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An Introduction To The American Underground Film
''An Introduction To The American Underground Film'' is a book by the American author Sheldon Renan. It was published by Dutton in 1967. It was the first book about Underground Film. Written at the dawn of film studies as an academic subject it was used by many teachers as the guide to the study of Underground Film, a term that prior to the publication of this book was not widely disseminated. Structure Opposite the title page is this statement: .... "Sheldon Renan was born in Portland, Oregon in 1941. He became addicted to the film medium during his four years at Yale University, where he was a member of the Scholar of the House Program. After graduation in 1963, he spent much of his time scurrying from one movie theatre to another, and did not emerge from the darkness until 1966, when he married, wrote this book, and settled near San Francisco." There is a Foreword by Willard Van Dyke. There are six chapters, An appendix, bibliography and index. Chapters Defining Undergroun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Underground Film
An underground film is a film that is out of the mainstream either in its style, genre or financing. Notable examples include: John Waters' ''Pink Flamingos'', David Lynch's ''Eraserhead'', Andy Warhol's ''Blue Movie'', Rosa von Praunheim's ''Tally Brown, New York'', Frank Henenlotter's ''Basket Case'', Nikos Nikolaidis' ''Singapore Sling'', Rinse Dreams' ''Café Flesh'', and Jörg Buttgereit's ''Nekromantik''. Definition and history The first printed use of the term "underground film" occurs in a 1957 essay by American film critic Manny Farber, "Underground Films." Farber uses it to refer to the work of directors who "played an anti-art role in Hollywood." He contrasts "such soldier-cowboy-gangster directors as Raoul Walsh, Howard Hawks, William Wellman," and others with the "less talented De Sicas and Zinnemanns hocontinue to fascinate the critics." However, as in "Underground Press", the term developed as a metaphorical reference to a clandestine and subversive culture ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Taylor Mead
Taylor Mead (December 31, 1924 – May 8, 2013) was an American writer, actor and performer. Mead appeared in several of Andy Warhol's underground films filmed at Warhol's The Factory, Factory, including ''Tarzan and Jane Regained... Sort of'' (1963) and ''Taylor Mead's Ass'' (1964). Career Born in Detroit, Michigan and raised by divorced parents mostly in the wealthy suburb of Grosse Pointe, he appeared in Ron Rice's beatnik, beat classic ''The Flower Thief'' (1960), in which he "traipses with elfin glee through a lost San Francisco of smoke-stuffed North Beach cafés ..." Film critic P. Adams Sitney called ''The Flower Thief'' "the purest expression of the Beat sensibility in cinema." Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman called Mead "the first underground movie star." In 1967, Taylor Mead played a part in the Surrealism, surrealistic play ''Desire Caught by the Tail'' by Pablo Picasso when it was set for the first time in France at a festival in Saint-Tropez, among others ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
1967 Non-fiction Books
Events January * January 1 – Canada begins a year-long celebration of the 100th anniversary of Confederation, featuring the Expo 67 World's Fair. * January 5 ** Spain and Romania sign an agreement in Paris, establishing full consular and commercial relations (not diplomatic ones). ** Charlie Chaplin launches his last film, ''A Countess from Hong Kong'', in the UK. * January 6 – Vietnam War: USMC and ARVN troops launch ''Operation Deckhouse Five'' in the Mekong Delta. * January 8 – Vietnam War: Operation Cedar Falls starts. * January 13 – A military coup occurs in Togo under the leadership of Étienne Eyadema. * January 14 – The Human Be-In takes place in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco; the event sets the stage for the Summer of Love. * January 15 ** Louis Leakey announces the discovery of pre-human fossils in Kenya; he names the species '' Kenyapithecus africanus''. ** American football: The Green Bay Packers defeat the Kansas City Chiefs 35–10 in the First AF ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Village Voice
''The Village Voice'' is an American news and culture paper, known for being the country's first alternative newsweekly. Founded in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, John Wilcock, and Norman Mailer, the ''Voice'' began as a platform for the creative community of New York City. It ceased publication in 2017, although its online archives remained accessible. After an ownership change, the ''Voice'' reappeared in print as a quarterly in April 2021. Over its 63 years of publication, ''The Village Voice'' received three Pulitzer Prizes, the National Press Foundation Award, and the George Polk Award. ''The Village Voice'' hosted a variety of writers and artists, including writer Ezra Pound, cartoonist Lynda Barry, artist Greg Tate, and film critics Andrew Sarris, Jonas Mekas and J. Hoberman. In October 2015, ''The Village Voice'' changed ownership and severed all ties with former parent company Voice Media Group (VMG). The ''Voice'' announced on August 22, 2017, that it would cease pu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Canyon Cinema
Canyon Cinema is an American nonprofit organization for distributing independent, avant-garde, and artist-made films. After starting in the 1960s as an exhibition program, it grew to include a nationwide newsletter and a distribution cooperative. Its exhibition activities were split off to form the San Francisco Cinematheque. History Canyon Cinema informally began in 1960 as an exhibition outlet in Canyon, California. Filmmaker Bruce Baillie got a projector and army surplus screen to put on shows in his backyard. Chick Strand and Ernest Callenbach became involved, and they began holding screenings around the Bay Area. Early programming included popular cinema, particularly from Castle Films, and avant-garde cinema but over time came to focus exclusively on the latter. Callenbach, an editor for ''Film Quarterly'', had the idea to publish a regular newsletter. The first issue of the ''News'' came in December 1962, and the publication later became the ''Cinemanews'' and the ''Canyon ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Film-Makers' Cooperative
The Film-Makers' Cooperative a.k.a. legal name The New American Cinema Group, Inc. is an artist-run, non-profit organization incorporated in July 1961 in New York City by Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Stan Brakhage, Lionel Rogosin, Gregory Markopoulos, Lloyd Michael Williams and other filmmakers for the distribution, education and exhibition of avant-garde films and alternative media. History In the fall of 1960, Jonas Mekas and Lewis Allen organized several meetings with independent filmmakers in New York City that culminated on September 28, 1960 with them officially declaring themselves the New American Cinema Group. Two days later on Sept. 30, Mekas presented the first draft of a manifesto for the Group, which included a call to form a cooperative distribution center. On January 7, 1961, at a contentious meeting of the Group, Amos Vogel attempted to stonewall the formation of the distribution center claiming that his own Cinema 16 organization should be the only distributor of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jonas Mekas
Jonas Mekas (; December 24, 1922 – January 23, 2019) was a Lithuanian-American filmmaker, poet, and artist who has been called "the godfather of American avant-garde cinema". Mekas' work has been exhibited in museums and at festivals worldwide. Mekas was active in New York City, where he co-founded Anthology Film Archives, The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, and the journal '' Film Culture''. He was also the first film critic for ''The Village Voice''. In the 1960s, Mekas launched anti-censorship campaigns in defense of the LGBTQ-themed films of Jean Genet and Jack Smith, garnering support from cultural figures including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag. Mekas mentored and supported many prominent American artists and filmmakers, including Ken Jacobs, Peter Bogdanovich, Chantal Akerman, Richard Foreman, John Waters, Barbara Rubin, Yoko Ono, and Martin Scorsese. He helped launch the writing careers of the critics Andrew Sarris, Amy Taubin, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Marie Menken
Marie Menken (born Marie Menkevicius; May 25, 1909 – December 29, 1970) was an American experimental filmmaker, painter, and socialite. She was noted for her unique filming style that incorporated collage. She was one of the first New York filmmakers to use a hand-held camera and trained Andy Warhol on its use. Her film '' Glimpse of the Garden'' was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. Early life Marie Menkevicius was born in Brooklyn, New York, on May 25, 1909, to Roman Catholic Lithuanian immigrant parents. She studied at the New York School of Fine and Industrial Arts as well as the Art Students League of New York and honed her craft as a painter. To support herself, she worked as a secretary at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum before receiving a scholarship from Yaddo and moving to upstate New York. Professional career Menken and her husband Willard Maas began a well-respected avant-garde art group known as The Gryphon Gr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Edie Sedgewick
Edith Minturn Sedgwick Post (April 20, 1943 – November 16, 1971) was an American actress and fashion model, known for being one of Andy Warhol's superstars.Watson, Steven (2003), "Factory Made: Warhol and the Sixties" Pantheon Books, pp. 210–217 Sedgwick became known as "The Girl of the Year" in 1965 after starring in several of Warhol's short films in the 1960s. She was dubbed an "It Girl", while ''Vogue'' magazine also named her a " Youthquaker". Sedgwick broke with Warhol in 1966, and attempted to forge an independent acting career. However, her mental health deteriorated from drug abuse, and she struggled to complete the semi-autobiographical film ''Ciao! Manhattan''. She gave up drugs and alcohol after meeting her future husband Michael Post, and completed filming ''Ciao! Manhattan'' in early 1971. Post and Sedgwick married in July 1971; she died four months later of an overdose at age 28. Early life and education Edie Sedgwick was born in Santa Barbara, California ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Claes Oldenburg
Claes Oldenburg (January 28, 1929 – July 18, 2022) was a Swedish-born American sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions of everyday objects. Many of his works were made in collaboration with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen, who died in 2009; they had been married for 32 years. Oldenburg lived and worked in New York City. Early life and education Claes Oldenburg was born on January 28, 1929, in Stockholm, the son of Gösta Oldenburg and his wife Sigrid Elisabeth née Lindforss. His father was then a Swedish diplomat stationed in New York and in 1936 was appointed consul general of Sweden to Chicago where Oldenburg grew up, attending the Latin School of Chicago. He studied literature and art history at Yale University [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ralph Steiner
Ralph Steiner (February 8, 1899 – July 13, 1986) was an American photographer, pioneer documentarian and a key figure among avant-garde filmmakers in the 1930s. Photographer Born in Cleveland, Steiner studied chemistry at Dartmouth, but in 1921 entered the Clarence H. White School of Modern Photography. White helped Steiner in finding a job at the Manhattan Photogravure Company, and Steiner worked on making photogravure plates of scenes from Robert Flaherty's 1922 ''Nanook of the North''. Not long after, Steiner's work as a freelance photographer in New York began, working mostly in advertising and for publications like ''Ladies' Home Journal''. With fellow graduate Anton Bruehl (1900–1982), in 1925, they opened a studio on 47th Street, producing a narrative series of amusing table-top shots of three cut‑out figures dressed in suits for ''The New Yorker'' magazine; advertisements for Weber and Heilbroner menswear in a running weekly series. Their client was wiped out i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol (; born Andrew Warhola Jr.; August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American visual artist, film director, and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, advertising, and celebrity culture that flourished by the 1960s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silkscreening, photography, film, and sculpture. Some of his best-known works include the silkscreen paintings '' Campbell's Soup Cans'' (1962) and ''Marilyn Diptych'' (1962), the experimental films ''Empire'' (1964) and ''Chelsea Girls'' (1966), and the multimedia events known as the '' Exploding Plastic Inevitable'' (1966–67). Born and raised in Pittsburgh, Warhol initially pursued a successful career as a commercial illustrator. After exhibiting his work in several galleries in the late 1950s, he began to receive recognition as an influential and controversial artist. His New York studio, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
