Reading Response 5

J. Hoberman, Jonathan Rosenbaum, The Underground

1. What were some of the venues associated with the early underground film movement in New York City? What were some of the unique characteristics of the Charles Theater and its programming?

Fashion Industries Auditorium, The Charles, The Thalia, The New Yorker, The Bleeker Street Cinema. The Charles Theater was more “seedy” than the other ones where the high class mixed with the lower classes. They also often played Ukranian films that were extremely popular, and started the cult tradition of midnight screenings.

2. Which filmmakers did Jonas Mekas associate with the “Baudelairean Cinema”? Why did Mekas use that term, and what were the distinguishing characteristics of the films?

Flaming Creatures, The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man, Blonde Cobra, and Little Stabs at Happiness were associated with “Baudelairean Cinema”. He used that term because Baudelaire was a writer who helped to revolutionize world literature a century prior, and these films were “the real revolution in cinema” of that time. These films were not afraid to delve into delicate and dirty things, perversity, and they were without sexual inhibitions or inhibitions of any kind.

3. Why did underground films run into legal trouble in New York City in 1964? What film encountered legal problems in Los Angeles almost on the same day as Mekas’s second arrest in New York City?

Underground films ran into trouble in NYC in 1964 because NYC was trying to clean up it’s act for the 1964 World’s Fair. Scorpio Rising encountered legal problems in LA the same day as Mekas’ second arrest in NYC.

4. What were some of the defining characteristics of Andy Warhol’s collaboration with Ronald Tavel? What were some of the unique characteristics of Vinyl? How does Edie Sedgewick end up "stealing" the scene in Vinyl?

Warhol’s collaborations with Tavel culminated in actors who didn’t know their lines, were afraid of being in front of the camera, came and went whenever they wanted, all while the camera was pointed in their general direction and ran until the film ran out.

Vinyl, extremely loosely based on the novel A Clockwork Orange, was shot in real time with a single camera setup, performers read lines from cue cards. Edie Sedgewick stole the scene by simply being “spaced out” and present consistently at screen right to add to compositional balance.

5. In what ways did the underground film begin to "crossover" into the mainstream in 1965-1966? What films and venues were associated with the crossover? How were the films received by the mainstream New York press?

Warhol’s, My Hustler, was to be his first popular success and was showed in midnight screenings at the Cinematheque. Then Chelsea Girls came out, and Newsweek called it “The Illiad of the underground” while the New York Times said Warhol was “pushing a reckless thing too far”. The Film-Makers’ Cinematheque was the main venue associated with the crossover, because it was too small to hold the number of people who wound up wanting to see Chelsea Girls. It then moved to theaters like The Regency and the Cinema Rendezvous. Chelsea Girls also played in LA, Dallas, Washington, San Francisco, Buffalo, Cambrige, Houston, Atlanta, and St. Louis, as well as being invited to the Cannes Film Festival.

6. Why was John Getz an important figure in the crossover of the underground?

Getz packaged programs of underground films and sent them to a circuit of movie houses owned by his uncle in 22 cities. They were immensely popular, and Getz is credited for introducing underground cinema to the American heartland.

7. How do Hoberman and Rosenbaum characterize Warhol’s post-1967 films?

None of them were again truly directed by Warhol after his attempted assassination, and they began to turn a lot more pornographic.