An underground film is a film that is out of the mainstream either in its style, genre or financing.
Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many experimental films, particularly early ones, relate to arts in other disciplines: painting, dance, literature and poetry, or arise from research and development of new technical resources.
The Collective for Living Cinema was an outpost of avant-garde cinema located on White Street in Lower Manhattan in the United States. It regularly presented work by filmmakers such as Ken Jacobs, Nick Zedd, Johan van der Keuken, Yvonne Rainer, Christine Vachon, Dziga Vertov, and many others who created films that were outside of the commercial mainstream in the United States. It also published a number of scholarly journals on film. Many of the founders studied film at Binghamton University together, where they developed a particular interest in the avant-garde.
Paracinema is an academic term to refer to a wide variety of film genres out of the mainstream, bearing the same relationship to 'legitimate' film as paraliterature like comic books and pulp fiction bears to literature.
Anthology Film Archives is an international center for the preservation, study, and exhibition of film and video, with a particular focus on independent, experimental, and avant-garde cinema. The film archive and theater is located at 32 Second Avenue on the southeast corner of East 2nd Street, in a New York City historic district in the East Village neighborhood of Manhattan.
Structural film was an avant-garde experimental film movement prominent in the United States in the 1960s and which developed into the Structural/materialist films in the United Kingdom in the 1970s.
Jordan Belson was an American artist and abstract cinematic filmmaker who created nonobjective, often spiritually oriented, abstract films spanning six decades.
Wavelength is a 1967 Canadian-American short subject by experimental filmmaker and artist Michael Snow. Considered a landmark of avant-garde cinema, it was filmed over one week in December 1966 and edited in 1967, and is an example of what film theorist P. Adams Sitney describes as "structural film", calling Snow "the dean of structural filmmakers."
Flaming Creatures is a 1963 American experimental film directed by Jack Smith. The film follows an ensemble of drag performers through several disconnected vignettes, including a lipstick commercial, an orgy, and an earthquake. It was shot on a rooftop on the Lower East Side on a very low budget of only $300, with a soundtrack from Smith's roommate Tony Conrad. It premiered April 29, 1963 at the Bleecker Street Cinema in Greenwich Village.
P. Adams Sitney, is a historian of American avant-garde cinema. He is known as the author of Visionary Film, one of the first books on the history of experimental film in the United States.
Zorns Lemma is a 1970 American structural experimental film by Hollis Frampton. Originally starting as a series of photographs, the non-narrative film is structured around a 24-letter classical Latin alphabet. It remains, along with Michael Snow's Wavelength and Tony Conrad's The Flicker, one of the best known examples of structural filmmaking.
Storm de Hirsch (1912–2000) was an American poet and filmmaker. She was a key figure in the New York avant-garde film scene of the 1960s, and one of the founding members of the Film-Makers' Cooperative. Although often overlooked by historians, in recent years she has been recognized as a pioneer of underground cinema.
Hapax Legomena is a seven-part film cycle by American experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton. The complete cycle premiered in November 1972.
The Film-Makers' Cooperative is an artist-run, non-profit organization founded in 1961 in New York City by Jonas Mekas, Andy Warhol, Shirley Clarke, Stan Brakhage, Jack Smith, Lionel Rogosin, Gregory Markopoulos, Lloyd Michael Williams, and other filmmakers, for the distribution, education, and exhibition of avant-garde films and alternative media.
Robert Carlton Breer was an American experimental filmmaker, painter, and sculptor.
Leslie Thornton is an American avant-garde filmmaker and artist.
Sally Foy Dixon was an American arts administrator, curator, and advocate of American experimental film and filmmakers. She was a Film Curator at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from 1970 to 1975 and interim director of Film in the Cities in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from 1978 to 1979. She also served as Director of the Bush Foundation for Artist Fellowships from 1980 to 1996 and was a consultant for the Pew Charitable Trusts, The MacArthur Foundation, the Herb Foundation, and the Leeway Foundation.
The Centre for Experimental Art and Communication (CEAC) was a Canadian artist-run centre that developed out of the Kensington Arts Association (KAA) [1973-1978] in 1976 as a multimedia space that provided an important venue for experimental and avant-garde art in Toronto, Ontario and beyond. CEAC was the first ever multi-media centre owned and operated by an artist-run centre in Toronto and the largest non-institutional art space during its time. The centre engaged with artists, musicians, and activists from across North America through organized exhibitions, in addition to hosting video production facilities, workshops, screening, and performance series'. CEAC encouraged artist-to-artist communication and provided a platform for Canadian artists to expand their knowledge through international tours. The centre was also home to the radical art magazine Art Communication Edition, later renamed STRIKE. Despite its success as an artist-run centre from 1976 through to 1978, CEAC was disbanded in the summer of 1978 following scandal and the withdrawal of government funding from the Ontario Arts Council
Bradley Eros is an experimental film director, actor, curator, poet, and performance artist who also makes Musique concrète sound collages, music videos, photographs, live projection performances, works on paper and art objects.
Anticipation of the Night is a 1958 American avant-garde film directed by Stan Brakhage. It was a breakthrough in the development of the lyrical style Brakhage used in his later films.
Ken Jacobs, personal communication to P. Kingsbury, August 2013)
