his armor and mumbling “pretty weird,” as though Stanley Kowalski had stumbled onto the set of Quo Vadis?—chain-smokes through a tepid love scene with the coyly simpering Lydia Lunch. A black slip hiked over her thighs and a spiky mop of hair cascading onto her face, she rises from her mattress-on-the-floor divan only once in the film, to chase McDermott around the camera with a whip.

(cont.)

 

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Selection

Shozin Fukui Rubber’s Lover (1996)
‘A secret Corporation has been running tests on human subjects to determine the effects of sound and ether using what they call DDD (Digital Direct Drive). The problem is, the subjects tend to blow up if subjected to too much of it. Upon learning that there experiments are about to be shut down, researchers Motomiya and Hitotsubashi go off the deep-end by kidnapping the corporation secretary, and increasing there experimentation in hopes of proving there work. With there first subject unsuccessful due to blowing the test subjects brains out, they continue by enlisting another to delve even further. The intent is to increase psychic ability in humans. But how and why they came to the methods they are investigating is beyond me. I think a film like this is not intended to really stay on coherent course rather than to shock the viewers with stark violence, overacting and nightmarish segues. And let me re-iterate overacting is a big part of this!!

‘In keeping with the visual needs for this film, the director Shozin Fukui chose to intermix a variety of industrial imagery to help sell the look and feel. Often Fukui uses close ups of machinery, gears, wiring, and electronic parts to further drive home the industrial environment they are in. On the most part, this film is pretty incomprehensible. The human experiments are outfitted in strange rubber bondage suits and then injected with ether to get them on an accelerated addiction. This combined with the audio overloads is supposed to awaken psychic abilities, though these abilities also come with a price of madness and fatalities. The whole idea is pretty ludicrous and a stretch on scientific reasoning. I never did get the whole ether thing. If there’s some credibility to the idea of it …I’m really not sure. But I guess it doesn’t matter. The result is total on screen chaos.’ — HHN

 

Sarah Jacobson I Was a Teenage Serial Killer (1993)
‘I Was a Teenage Serial Killer might very well be the only movie that feels fully, authentically submerged in riot grrrl aesthetics & ideology. Its black & white chocolate syrup gore and its cut & paste block text collages directly echo the visual patina of the Xeroxed zines that sparked the movement and gave it a name. Its misandrist serial killer premise that lashes back at the misogyny of its own punk community plays like a faithful adaptation of the Bikini Kill track “White Boy.” It even has bonafide riot grrrl cred on its soundtrack, which includes contributions from the seminal band Heavens to Betsy (which featured Corin Tucker, later of Sleater-Kinney). It’s not a perfect film, but it is a perfect time capsule of the exact frustrations & aesthetics that fueled the feminist punk movements of its era.’ — Swamp Flix

 

Richard Kern Catholic (1991)
‘Catholic is a b/w Super-8 short written, produced and directed by Richard Kern. A Catholic student has a crisis of faith.’

 

Michael P. DiPaolo Requiem for a Whore (1989)
‘The last day in the life of a NYC streetwalker. Well my “day job” at that time was videotaping confessions for the Brooklyn DA’s Office, where I also did some surveillance stuff and I thought I could get a more “real” unguarded view that way. In addition, I was planning on going down to the West 20s/30s to video the prostitutes, and I knew that there would be no way in hell to do that without hiding the camera. Finally, I wanted to get some background footage for a shot-on-video feature I would later complete in 1989– Requiem for a Whore.

‘I would put the camera–a Panasonic VHS camcorder with a wide-angle lens–inside a black gym bag that had a hole cut out on one end. Then I placed black gauze/screening over the hole. I would start recording about a 100 feet before turning onto the block I was going to shoot, then just kept walking and pointing the camera in the direction of anything interesting. But I made it a point of trying NOT to look where I had the camera pointed and I always kept walking. By doing it this way, I never knew what I had until I got home and was able to screen it.’ — Vanishing New York

 

Jon Reiss A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief (1988)
‘A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief is a fractured narrative featuring large anthropomorphic robots living in their own fictional world devoid of humankind, the machines act out scenarios of perpetual torment, exasperated consumption and tragic recognition. The film is a fast paced glimpse into the disturbing nightmare of machine psychology.

‘During the 1980’s I worked closely with Survival Research Laboratories (SRL) directing four documentaries of their live performances in addition to A Bitter Message of Hopeless Grief. This film was an outgrowth of that relationship. The founder of SRL, Mark Pauline, and I wanted to create a fiction film using the machines to go beyond the restraints of documentation and the traditional utilization of non-human characters in narrative cinema.

‘For the original shooting we were able to get access to an enormous warehouse in San Francisco which enabled us to create the incredibly large sets (15 feet high – 30-60 feet wide) in order to have enough space to film the machines, some standing 10 feet tall.’ — Jon Reiss

 

Nick Zedd Police State (1987)
‘Zedd is minding his business, when he is stopped by a cop who accuses him of being a junkie. After a short argument he is beaten and dragged to the police station. At the station he is interrogated by a detective (Rockets Redglare) and the police chief. After being beaten and tortured several more times, Nick Zedd’s character mutilates himself with some hedge cutters.

‘Even with the extremely amateur filmmaking involved, Nick Zedd’s Police State manages to be one of the strongest and most provocative “fuck cops” movie out there.

‘The intense anger fumes as Zedd creates a brutal, shocking, and briefly hilarious short that proves to be unforgettable in every way. No amount of boom mic slipping into frame will undo the power this film has.’ — Scar

 

Tracey Moffatt Nice Coloured Girls (1987)
‘Nice Coloured Girls was written and directed by Tracey Moffatt, an Australian Aboriginal artist working in film, photography and video. It is an unusual film in that it is quite different to the documentaries and realist dramas of contemporary Aboriginal filmmakers and to ethnographic documentaries of the past. Moffatt has set out to counter dominant representations, to challenge the notion of what constitutes an Aboriginal film and to explore how representations throughout history have constructed her identity and that of her race. In doing this, she draws attention to the means by which history itself is constructed and also, how film constructs meaning. Unlike the bulk of films about Aboriginal people which are set in the outback and portray Aboriginals in a community environment, the setting for Nice Coloured Girls is primarily the urban landscape and shows the central characters, three Australian Aboriginal women, in their element.

‘The style chosen by Moffatt is anti-realist in Nice Coloured Girls (and her later film Night Cries A Rural Tragedy). The visual language of the film is strongly figurative; symbolic devices are used to economically evoke times and places (such as climbing of the rope ladder and the arms pulling at the bag of money) and she subverts dominant cinematic conventions (such as with the use of fluid temporal and spatial zones). The effect of this approach is to provoke the audience into awareness of the actual existence of filmmaking and narrative codes and thus induce an active, analytic, critical approach from the audience.

‘Nice Coloured Girls is a ground-breaking film stylistically and thematically. The audience is left to question history, in particular the reliability of primary sources. The absence of the Aboriginal point of view in Australia’s ‘history’ becomes glaringly obvious as we are left to question the nature of traditional representations of Aborigines. As Australians, Aboriginal people have been marginalized and stereotyped but Moffatt who is a young, contemporary Aboriginal Australian offers an Aboriginal perspective through her work and questions dominant representations which have excluded Aborigines (or offered unrealistic images of them).’ — Senses of Cinema

 

Richard Kern You Killed Me First (1985)
‘You Killed me First, one of Richard Kern’s longer films starring David Wojnarowicz and Lung Leg, could be read as a clear teenage allegory of the Cinema of Transgression itself. A girl (Lung leg) bristles at the religious directives of her parents, asserting her right to personhood outside demure hairstyles and turkey dinners, constructing voodoo dolls and entertaining other manners of dark drawing in her dank emo-den. When confronted with the humanity and hypocrisy of her tormentors, the young antihero vanquishes their belief systems (and bodies) asserting, “You killed me first!”’ — Daily Serving

 

Tessa Hughes-Freeland Baby Doll (1982)
‘Tessa Hughes-Freeland’s “Baby Doll” is a tiny slice of cinéma vérité from 1982 about the girls working the now defunct Baby Doll Lounge on Church and White St. in downtown Manhattan. It captures a moment before NYC got sanitized.

‘In live-action films, as well as collaged films from found footage, Hughes-Freeland taps into the sophisticated emotional filters we erect to deal with uncomfortable feelings. Images crash into one another in disorienting ways. Drawing upon the mind-altering potential of spontaneous transformation and the power of myth, her films are essentially “psychedelic”—conjuring ineffable experiences beyond the commonplace.

‘“My films are ritualistic and atavistic—inspired by dreams, visions, and imagination. Sometimes the nucleus of an idea for a film starts with an object. The original idea for Hireath came from the top of the Christmas cake, which my mother made every year,” the artist says.’ — Howl!

 

John Lurie Men in Orbit (1979)
‘Like certain Warhol movies of the mid-60s and Mitchell’s 1978 Warhol homage Kidnapped, Men in Orbit is based on a single idea or situation. Two costumed astronauts (Mitchell and Lurie) are strapped into their seats in a space capsule that appears to be a classic Lower East tub-in-kit apartment and blast off into space, guided by the voice of their unseen Mission Control (Michael McClard). The movement of the capsule and subsequent absence of gravity is signified by occasional camera tilts. The only other special effect is a video monitor which at one point shows the men their wives back on earth (one them is the fellow Super 8 filmmaker and future screenwriter Becky Johnston).

‘Men in Orbit is in no way a parody. The movie not so much a satire on science fiction as a science fiction experiment — how will these actors perform under these specific conditions? The soundtrack is noisy with largely unintelligible dialogue but nothing much actually happens. (If anything, the movie, in production at roughly the same time as Ridley Scott’s Alien, conveys the banality of space travel, made during a period when NASA was part of daily consciousness: Skylab was falling, the space shuttle was about to begin regular flights.)

‘Mitchell and Lurie smoke innumerable cigarettes and devour what looks like a McDonald’s happy meal. Mitchell in particular is giggling throughout. These men may truly be in orbit but their often hysterical laughter suggests that the movie’s real drama may be pharmaceutical, played out in their own inner space.’ — Orphan Film Symposium

 

Coum Transmissions After Cease to Exist (1977)
‘Characteristic naïve shock tactics and juvenile fun in this charming, fascinating document of prime-era Throbbing Gristle/COUM Transmissions, where Chris Carter’s nether regions are on proud display and receives the final cut while Soo Catwoman is tied to a bed. TG never really mastered the ambient genre but here the hissy, lo-fi soundtrack fits the murky visuals like a pair of German leather gloves with homicidal intent.’ — Falkus Twigbottom

 

Amos Poe Unmade Beds (1976)
‘This is the story of Rico, a man who lives in New York in 1976 but who lives his own life in Paris during the time of the ‘New Wave’. He is a photographer who thinks he’s a gangster, a loner, and an outsider. He uses his camera like a gun, loading it with bullets of film. He’s constantly on the look for a reality to fulfill his fantasy, and as long as he has that energy, he lives. Of course, he’s also a romantic, and this is his downfall, because he believes all photographers to be liars. When Rico falls in love, the delicate balance of the world he has made for himself is disrupted. With Duncan Hannah, Eric Mitchell, Debbie Harry, Kitty Sondern, Patti Astor.’ — Clint Weiler

 

Ralph Thanhauser Godard in America (1970)
‘During April 1970, Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, a comrade from the Dziga-Vertov Group, toured major American universities screening See You at Mao in order to raise money to finish a film on the Palestinian Al Fatah movement (a project that was never completed). This penetrating document of that tour reveals the enormous appeal of these French filmmakers to a new generation of politically engaged young Americans.’ — Harvard Film Archive

 

Win Chamberlain Brand X (1970)
‘The film follows the on-and off-air shenanigans of Wally Right, the manic head of a television station. It takes on President Nixon, the Vietnam War, sex, drugs, technology and advertising, alternating between vignettes riffing on TV programming — an exercise show, a soap opera, a financial report — and Dadaist commercials like one for “Food,” in which the film’s cinematographer, John Harnish, is seen sitting with a naked blond woman at a table covered with fruit. “Eat more, think less,” he quips to the camera. Abbie Hoffman plays a corrupt cop who bathes in a tub full of money; Taylor Mead portrays an indignant American president holding a news conference; and Ultra Violet gives an off-key performance on “The Tomorrow Show.”’ — SS.com

 

Sally Pugh Huey! (1968)
‘Documentary film produced by American Documentary Films and the Black Panther Party from 1968, honoring Huey P. Newton’s struggle for African American civil rights, advocating for his release from jail and addressing issues of racism in American society. Features scenes from the funeral of Bobby Hutton and the Huey P. Newton Birthday Rally in the Oakland Auditorium on February 17th 1968, with speeches by: Bobby Seale (who explains the Black Panther Party’s 10 Point Program in detail); Ron Dellums; James Foreman; Charles R. Garry; Eldridge Cleaver; Bob Avakian; H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael. Also includes views of police officers showing the weapons and armor they carry in patrol cars and of African Americans discussing racism in American society. This film was scripted and directed by Sally Pugh.’ — letterboxd

 

Andy Warhol Couch (1964)
‘Couch is a silent black and white film from July 1964 ranging from 40 to 54 minutes. The cast of the film reads like a who’s who of the New York underground. Stars include Billy Linich (Billy Name), Taylor Mead, Baby Jane Holzer, Gerard Malanga, Ivy Nicholson and Ondine. By all accounts, Couch is one of Warhol’s most directly pornographic, yet it is also repetitious and boring. Warhol utilized a stationary camera to film various individuals on a couch in some form of intimacy, be it kissing, hugging, oral sex, or intense conversation. The real star of the movie is the couch. Billy Name, the man responsible for the silver interior of the Factory, found the red couch on 47th Street. Throughout the mid-1960’s, the couch popped up in photographs and films, like Blowjob, becoming a symbol of the Factory years. The theft of the couch in 1968 marked the symbolic end of the Factory Era, as the shooting of Warhol by Valerie Solanas did in actuality.’ — Reality Studio

 

Rudy Burckhardt Mounting Tension (1950)
‘The story was made up more or less as we went along; Larry as the madly energetic, oversexed artist and Jane, a combination of palmreader and psychoanalyst, trying to straighten him out but turning into another girlfriend and model. John Ashbery is a straight boy interested in baseball but ends up an abstract painter. With a scene in the Museum of Modern Art.’ — R.B.

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! That book’s fun if you’re in the mood for a trippy goofball novel. Oh, wow, I see. About leaking SCAB’s treasures rather than using the avalanche method. That’s exciting! Well, I’m chomping for the first shard. Cool. No, France, at least, doesn’t do miniature golf. I love France, but …no miniature golf, no Halloween?! So I miss miniature golf, I guess. In LA, where I come from, it’s an easy fix. I think my love was terrifying, yeah, although I think the bee meant well and is very lonely. Ha ha. Your love is pretty terrifying too, or at least to me who was hospitalised for severe sunburn once when I went to the beach on LSD once and zonked out under the summer sun for hours. Love inhaling helium and shattering every window for 100 kilometres in every direction when he says, ‘I love you’, G. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. Oh, if only that MacGuane directed film was actually good. Stellar cast, though, you’re right. I own that Judy Garland album. ** Misanthrope, It is funny. It’s a funny, fun, cool novel. It’s true: worst conclusions. Is that they want? The first five pages? That’s tough. Although it’s true that I, at least, pretty much decide whether to read novel or not based on … well, the first few paragraphs even. So, you changed the phrase so the agents will know that they … do (don’t?) … have sex? Oh, right, this is your kind of ‘Call Me By Your Name’ novel, right? I overthink everything. There are worse ways to work. ** Jeff J, Hi, Jeff. ’92 …’ is good, yeah, but, yeah, I think ‘…Bushwacked…’ is the one. I know, shame about the ’92 …’ film. And there’s really no excuse. You’re listening GbV, you wise, wise fellow! Uh, wow, I kind of feel like making a best of GbV’s recent stuff post would be so self-indulgent of me, being such a diehard, but, on the other hand, boy, does that sound like a great idea! Let me see what I can do. Okay, you need to define what you mean by ‘second phase’. There are four GbV phases. Technically, the second phase starts with ‘Mag Earwhig’ and goes through ‘Half Smiles of the Decomposed’. Then phase three is the reunion period. And phase four is the current line-up period. (Actually, to be a diehard, there are subphases as well, like the Doug Gillard era, the Todd Tobias era, etc., but I’ll spare you.) Which phase do you mean? I’d be more than happy to, of course. I’m good. The novella, now titled ‘The Has-Been’, is on hold for the moment because it’s Zac’s turn to have a whack at it, and he’s away and chilling and not into working at the moment, so it’s waiting for his return to duty in order to progress. An excerpt from its current state will be in the upcoming Infinity Land Press anthology. You good? ** Steve Erickson, Everyone, Another musical concoction from Mr. Erickson … ‘I wrote another song today, the gqom-inspired “Fragrance”. I tried building something out of layers of percussion with no melody (although it includes synthesizer chords.).’ My appointment for my first vax shot (Pfizer) is on Monday, the 3rd. I don’t dislike Verhoeven. I think his things can be fun. I just think the claims of his hardcore fans that his films are genius meta-textual masterworks is insane, that’s all. Cannes looks good. I’m personally hottest for the new Wes Anderson. And the Carax, of course. ** Jack Skelley, Jack-of-most-trades! Can not wait to see what you do with that challenging subject matter. See you tonight! ** Bill, Hi, Bill. My first shot’ll happen on the 3rd. Second shot on June 12th. Gilbert Peyre, yes! I wonder what he’s up to. That Judith Schaecter painting is very nice. I’ve never seen it nor heard of her before. Huh. Any productivity pop up and surprise you this weekend? ** Right. This weekend I’m raiding the vault of the American Underground Film Archive in order to give you guys the chance to have proper underground film marathon in your very own homes. Or the chance to watch one or two underground films. Or the occasion to ignore the whole thing too, I guess. *sad face* In any case, see you on Monday.