Celebrating the publication of Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop. Tonight's event will feature a book signing beginning at 7:00pm, followed by a program of 16mm short films and a Q&A with J. Hoberman.
About the book:
Like Paris in the 1920s, New York City in the 1960s was a cauldron of avant-garde ferment and artistic innovation. Boundaries were transgressed and new forms created. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and the alternative press, Everything Is Now chronicles this collective drama as it was played out in coffeehouses, bars, lofts, storefront theaters, and, ultimately, the streets.
The principals here are penniless filmmakers, jazz musicians, and performing poets, as well as less classifiable artists. Most were outsiders at the time. They include Amiri Baraka, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Carolee Schneemann, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, and many more. Some were associated with specific movements (Avant Rock, Destruction Art, Fluxus, Free Jazz, Guerrilla Theater, Happenings, Mimeographed Zines, Pop Art, Protest-Folk, Ridiculous Theater, Stand-Up Poetry, Underground Comix, and Underground Movies). But there were also movements of one. Their art, rooted in the detritus and excitement of urban life, was taboo-breaking and confrontational.
As J. Hoberman shows in this riveting history, these subcultures coalesced into a counterculture that changed the city, the country, and the world.
About the program:
The Whirled (aka Four Shorts of Jack Smith) (Dir. Ken Jacobs, 1961, 16mm, 19 min)
The Whirled comprises four short films: Saturday Afternoon Blood Sacrifice, 1956; Little Cobra Dance, 1956; Hunch Your Back, 1963; and Death of P'Town, 1961. Says Ken Jacobs: "The first two shorts were shot around Jack’s loft on Reade Street on two 100′ rolls in an impromptu way very different from my initial fastidious art-film approach. I would never be an art-film true-believer again. After years of shooting my raging epic Star Spangled to Death starring Jack as The Spirit Not of Life But of Living, and after a few months of being on the outs with each other, we got together for one last stab at friendship and at another film in Provincetown, Summer 1961."
Senseless (Dir. Ron Rice, 1962, 16mm, 28 min)
Consisting of a poetic stream of razor-sharp images, the overt content of Senseless portrays ecstatic travelers going to pot over the fantasies and pleasures of a trip to Mexico. Highly effective cutting subtly interweaves the contrapuntal development of themes of love and hate, peace and violence, beauty and destruction. One of just four films made by Rice during his short lifetime (like Jean Vigo, he died at 29), Senseless won a filmmaker’s award at one of the Charles Theater’s monthly showcases for local avant-garde artists.
New York Eye and Ear Control (Dir. Michael Snow, 1964, 16mm, 34 min)
A 34-minute abstraction made in collaboration with Joyce Wieland and Paul Haines that combines live 16mm footage with a cutout of a woman’s silhouette and a free jazz score by Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, John Tchicai, Roswell Rudd, Gary Peacock, and Sonny Murray. While many audience members reacted negatively to Snow’s film when it first screened in Toronto, Andy Warhol and Gerard Malanga were impressed upon the film’s New York premiere, and it has since become one of Snow’s best-known works. —Matt McKinzie, Filmmakers' Coop
D. M. T. (Dir Jud Yalkut, 1966, 16mm, 3 min)
A psychedelic short film by Jud Yalkut based on Jackie Cassen’s light show. Slides by Jackie Cassen. Choreography by Mary McKay and danced by her. Sound: Bach, The Beatles, and the voice of Ralph Metzner reading a "Psychedelic Prayer" by Timothy Leary. Filmic translation of the first multi-media presentation of Jackie Cassen and Rudi Stern, originally premiered at the Bridge Theater in New York in the spring of 1966.
About the author:
J. Hoberman was for over three decades a film and culture critic for The Village Voice. His previous books have explored the subculture of midnight movies, the rise and fall of Yiddish-language cinema, the international Communist avantgarde, SoHo performance art, and the underground filmmaker Jack Smith. His “found illusions” trilogy—which includes The Dream Life, Make My Day, and An Army of Phantoms—used Hollywood to refract the history of the Cold War.
TRT: 84 min
In person: J. Hoberman
"[Everything Is Now is] a work of obsession and devotion that finds a distinctive and original form—a hectic informational voracity—for its passionate archivism... as jubilantly overstuffed as its subtitle." —Richard Brody, The New Yorker
"A serious effort of research, reporting, and criticism written with the enthusiasm of a fan, Everything Is Now feels like the culmination of a life’s work, the New York book that Hoberman was born to write." —Andrew Marzoni, The Nation
"Ron Rice's images in Senseless become linked in a golden chain, and like the words of a poem they quarrel, dispute and seek their meaning through the joyous encounter of light upon imprisoned celluloid." —Gregory Markopoulos, "The Golden Poet"
"The shorts included in The Whirled are so entrenched in their happenin’ east coast place and time as to be certifiably Beat-infused works. These films take a stylistic leap from the the street-level home movie aesthetic of 1955’s Orchard Street." —Jim Tudor, Zekefilm
"One of the major achievements of the sixties... As in no other film yet seen, [New York Eye and Ear Control's] alternately soft and granite images lift us toward the year 2000; capturing not events, not objects, but again and again registering a ‘placement’ of consciousness—the subject matter of the future, really. Human energy on film.” —Richard Foreman, Filmmakers' Coop
(Available to download after screening date)