Underground Film Yearbook: 1973
This is the third entry in my series of the underground film scene of the ’70s. You can follow the series here.
1973 was a big year for Stan Brakhage. As far as I can figure, he completed just four films in ’73, but two major events occurred for him. One, he was awarded a Brandeis Citation. Second, editor Annette Michelson devoted the entire January issue of Artforum to both Brakhage and Sergei Eisenstein.
Michelson herself wrote an influential piece on Brakhage called “Camera Lucida/Camera Obscura.” Senses of Cinema calls the piece “among the most eloquent and profound theoretical accounts of Brakhage’s achievement.”
I’m not sure if the following is the full list of other articles on Brakhage, but here’s the titles of the other pieces I found: “Stan Brakhage: Four Films” by Paul Arthur; “Scenes from Under Childhood” by Phoebe Cohen; “Stan and Jane Brakhage, Talking” by Hollis Frampton and “‘Western History’ and ‘The Riddle of Lumen'” by Fred Camper.
The only underground film festival I could find screening in ’73 was the Festival of Independent Avant-Garde Film, which ran Sept. 3-16 in London. While I don’t have a list of the films that screened, the site LUX Online has the program guide’s introduction as both a scan and re-typed for the web. Here’s the opening couple of sentences, which I really like:
No label has been found that will satisfactorily cover that area of film known variously as ‘underground’, ‘avant-garde’, ‘experimental’ and ‘independent’. However what has been discovered is that this sort of film, in all the extremely different forms it takes, is now truly here to stay. Not only was the ‘underground’ not a temporary aberration but people are grudgingly having to recognise that it is a movement from which have emerged some of the most important film-makers of the last decade.
Yes, the underground was “here to stay,” although trying to find information about what was going on in the underground scene in the ’70s is extremely difficult, which is what gave me the idea to do this Yearbook series in the first place. As for this particular festival, the only filmmakers listed in the intro as screening there are Ken Jacobs and George Landow. I’m extremely curious now to know who else they would have considered significant. Also, the catalog intro was co-written by Simon Field and David Curtis. Two years earlier, Curtis had his book Experimental Cinema: A Fifty Year Evolution published.
In the “midnight movie” arena, Alejandro Jodorowsky followed up his wildly successful El Topo with The Holy Mountain. Also, Paul Morrissey directed Flesh for Frankenstein, a campy horror flick produced by Andy Warhol that was released in 3-D.
Born in 1973 were Matt McCormick; future filmmaker and founder of the Peripheral Produce DVD distribution label and the PDX Film Festival; and Sadie Benning, daughter of experimental filmmaker James Benning, a future filmmaker herself, and a member of the post-riot grrl band Le Tigre.
Below is the list of films that I compiled with an official release date of 1973, organized alphabetically by director’s last name. This isn’t meant to be a complete list, but just what I could find so far on the Canyon Cinema and Film-makers’ Cooperative‘s online catalogs, plus a few other random sources. If anyone has a film to add, along with proof of year of completion, please leave a comment below.
This being the third list I’ve produced, I still haven’t studied them in detail other than just typing up the data. However, it’s starting to feel that for each year the list has gotten much longer than the previous one.
Norman R. Abrams: Sideissue
Rudy Albers: Cycle
Yvonne Andersen: Yellow Ball Cache
Kenneth Anger: Lucifer Rising
Ralph Arlyck: An Acquired Taste
Natural Habitat
Sean
Charles Atlas: Walkaround Time
Frederick Bailey: Monster Movie
Physiognomy
Tony Bannon: Baroque Variations
Citizens of What Country
Rainlight
James Benning: 57
Honeyland Road
Les Blank: Dry Wood
Hot Pepper
Stan Brakhage: Sincerity I
Gift
The Women
Sexual Meditation: Open Field
Bill Brand: Demolition of a Wall
Touch Tone Phone Film
Robert Breer: Fuji
James Broughton: High Kukus
Rudolph Burckhardt: Caterpillar
Slipperella
Silvestre Byrón: Allan Poe: La Casa Usher
El último corto
Las chicas de Flores
James Cagle: Matrix
Waterwork
Pola Chapelle: How to Draw a Cat
Doris Chase: Sculpture on the Move
Squares
Tom Chomont: Re: Incarnation
Karl Cohen: Ralph’s Busy Day
Roy Colmer: Metamorphosis
Arnold Eagle: Noguchi: A Sculptor’s World
Ed Emshwiller: Chrysalis
William Farley: Sea Space
Morgan Fisher: Picture and Sound Rushes
Colen Fitzgibbon: Found Film Flashes
Focus Pocus Film Squad: An Open Letter
Hollis Frampton: Less
Nostalgia (Hapax Legomena I)
Freude: My Life in Art
Women & Children At Large
John Gati: Emotions at Sunset
Peter Gidal: Room Film 1973
Myrel Glick: XXXXXXX
Silvianna Goldsmith: The Transformation of Persephone
Bette Gordon: Michigan Avenue (Made with James Benning.)
Larry Gottheim: Horizons (Elective Affinities, Part 1)
Nancy Graves: Aves: Magnificent Frigate Bird, Great Flamingo
Amy Greenfield: Element
George Griffin: Trikfilm 1
Trikfilm 3
Red Grooms: Hippodrome Hardware
Walter Gutman: The Very Brief Romance of Barbara Frietchie and Stonewall Jackson
Robert Haller: Notes on the Buffalo Conference: “Autobiography in American Independent Cinema”
Amy Halpern: Peach Landscape
Barbara Hammer: Sisters!
Leonard M. Henny: Getting It Together
Isa Hesse-Rabinovich: About a Tapestry
Storm De Hirsch: Lace of Summer
Wintergarden. Hudson River Diary Book: III
River Ghost. Hudson River Diary Book: IV
September Express
Louis Hock: Zebra
Doloris Holmes: Room of the White Mask
Takahiko Iimura: + & – (Plus and Minus)
1 To 60 Seconds
Tom Jancar: Four Stages of Cruelty
Jim Jennings: Proximity
Larry Jordan: Orb
Marjorie Keller: The Outer Circle
She/Va
Chester Kessler: Columbarium
Alexis Krasilovsky: Charlie Dozes Off & the Dog Bothers Him
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
Guerrilla Commercial
James Krell: The Shoreline of China
Daina Krumins: The Divine Miracle
George Kuchar: The Devil’s Cleavage
Owen Land: Thank You Jesus for the Eternal Present
Maria Lassnig: Self Portrait
Dave Lee: Duskly Driven Drift
Elixer of Growth
Fish of the Helix
One to One
Seeds of Sky
Swimmer
Saul Levine: The Big Stick
Note to Erik
Travel Note and Sketch
Michael Lovell: Birds of Paradise
Fredric Martin: In the Beginning
Sublimated Birth
Pamela Mayo: Emouna
Anthony McCall: Line Describing a Cone
Curt McDowell: A Night With Gilda Peck
Richard Meltzer: Cots for Sleeping Six Abreast
Tom Palazzolo: Love It/Leave It
Suzan Pitt: Jefferson Circus Songs
Lawrence Rice: Work in Progress
Alister Sanderson: Birdfilm
Moving Life
Ralph Schreiber: Framework
Paul Sharits: Axiomatic Granularity
Daniel Singelenberg: Another Shot
John Smith: The Hut
Words
H.C. Solomon: The South Street Seaport Museum
Tyler Turkle: Spider – 71-50
Jon Voorhees: Whispers Delaying Grace
Michael Wallin: Sleepwalk
Peter Whitehead: Daddy (co-directed with Niki de St. Phalle)
Charles Wright: Surprised
Jud Yalkut: China Cat Sunflower
John Cage Mushroom Hunting in Stony Point
Slop Print
Greg Yaskot: July 1973 TV Images