Underground: American Avant-Garde Film in the 1960s at Eye Filmmuseum

Did you ever dream about a place you never really recall being to before? A place that maybe only exists in your imagination? Some place far away, half remembered when you wake up. When you were there, though, you knew the language. You knew your way around. That was the sixties.... No. It wasn't that either. It was just '66 and early '67. That's all there was. — Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda) in The Limey (1999), written by Lem Dobbs, directed by Steven Soderbergh

Ten names, in order of disappearance: Hollis Frampton and Stan Vanderbeek (1984), Andy Warhol (1987), Shirley Clarke (1997), Stan Brakhage (2003), Bruce Conner (2008), Jonas Mekas and Carolee Schneemann (2019), Bruce Baillie (2020) and finally Gunvor Nelson, who died in January of this year. According to the curators at Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, these people collectively comprise the pantheon of “American Avant-Garde Film in the 1960s,” a (counter-)cultural cinematic movement commemorated at the institution from October 12th, 2024 to January 5th, 2025 via a two-pronged extravaganza “Underground.”

The umbrella title covered an exhibition in the main gallery at Eye — screening 16mm films digitally — which offered a helpful overview of (and introduction to) the subject, and, concurrently, a much more comprehensive 24-programme film series in its cinemas, which was equipped for 16mm. The screen programme's remit was (too?) wide, incorporating original works by artists associated with the 1960s avant-garde, documentaries and lectures on the theme — plus a somewhat superfluous sampling of films evoking and/or engaging with psychedelia and drug-assisted altered states (Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly, Ciro Guerra's Embrace of the Serpent, David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, etc.)

Unlike some film museums around the world — such as the Austrian Filmmuseum in Vienna, where the "exhibitions" only take place on the screen — Eye is an amphibious venue, its considerable size enabling it to host both months-long gallery exhibitions and daily film shows. This amphibiousness is mirrored by its design: crouching alongside the IJ channel that separates the main part of Amsterdam from its northern suburbs —criss-crossed by ferries departing every few minutes — this 13-year-old structure designed by Vienna-based firm Delugan Meissl resembles a colossal, stylised white frog. What it lacks in graceful form it makes up for in functionality. The four cinemas (one with 300 seats, two with 127 and a fourth with 67) were put to great use during International Documentary Festival Amsterdam, whose 2024 dates (November 14-24) enabled its attendees to sample the Underground show in-between festival appointments.

The Underground screening series began on November 12th with a showing of the 210-minute Chelsea Girls (1966) on 16mm, co-directed by Warhol and Paul Morrissey — 16 days before Morrissey's death, aged 86, in New York. One of only ten artists represented in both parts of Underground (their names listed above), Gunvor Nelson died in her native Sweden aged 93 on January 6th, only a few hours after the exhibition closed. Nelson was represented there by My Name Is Oona (1969) and Take Off (1972) and in the screen programme by Schmeerguntz (1967), co-directed by the still-with-us Dorothy Wiley. Her passing left only two artists surviving from the 16 featured in the exhibition, both Japanese women, both of them multi-media practitioners not principally known for their work in cinema: Yoko Ono (b. 1933), represented by three films running between 2 minutes and 6 minutes, made in 1966 and 1967, and Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929), who collaborated with Jud Yalkut on the 24-minute Kusama's Self-Obliteration (1967).

The inclusion of Ono and Kusama — ahead of more obvious eminences such as Tony Conrad, Ken Jacobs and Jack Smith, each of whom were represented in the screen programme via their most famous works (The Flicker, Blonde Cobra, Flaming Creatures) — enabled Underground curator Jaap Guldemond to neatly achieve an exact 50/50 gender split among the 16 artists represented in the exhibition. Indeed, all three of the filmmakers grouped at the entrance of the gallery under the heading “Pioneers” were women: Maya Deren (Ensemble for Somnambulists, 1951), Shirley Clarke (Bridges-Go-Round, 1958) and Marie Menken (Glimpse of the Garden, 1957) — this trio was cited as "paving the way for a new generation" who blossomed in the 1960s.

And while Menken's three films in the main body of the exhibition included the four-minute Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (1961), Anger himself was conspicuous by his absence: surprisingly, none of his 1960s works (Scorpio Rising [1963], Kustom Kar Kommandos [1965], Invocation of My Demon Brother [1969]) featured in either the exhibition or the screen programme. Was there perhaps some kind of legal obstacle or rights issue? Was it the same situation with the likewise-MIA Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie's Beat Generation classic Pull My Daisy (1959), or did Guldemond impose a strict chronological parameter on this 1960s show? (The inclusion of Nelson's Take Off suggests not.)

The lack of Anger was even more baffling when juxtaposed with the presence in the exhibition of works by the relatively obscure Storm de Hirsch (two-screen projection Third Eye Butterfly, 1968) and the inclusion in the screen programme of Agnès Varda's feature-length fiction Lions Love (. . . and Lies) (1969) — in this particular context a relatively conventional affair whose “underground” credentials depend mainly on the presence in front of the camera of Warhol superstar Viva and Shirley Clarke.

Perhaps the most unfortunate omission in an otherwise exhaustive survey was William Greaves' enduringly seminal 75-minute Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, made in 1968 (although not widely screened until 1971.) Greaves — who died in 2014 — was by far the most high-profile Black filmmaker in the US avant-garde scene at this period; without him, Underground was a decidedly white affair, although of course far from "white bread" given the diversity of the still-provocative radicalism on view everywhere one looked.

The US avant-garde of the 1960s was less a school than a shoal comprising numerous different species, unified mainly by their avoidance of the cinematic mainstream — its fecundity very much a byproduct of its heterogeneity (many of its eminences, from Ukraine-born Deren to Lithuanian-SSR escapee Mekas, hailed from overseas.) The exhibition space was thus an arena of sensory bombardment, with several sound films playing at the same time — though thankfully sufficiently far apart to prevent significant overlap. The funky score of Kusama's Self-Obliteration contributed a welcome, steady background-buzz of upbeat excitement, in counterpoint to the hypnotically repetitive-minimalist soundtrack of My Name is Oona, arranged by Steve Reich. Speaking of repetitive loops, the exhibition's films were digitally-projected dozens of times each day onto the white walls of the gallery, whose floor space included several glass-topped display cases full of paraphernalia and memorabilia connected with the films and their original screenings in venues such as Mekas' Film-makers’ Cinematheque (and later Anthology Film Archives) and Amos Vogel's Cinema 16.

All of the films shown in the exhibition were shorts, with two notable exceptions. Mekas' 180-minute Walden (Diaries Notes and Sketches) (1969) was shown as a triple-screen installation. Trading on the fact that Warhol was by far the best-known name in the show, the curators — taking a cue from the way supermarkets position their milk — located his Empire on the furthest wall from the entrance. There it played in its 485-minute entirety each day during the opening hours (10am - 7pm): this fixed, unblinking monochrome survey of the Empire State Building, forbiddingly remote and monumental as a Tibetan monastery.

Anyone wishing to spend the whole day with Empire had to bring their own chairs, the exhibition lacking same — a curatorial decision which encouraged visitors to drift from film to film, as if surveying paintings on a gallery wall. Only two artists were accorded the privilege of having their work screened in separate spaces: a small box room accessed by a glass door hosted two shorts by Bruce Conner, while a bigger ante-room a few metres away was filled with Stan Vanderbeek's sprawling multi-media installation Movie Mural (1965-68). 

The latter was an instantly engaging and cumulatively rewarding assault on the senses —one from which many visitors (myself included) found it hard to tear themselves away — achieved with multiple projectors and screens arrayed in delightfully ragtag fashion across a dozen metres of space. Originally made for the display of 16mm and 35mm materials, this iteration was of course almost entirely digital. But like nature, analogue finds a way — here via that most archaic-seeming of 1960s technologies, the humble slide-projector.

The other outstanding discovery of the Underground exhibition was lurking in the Conner Box, whose confines effectively amped up the intensity of the two films showcased therein. Looking For Mushrooms is a delirious example of psychedelia-infused, explosive virtuosity, a Mexico-on-LSD travelogue of mosaic fragmentation and organisation, originally made between 1959 and 1967. Conner updated the film in 1996 by replacing the original soundtrack with “Poppy Nogood and the Phantom Band,” "a saxophone-based drone piece featuring tape loops and edits, drawing on Riley's all-night improvisatory performances in the 1960s." Excellent on their own, the two elements fuse magnificently and elevate Looking For Mushrooms to masterpiece level. It nevertheless remains relatively little-known in comparison to Conner's long-pantheonised landmarks such as A Movie (1958) and the other Conner Box inclusion, Report (1963-67), his still-bracing encapsulation of the intersection between media and politics as seen through the lens of the John F. Kennedy assassination.

And while — along with his irresistibly-magnificent Cosmic Ray (1969) and the propulsive Breakaway (1967) — A Movie disappointingly did not make it into either Underground strand (too early?), Report showed up in both the exhibition and the screen programme. It popped up in the latter via a special Election Night programme on November 5th. 

The outcome of that election doubtless deeply dismayed the vast majority of those who attended Underground. But it is nevertheless to be hoped that the exhibition and screen programme's energetic streaks of rebellion and resistance can inspire both artistic and political radicalism in the tough years ahead — among filmmakers and the public alike.