James Benning is an independent filmmaker from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Over the course of his 40-year career Benning has made over twenty-five feature-length films that have shown in many different venues across the world.
An underground film is a film that is out of the mainstream either in its style, genre, or financing.
Isaac Julien, CBE is a British installation artist and filmmaker.
Jon Moritsugu is an American cult-underground filmmaker. His movies are satiric, protopunk deconstructions of popular genres and formats with scabrous and pointedly garish results. The New York Times describes them as "funny, anarchic, provocative and exhilarating". Influenced by the nihilism of Jean-Luc Godard and Guy Debord, Moritsugu's films are often defined by their "lo-fi" aesthetic and were initially shot on 16mm film for a gritty, visceral quality. He states that he often "pay(s) less attention to narrative flow and storyline and put(s) more emphasis on sight, sound and spectacle" to create a movie that is "like a live punk/hardcore show." The works themselves are often absurdist comedies that feature actress, co-writer, stylist, and wife, Amy Davis. Perhaps best known for his cult film Mod Fuck Explosion, Moritsugu's films have been screened at Sundance, Cannes, Berlin, Toronto, Rotterdam, Venice, New York Underground, Chicago Underground, MoMA, Guggenheim, Whitney and numerous other festivals and museums. In 2001 he received the Moving Image award from Creative Capital.
No wave cinema was an underground filmmaking movement that flourished on the Lower East Side of New York City from about 1976 to 1985 and in Uganda from 2005-2017, most famiously No Wave has shown up online is guerrilla film-makers who make 15-120 second movies that highlight political and societal unrest and inequality. Sponsored by and associated with the artists group Collaborative Projects or "Collab", no wave cinema was a stripped-down style of guerrilla filmmaking that emphasized mood and texture above other concerns -- similar to the parallel no wave music movement.
Gwendolyn Audrey Foster is a prolific filmmaker and film scholar with a focus on numerous areas related to cinema; these often include gender, race, ecofeminism, queer sexuality, eco-theory, and class studies in film. From 1999 through the end of 2014, she was co-editor along with Wheeler Winston Dixon of the Quarterly Review of Film and Video. In 2016, she was named Willa Cather Endowed Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
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.
Film Comment is an arts and culture magazine now published by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, of which it is the official publication. Film Comment features reviews and analysis of mainstream, art-house, and avant-garde filmmaking from around the world. Founded in 1962 and originally released as a quarterly, Film Comment began publishing on a bi-monthly basis with the Nov/Dec issue of 1972. In 2007, the magazine was awarded the Utne Independent Press Award for Best Arts Coverage. The magazine's editorial team also hosts the annual Film Comment Selects at the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
La ciénaga is a 2001 Argentine, Spanish, and French film, written and directed by Lucrecia Martel in her feature directorial debut. The film was executive-produced by Ana Aizenberg, Diego Guebel, Mario Pergolini, and produced by Lita Stantic. It features Graciela Borges, Mercedes Morán, Martín Adjemián and Daniel Valenzuela, among others.
Amy Taubin is an American film critic. She is a contributing editor for two prominent film magazines, the British Sight & Sound and the American Film Comment. She has also written regularly for The Village Voice, The Millennium Film Journal, and Artforum, and used to be curator of video and film at the non-profit experimental performance space The Kitchen.
Christabel is a 2001 avant-garde experimental film directed by James Fotopoulos and based on the unfinished poem of the same name by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Luther Price is an experimental filmmaker.
The Millennium Film Workshop is a non-profit media arts center and cinema located in the Bushwick neighborhood of the New York City borough of Brooklyn. It is dedicated to the exhibition, study, and practice of avant-garde and experimental cinema. It was also where the St. Mark's Poetry Project began. Ken Jacobs stated in 2013 that he chose the name Millennium "...because it would have to be that to actually give out equipment, education, space to work in, etc. for free. Dictionary definition: 'A hoped for period of joy, serenity, prosperity and justice.' "
Tessa Hughes-Freeland is a British-born experimental film maker, writer living in New York City. Her films have screened internationally in North America, Europe and Australia and in prominent museums and galleries, including the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York; and the KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin. She has collaborated on live multi-media projects with musicians like John Zorn and J. G. Thirlwell. She and Ela Troyano co-founded the New York Film Festival Downtown in 1984 and served as its co-directors until 1990. Hughes-Freeland later served as President of the Board of Directors of the Film-Makers Co-Operative in New York City from 1998-2001. She has published articles in numerous books, including “Naked Lens: Beat Cinema” and “No Focus: Punk Film,” and in periodicals including PAPER Magazine, Filmmaker magazine, GQ, the East Village Eye, and Film Threat.
Sheila McLaughlin is an American lesbian feminist director, producer, screenwriter, actor, and photographer. She wrote and directed the controversial film, She Must Be Seeing Things (1987). Her debut feature film, Committed (1984), which she co-directed with writer Lynne Tillman, is an experimental narrative of the life of Frances Farmer, shot on a very low budget of $45,000. McLaughlin's films have been described as presenting "a grasp of a developing new feminist language of cinema."
Letter in Motion to Gilles Jacob and Thierry Frémaux is a 2014 short film directed by Jean-Luc Godard. It was made as a personal video letter to retiring festival president Gilles Jacob and artistic director Thierry Frémaux explaining Godard's absence from the 2014 Cannes Film Festival for the premiere of his feature film Goodbye to Language. Jacob later release the short film on the internet. In the short film Godard's narration explains his personal state of mind as an artist and the current "path" that he is on. It includes footage from Godard's films Germany Year 90 Nine Zero and King Lear, quotes by Jacques Prévert and Hannah Arendt, and black and white still photos of Jacques Rivette and François Truffaut as Godard references the autumn and says that he is going "where the wind blows me." In King Lear Godard filmed a similar scene that included black and white still photos of film directors like Rivette and Truffaut, but Godard mocked the then recently deceased Truffaut in that film.
Travis Wilkerson is an American independent film director, screenwriter, producer and performance artist. Named the "political conscience of 21st century American independent cinema," by Sight & Sound magazine, Wilkerson is heavily influenced by the Third Cinema movement, and known for films that combine "maximalist aesthetics and radical politics." This is owed, in part, to his meeting Cuban filmmaker Santiago Álvarez. Following the meeting, Wilkerson made the feature documentary Accelerated Under-Development about that meeting, and he was heavily involved in the rediscovery of Alvarez's films.
Jim Sikora is a Chicago-based filmmaker best known for his underground feature films WALLS IN THE CITY, which starred Paula Killen, Bill Cusack, Tony Fitzpatrick, and David Yow of the band The Jesus Lizard with a soundtrack by The Dennison Kimball Trio, BULLET ON A WIRE, starring Jeff Strong, Paula Killen, Lara Phillips, David Yow, Richard Kern, and ROCK & ROLL PUNK which featured members of Husker Du, Tortoise, and Slint. Jim Sikora's films and videos have aired on MTV's 120 MINUTES to PBS's IMAGE UNION. His film “Bullet on a Wire” was shown in 18 film festivals in the US, including the Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Munich International Film Festival, and in London at the ICA as part of the American Underground Cinema program line-up. Sikora has also had successful theatrical runs of his pictures in New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
