Blazes is one of Breer’s most well-known films and was created using 100 cards painted with “with bold, free-drawn shapes and rough calligraphic lines,” as described in Visionary Film by P. Adams Sitney.

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 […]

One of filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek’s most famous articles is “The Cinema Delimina” published in the Summer 1961 edition of Film Quarterly (vol. XIV no. 4), in which he is the first person to use the term “underground” to refer to what was then mostly referred to as “experimental cinema.”

This is Part Two in a series about Chicago’s Experimental Film Coalition; and covers their screening series. Formed in 1983, the Experimental Film Coalition started holding regular monthly screenings starting in 1984. The screenings brought to Chicago the work of independent, experimental filmmakers across the country, as well as screening local work.

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.”

The 6th annual Migrating Forms returns to the BAMcinématek in Brooklyn, NY on Dec. 10-18 for a week of new and classic experimental media, including a William Greaves documentary retrospective.

Jan. 21, 1968: This condescending article belittles several underground films that have achieved classic status since, such as Blazes and Christmas on Earth.

The 50th anniversary of the Ann Arbor Film Festival includes a major retrospective of Bruce Baillie, a Craig Baldwin lecture, and tons of films by George Kuchar, Jodie Mack and more.

Robert Breer, the pioneering experimental animator, passed away on Aug. 12. He was either 84 or 85 years old.

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