Page 25 - Studio International - November December 1975

close. The Drury Lane Arts Lab opens with Peter
Goldman's Echoes of Silence — a disastrous flop. In the
shift between the two locations our audience undergoes
a subtle change. The student and post-student informed
art followers who formed the clientele at Better Books
are outnumbered in Drury Lane by a younger, music-
orientated audience, brought together by IT and UFO,
and to them the underground film rightly belongs. Since
the Arts Lab is open 6 days a week, the cinema schedule
is filled out with camp and classic features, open
screenings and a once-a-week co-op show. When the
co-op screenings ended, the proportion of underground
movies remained the same, increasing with the arrival of
further film-makers, The two major additions to our
repertory in '67/68 (both via commercial distributors)
were Warhol's 2-screen Chelsea Girls and Anger's
shot a foot of film in England. (When Yoko Ono surfaces
a year later with her bottoms film No. 1, she is lumped by
the press into the same category ; thereafter press silence
on the subject of the underground film till Muehl 'kills'
his chicken ...) But the popular notion is not entirely
false. By late spring '67 Matusow, Dwoskin, Latham,
Stacy Waddy, Roland Lewis, Les Philby and Paul Francis
are all ostensibly at work on film ; even Ray Durgnat is
secretly shooting ; and I am showing loops and
scissors-and-tape collages (very sub-Conner) to the
largest audience the underground film ever had, that is,
at the UFO Club.
American visitors to the co-op and UFO during '66 and
'67 included Bill Vehr with his Jack Smith-likeAvocado
and Brothel, and Warren Sonbert. Vehr's work is striking
in its abolition of editing ; bodies writhed ('as if born to
writhe' wrote Smith), the camera started and stopped
apparently at random. No-one is precisely sure of its Poster designed by Brigid Peppin
intention. Sonbert shows his juvenilia Where Did Our
Love Go ?, Amphetamine, Hall of Mirrors, part The Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, both of which
psychodrama, part diary, part adoption' (in parentheses) were received as drug culture movies and attracted
of Hollywood cliché. More important, he appeared as a capacity audiences. In the mounting hysteria the Living
walking demonstration of the intuitive use of camera we Theatre came to London, Warhol appeared and
later saw in the work of Mekas, Brooks and Brakhage ; he announced his intention to show all future work at the
shot wherever he went, always with an unerring sense of London Pavilion (an ambition ironically fulfilled some
purpose and with an apparent ability to bypass the years later by Morrisey), and Antonioni, Tynan, Pinter
appalling responsibilities of setting up a shot. Nobody and Princess Margaret commanded performances of
worked like that in England. Flaming Creatures. More significantly, the first phase
Late Spring '67. Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures of co-op film-making ended with the showing of Lewis's
Short Film, Waddy's 3 Pig Poems amd Latham's Speak
and Talk. Of the original group, only Dwoskin was to
continue making films.
December '67/January '68. Exprmntl 4 at Knokke.
Cobbing, Collins (co-op secretary), Dwoskin, Hartog,
Latham, Haynes (arts lab) and I are the only English
underground personae present; Latham and Dwoskin the
only film-makers. Latham's Speak is acclaimed by the
French critics; Dwoskin wins the Solvay Prize; but the
festival is dominated by Markopoulos and two new
figures, Mike Snow and Paul Sharits. (Kren is conspicuous
by his absence). Markopoulos impresses through sheer
force of technique ; his ability to keep his static,
meticulously lit tableaux alive through bursts of cross-
cutting ; his synthesis and condensation of the codes of
narrative cinema. Of the work of Sharits and Snow, the
most radical feature seemed to be one already implicit
Jack Smith Flaming Creatures 1963 in Markopoulos, a realization that the New American
Cinema, contrary to our previous conviction, was not
is shown at the UFO Club, burdened with awe-inspiring exclusively concerned with psychodrama and aesthetic
tales of perversion and prosecution. (Our first reference subversion. Here were two didactic but distinctly
work—Alpert and Knight's 'Survey of the underground constructive speculations about possible forms in cinema.
avant-garde' in Playboy— has just hit the stands.) That Almost incidentally they seemed to share a respect for
Smith's concept of editing, framing and the organization colour as an autonomous element in film, and a concern
of 'action' on the screen constituted a radical innovation for the integrity of the materials involved, that wrongly or
was immediately apparent, heightened if anything by rightly allowed us to construct analogies with
recent exposure to the altogether 'tamer' Vehr. But our contemporary painting. From Europe the films of Werner
enthusiasm was expressed almost entirely in terms of Nekes and Dore 0 were the clearest evidence of any
Flaming Creatures's subversive content, the degree to possible parallel development. (Markopoulos visited
which it defied the accepted aesthetic and moral codes London in June, Snow in August/September, Sharits not
of cinema. It was acclaimed as evidence of one man's till September 1970).
cerebral and sexual emancipation ; that it was also Spring '68. Malcolm Le Grice comes to the Drury
ravishingly beautiful to look at (even reactionarily so, Lane Arts Lab sometime in January or February to show
I've recently heard said) largely evaded us. me his film Castle 1 (dating from 1966). Malcolm's only
September/October '67. Better Books is forced to previous contact with the co-op group had been at a
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