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 […]

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 […]

The National Film Preservation Foundation has awarded their annual Avant-Garde Masters Grants, to films by Tommy Turner, Julie Murray and more to be preserved.

Red Spirit Lake is psychotronic filmmaker Charles Pinion’s second feature film, shot entirely on video in the early ’90s and featuring several superstars of the Cinema of Transgression movement, such as Richard Kern and Tessa Hughes-Freeland. The film — available on DVD from the filmmaker — is a wildly evolutionary step up from Pinion’s first […]

Watch the first music video ever produced for Sonic Youth, “Death Valley 69,” which is co-directed by Richard Kern, one of the leading figures of the Cinema of Transgression movement.

Feb. 18 & 19: This 2-day event features films by Cinema of Transgression leaders Nick Zedd and Richard Kern, plus a live performance by Lydia Lunch.

Watch a classic interview from 1986 conducted by Cassandra Stark with Richard Kern, two stars of the Cinema of Transgression movement.

I’ve uncovered the lineup of the first ever Chicago Underground Film Festival, held back in 1994 and which had a very transgressive bent.

The Lausanne Underground Film Festival is screening films by Alison Murray, Brian Lonano, Craig Baldwin, Jonas Mekas, Peter Whitehead, Richard Kern and more.

Underground film scholar Jack Sargeant says his classic text on the Cinema of Transgression movement, Deathtripping, is coming out with a new edition.