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 […]

In December 1954, Jonas Mekas and his brother Adolfas published the first issue of Film Culture magazine. Initially hostile to American avant-garde filmmaking, the magazine eventually evolved into the avant-garde’s greatest champion in print.

In 1983, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, along with Media Study/Buffalo, created a touring retrospective of avant-garde films, primarily feature-length ones and a few shorts, which they called “The American New Wave 1958-1967.”

In the Spring of 1964, Los Angeles theater manager Michael A. Getz was arrested and placed on trial for screening Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising. Here are several articles the Underground Film Journal has found that follow the progression of the case.

Underground film actor and poet Taylor Mead has passed away at the age of 88 after suffering a debilitating stroke. He starred in The Flower Thief and Tarzan and Jane Regained.. Sort of.

Underground filmmaker Adolfas Mekas has passed away at the age of 85. He is most well known for the screwball comedy Hallelujah the Hills.

Watch a madcap 6-minute excerpt from the 1963 underground film classic Hallelujah the Hills directed by Adolfas Mekas. It’s pretty funny.

A 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science-Fiction features a skeletal Jonas Mekas hovering over his dashing brother Adolfas Mekas piloting a spaceship.

Notable underground films in 1972 were John Waters’ Pink Flamingos, Robert Downey Sr.’s Greaser’s Palace; plus Kenneth Anger published his own obituary.

Back on Sept. 28, 1960, film diarist Jonas Mekas organized a meeting of the world’s best underground filmmakers to form the historic New American Cinema Group.