According to Jonas Mekas‘s diaries, on May 17, 1961 he was contacted by Jerome Hill about the Spoleto Festival in Italy. Hill had convinced the festival’s organizer, Gian Carlo Menotti, to include a section on the New American Cinema for that year’s edition to be held in June and July. Mekas declined to participate, as […]

The third annual New York Film Festival Downtown was once again organized and presented by filmmakers Tessa Hughes-Freeland and Ela Troyano in 1986. In the festival’s program notes, the pair continued to bemoan the lack of attention given to Lower East Side filmmakers in their own city: Three years later the situation remains virtually unchanged […]

The Surf Theatre in San Francisco was a beloved independent movie theater located at 4520 Irving Street, just a few blocks from the Pacific Ocean. In the 1960s, the Surf jumped on the underground film bandwagon, occasionally screening the typical “midnight movies” shorts programs of the time; as well as sprinkling in feature-length underground cinema […]

Filmmakers Tessa-Hughes Freeland and Ela Troyano founded the New York Film Festival Downtown in 1984. In the program for the second annual edition in 1985, they laid out the need for such an event: “Most films made in this society fall into two categories: those financed and marketed commercially, and their counterparts in the arts […]

Jonas Mekas (1922 – 2019) accomplished much in his long life. And that’s not just in the realm of underground film! Mekas practically lived a lifetime under Nazi rule before reluctantly coming to the United States in 1949. At the Underground Film Journal, we love our timelines, so we’ve decided to maintain this list of […]

The November 12, 1958 edition of The Village Voice featured the first installment of the column “Movie Journal” by Jonas Mekas. “Movie Journal” would become what the Underground Film Journal would argue was the most significant organizing tool of avant-garde cinema created by Jonas, even more so than the Film-makers’ Cooperative and the Anthology Film […]

Underground Cinema 12 was a midnight movie screening series of underground films that ran in theaters owned by Louis Sher, who founded “the nation’s largest circuit of art houses” in 1954. While Sher was the head of the Art Theatre Guild, Underground Cinema 12 was run by his nephew Mike Getz. The series began at […]

Beginning in the early 1960s, one of the main venues where audiences could watch underground films outside of New York City was the midnight movie screening series called Underground Cinema 12.

In 1997, the Chicago Underground Film Festival held its fourth annual edition and published a four-page pull-out section in the Chicago-based political magazine Lumpen.

Jonas Mekas’s “Movie Journal” column in the Village Voice was the main organ promoting experimental and avant-garde cinema in the early 1960s. A survey of the column from that time period has shown that Mekas did not use the term “underground film” very frequently.