actor profiles
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Experimental & Avant-Garde
in issue 66
Film and Film and Film: An Interview with Jonas Mekas
"One who knows how to, as they say, 'read' the images, can tell everything about me."
By Jon Lanthier
in issue 64
Opposition Compositions: Treasures IV: American Avant Garde Film 1947-1986 on DVD — "Avant garde filmmaking has been defined almost entirely in opposition to the Hollywood mainstream."
in issue 63
Lysergic Landscapes: John Maybury's Read Only Memory — "Story, characters, and other reassuring elements are simply obliterated by what appears to be Maybury's quite elaborate private mythology."
in issue 58
"Ode to a Nectarite Harvest": On Brand Upon the Brain! — Maddin at his most masochistic — and magical
in issue 57
Close to Home: The Films of Su Friedrich on DVD — Autobiography sometimes trumps art in these uneven works
The Valorized Artist: Incorporation into the "Perpetual Art Machine" [PAM] — Art for [PAM]'s sake
in issue 53
Abstract Film Palimpsests: On the Work of Rey Parla — pa·limp·sest: n., Writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased; something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface (Webster's)
in issue 49
Isolating Isolationism: Recent INDEX Releases from the Austrian Avant-Garde — Part 1: Austrian Exhibitionists
Crossing the Bridge: Jenni Olson's The Joy of Life — Navigating a haunted, and haunting, world
Bobby Abate — Naked rough trade, sleepy rimmers, a man licking a modem — these are some of the denizens of Abate's sensual, skewed world
in issue 45
Ai-yi-yi, Robots! Survival Research Laboratories: Ten Years of Robotic Mayhem on DVD — A Cruel and Rebellious Plot to Pervert the Minds of Viewers to Unholy Uses
in issue 44
"Too Busy Making Work": Honoring Michael Snow at the 2004 Thessaloniki Film Festival — Painter, photographer, sculptor, composer, musician — and here, seminal experimental filmmaker
American Apocalypse: Craig Baldwin's Spectres of the Spectrum — "An infinite number of possible worlds . . . and this is the worst one."
in issue 39
An Appraisal of the Films of William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Anthony Balch, in Terms of Recent Avant Garde Theory and History — Those crazy "cut ups" Burroughs, Gysin, and Balch restored to their rightful place in avant garde film history
in issue 38
An Actionist Begins to Sing: An Interview with Otto Mühl — "I have been making art for 50 years and have never allowed myself to be corrupted. Quite the opposite, I was locked up." (Otto Mühl)
in issue 37
Diamonds in the Toilet: Andy Warhol's The Chelsea Girls — Warhol's trashy, timeless "girls" come a-callin'
in issue 34
Snapshots from Hell: Richard Kern, The Hardcore Collection on DVD — Kern's trashy teens fight and fuck their way through an incomprehensible world
in issue 32
Private Eye: Abigail Child in Brief — Child’s compulsive visual collages are visual and aural legerdemain
in issue 30
Tableaux Vivant: Lawrence Jordan — Jordan’s collage films are "moving" in two senses
Brief Candles: Warren Sonbert in Retrospect — The work of an avant-garde master now restored
in issue 29
Wasted: Ian Kerkhof in Brief — Underground cinema's baddest bad boy
Raging and Flaming: Jack Smith in Retrospect — New York’s pioneering campmeister
Home Movies from Hell: The Films of Luther Price — The master of Super-8 cinema takes us into the cave of the unknown, with extraordinary results
Lawrence Brose’s De Profundis — Oscar Wilde’s infamous letter from prison becomes a springboard for a surreal queer experience
in issue 28
Secrets of the Shadow World — George Kuchar scrutinizes sasquatch droppings and outer space
Three Films by Richard Dindo — A look at Ernesto Che Guevara: The Bolivian Diary, Grüninger’s Fall, and Arthur Rimbaud: A Biography
in issue 27
Laughing Pan: James Broughton — Ecstasy for all! says the pied piper of queer experimental film.
in issue 26
The Day the Bronx Invaded Earth: The Life and Cinema of the Brothers Kuchar — Major figures in the American Underground film movement of the 'sixties, George and Mike Kuchar are the acknowledged pioneers of the camp/pop aesthetic that would influence practically all who came after them, from Warhol and Waters to Vadim and Lynch.
in issue 25
Compulsive Repetitions: Short Works by Martin Arnold — Martin Arnold's short black-and-white experimental films restore much of the novelty, terror, and humor of early cinema. Using elaborate optical and aural manipulations, he turns scenes from old Hollywood movies into hilariously weird, black-comic nightmares.
Andy Warhol rarities — What do Edie Sedgwick, Hedy Lamarr, Mary Woronov, and a pack of queer cowpokes have in common? Andy Warhol, natch.
in issue 24
Behind the Mask: Sadie Benning's Pixel Pleasures — Sadie Benning has been a cause celebre in the queer community for almost a decade. Born in 1973 to a filmmaker father and an artist mother, she began making short films at age 15 and two years later came out as a lesbian. An iconoclast even as a teen, she employed the infamous "Pixelvision" camera in most of her early work and continues to use it.
Andy Warhol — Warhol's high standing as a visual artist and cultural icon has overshadowed his radical work in the cinema, but the recent emergence of many of his early films may change some of that.
"Sorry! It Had to Be Done!" Radical Actioner Kurt Kren
Called the "father of postwar European avant-garde cinema" and regarded in some circles as the continental equivalent of America's Stan Brakhage, Kurt Kren (1929–1998) was an unlikely pioneer. A bank cashier by trade and by all accounts rather elfin, charming, and unassuming in manner, his films predate and predict many of the strategies of present-day radical art.
"My Penis! Where Is My Penis?" John Greyson's Uncut — The man who gave us Urinal and Lillies now turns his playful eye on circumcision, copyright, and Pierre Trudeau.
Mike Hoolboom's Panic Bodies — The tragedy of the temporal dominates the work of this gifted Canadian experimental filmmaker.
in issue 22
Oskar Fischinger's Visual Music — By 1935, the films of avant-garde animator Oskar Fischinger were being shown on cinema screens and at film festivals throughout the world as the last word in modernism.
in issue 20
Gregory Markopoulos: Seconds in Eternity — How does it happen that a filmmaker once lauded as "the American
avant-garde cinema's supreme erotic poet" vanishes entirely from the cultural landscape? Gregory Markopoulous was complicit in his own disappearance from the histories of modern art and cinema, where by any reasonable standard he belongs in the very forefront.
in issue 21
Queer Innovators — The six-part Queer Innovators series at the 1998 San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival highlights the queer contribution to experimental film for the last seven decades.
Barbara Hammer's Tender Fictions — Barbara Hammer is best known for her groundbreaking experimental film Nitrate Kisses (1992), which fearlessly broke two taboos by showing older lesbians in extended erotic embrace, all in richly detailed black and white. Hammer has been making films since the 1970s (she was one of the inspirations for Word Is Out), and wanted to create her autobiography "before someone else does it." Tender Fictions (1995) is the result — a playful, imaginative, penetrating description of an artist's life.
