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 […]

Jan. 25: New screening and art space Microscope Gallery presents Nick Zedd in person to show several of his most controversial movies.

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

Here are more reviews of short films from the 3rd Austin Underground Film Festival, including ones by Andrew Perkowski and Don Hertzfeldt.

Naked Lens, Jack Sargeant’s take on how the Beat literary movement influenced underground film, happily veers off the well-trodden film history path.

The third Austin Underground Film Festival is screening films by Andre Perkowski, Don Hertzfeldt, Leah Meyerhoff, Jay Hollinsworth, Jon Clark and more.

Soft Skull Press has reissued an amazing new edition of Jack Sargeant’s history of the influential Cinema of Transgression movement of the ’80s.