Program 10: Downtown Counternarratives

Snapshots of the City
Stan VanDerBeek, 1960, 6m

Store Days I and II
Raymond Saroff, 1961, 16mm, 14m

Doomshow
Ray Wisinski, 1960, 16mm, 10m

Fugs: Sights and Sounds of the Lower East Side Rain Forest
Edward English, 1966, 16mm, 13m

Places
Marjorie Heins, 1969, 16mm, 8m

A firm highlight of The Film-Makers’ Cooperative’s collection is the sheer number of works that partake in, document, and celebrate the other arts. This selection of films roams across the 1960s to explore a variety of novel activities emerging from the world of avant-garde art in New York during this period. Beginning with a brace of evocative documents of Pop Art and Happenings pioneer Claes Oldenburg’s storefront and Judson Church performances, we also dive into the activities of the antinuclear NO!art Movement in Doomshow, which follows the deinstallation of a raucous, ephemeral show of sculptural installations. Edward English made a number of films about the outer reaches of the popular and experimental music revolutions taking place in the city during the 1960s, and his film about poet, musician, publisher, and all-round avant-garde impresario Ed Sanders and his protopunk rock outfit The Fugs, Fugs: Sights and Sounds of the Lower East Side Rain Forest, captures the band during the burgeoning days of NYC hippiedom.

Cut from a similar cloth is Chilean filmmaker Jaime Barrios’s personal look at Enrique Vargas’s Guerilla Theater, This Is Not a Demonstration. Concluding this program is a virtually unseen short experimental documentary by Marjorie Heins, Places, which strikes an ethnographic tone undercut by a searing and indignant political anger. Places is best described through Heins’s own words: “A call to overthrow the existing social structure in the form of a montage of New York’s Lower East Side, subways, bridges, and Fifth Avenue ruling-class glitter. Included is some wistful footage of a farmhouse in Trumansburg, New York. A soundtrack of selections from the World Almanac—statistics of Welfare, U.S. corporate profits, territorial conquests, etc.—produces an extremely jarring effect.”
Sunday, May 5 at 8:30pm