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 […]

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 a letter dated June 1, 1962, the newly formed Film-Makers’ Cooperative offered their first list of films that were available to rent. Fourteen filmmakers were represented.

1963 was a pivotal year in the history of avant-garde film in the United States. In Visionary Film, P. Adams Sitney calls it “the high point of the mythopoeic development within the American avant-garde.”

In 1966, as the underground film wave was sweeping the country, a Boston off-shoot of New York City’s Film-Makers’ Cinematheque opened at a performance space at 53 Berkeley Street. Underground films were shown on weeknights, while on the weekends the space transformed into a music venue called The Boston Tea Party.

The National Film Preservation Foundation and The Film Foundation have awarded their annual Avant-Garde Masters Grants for 2012, which will save films by Mike Kuchar, Ian Hugo, Jud Yalkut and more.

Here’s the list of all 330 films included in the Anthology Film Archives’ Essential Cinema repertory collection that was founded in 1970.

Here’s a list of filmmakers that author Sheldon Renan wrote bios for in his seminal ’67 book An Introduction to the American Underground Film.

Jan. 16: Anthology Film Archives is screening the dream-like Vampyr, the 1931 trance film by Danish director Carl Theodore Dreyer.

Oct. 25: For the first time ever, Robert Beavers will be in Los Angeles to screen several of his short films produced between 1980 and 2007.