A movement with several names
“Underground film,” “experimental film” and “avant-garde cinema” are used almost interchangeably for work made outside the commercial studio system. The movement did not begin in 1967. Its American roots reach back to the 1940s and 1950s, to filmmakers such as Maya Deren, and it grew in size and notoriety through the 1960s. By 1967 its films were being discussed in newspapers, screened at universities and sometimes seized by police.
The term “underground” was used both by the filmmakers and by their critics, with different feelings. For supporters it signalled independence. For opponents it implied something improper.
New York: cooperatives and the Voice
The centre of the movement was New York. The filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas, a Lithuanian emigre, wrote a regular “Movie Journal” column in The Village Voice and became its best-known advocate. In 1962 he helped found the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, which distributed films by artists who could not or would not use commercial channels, and he later helped establish the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque as a regular place to see them. Anthology Film Archives, which preserved the work, followed in 1970.
Several figures and works are especially associated with the New York scene:
- Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1963), a campy, sexually frank film that was seized by police in 1964 and led to prosecutions of those who showed it.
- Shirley Clarke, who made both documentary-style features and experimental work.
- Stan Brakhage, who worked largely outside New York but became central to the movement. His films, including the long Dog Star Man (1961-64), used hand-painted film, rapid editing and unconventional camera work to convey the act of seeing.
- Andy Warhol, whose early films included Sleep (1963) and Empire (1964). Empire is an eight-hour static shot of the Empire State Building, and its extreme length was the point.
Warhol and the Factory
Warhol’s film work was part of a broader enterprise at his studio, the Factory, which is described in a separate article on Andy Warhol. His films often used long takes, fixed cameras and improvised performances by the people around him. The Chelsea Girls, a double-screen film that premiered in New York in September 1966, brought the most attention. It was shown beyond the downtown circuit in late 1966 and 1967, which made it perhaps the best-known underground film of the decade. Reviews were divided. Some critics saw it as dull or exploitative, while others considered it a revealing portrait of the Factory crowd.
The Factory also overlapped with music. The Velvet Underground, whose debut album was released in 1967, performed with Warhol’s projections in the multimedia shows known as the Exploding Plastic Inevitable in 1966 and after.
Kenneth Anger
Kenneth Anger, based mainly in California and for periods in Europe, made short, intense films with a strong visual and symbolic style. Fireworks (1947) was an early homoerotic work. Scorpio Rising (1963) used images of motorcycle culture and a soundtrack of popular songs. It drew complaints and was the subject of a prosecution for obscenity in Los Angeles. Anger was also interested in occult symbolism, and his work from the late 1960s, including Invocation of My Demon Brother (completed 1969, with music by Mick Jagger), connected to the rock world.
San Francisco and the West Coast
The West Coast had a separate tradition. In San Francisco, Canyon Cinema, founded by Bruce Baillie and others, began as an informal screening series in the early 1960s and grew into a cooperative that distributed films. Artists such as Bruce Conner, who made the collage film A Movie (1958), and Jordan Belson, who created abstract films and the “Vortex” concerts in the late 1950s, had earlier explored non-narrative forms. The psychedelic scene fed the interest in light and colour, and multi-screen projections formed part of the light shows in the dance halls. The topic overlaps with the article on psychedelic experimentation.
How it differed from Hollywood
The contrast with the studio system was sharp.
| Hollywood | Underground film |
|---|---|
| Large budgets and professional crews | Very small budgets, often made by one person |
| Story, stars and genre conventions | Abstraction, diary-like films, performance and provocation |
| Theatres and mass advertising | Cooperatives, loft screenings, universities and small cinemas |
| Production Code and later a ratings system | Frequently outside the system, but exposed to police and obscenity law |
Many underground films were silent, used 8mm or 16mm film, or were made with no script. Their aim was often to question the usual rules about what a film should be, and viewers sometimes had to decide for themselves what they were looking at.
Censorship and the mainstream
Because underground filmmakers dealt openly with sex, drugs and unconventional lifestyles, they ran into the legal system. Seizures of film prints and arrests of projectionists made them a test case for freedom of expression. In the same period the Hollywood Production Code was being weakened, and in 1968 the studios replaced it with a ratings system.
The relationship between the two worlds was not simply hostile. Young directors in the New Hollywood generation, in films such as Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, borrowed editing styles and a willingness to break convention, and some of the techniques of experimental film reached commercial cinema and advertising. The pop-art interest in everyday imagery also flowed in both directions.
Why it mattered
Underground film is rarely popular, and even at its peak the audience was small. Its importance lies in showing that cinema could be an individual art form, made cheaply, outside the commercial system. That idea influenced later independent filmmaking, video art and music video. Some of the rough cooperative structures survived for decades, and the preservation of the films, many fragile and made on unusual stock, remains an ongoing job for archives.