News

This is Part Two in a series about Chicago’s Experimental Film Coalition; and covers their screening series. You can read Part One here.

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.

Screenings were held at the Randolph Street Gallery, an alternative performance and exhibition space located at 756 N. Milwaukee Ave. The Gallery eventually closed down in 1998 and donated their archives to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; which exhibits some of the Coalition’s flyers on their website.

Below is a sample of screening information culled from those archives, listed in chronological order:

1984

March 23

2 Razor Blades, dir. Paul Sharits

Make Me Psychic, dir. Sally Cruikshank

Unsere Afrikareise, dir. Peter Kubelka

Roslyn Romance, dir. Bruce Baillie

Musical Poster #1, dir. Len Lye

April 27

Rainbow Dance,...

From September 16 through 29, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will be screening new restorations of all six films that make up Eric Rohmer's Moral Tales: The Bakery Girl of Monceau, Suzanne’s Career, My Night at Maud's, La collectionneuse, Claire's Knee and Love in the Afternoon. More goings on: Work by Curt McDowell and Tom Rubnitz, Derek Jarman's Will You Dance With Me?, David Miller's Sudden Fear with Joan Crawford in New York; The Monkees and Guillermo del Toro in Los Angeles; Rouben Mamoulian at Harvard; art inspired by Wes Anderson's films in San Francisco; remembering Abbas Kiarostami in Toronto; and a Mohsen Makhmalbaf series in London. » - David Hudson...

From September 16 through 29, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will be screening new restorations of all six films that make up Eric Rohmer's Moral Tales: The Bakery Girl of Monceau, Suzanne’s Career, My Night at Maud's, La collectionneuse, Claire's Knee and Love in the Afternoon. More goings on: Work by Curt McDowell and Tom Rubnitz, Derek Jarman's Will You Dance With Me?, David Miller's Sudden Fear with Joan Crawford in New York; The Monkees and Guillermo del Toro in Los Angeles; Rouben Mamoulian at Harvard; art inspired by Wes Anderson's films in San Francisco; remembering Abbas Kiarostami in Toronto; and a Mohsen Makhmalbaf series in London. » - David Hudson...

Photo by Sophie BeeIn the display window of a used record store, you can see covers for albums that don’t exist. They bear titles like Flaming Creatures or Heaven and Earth Magic, familiar to aficionados of experimental film, alongside lurid designs by local artist Tom Carey. This exhibit can mean only one thing: the film festival has come to Ann Arbor. Just down the block is the Michigan Theater, which has been operating since 1928. For one week every spring, its spacious main auditorium and cozy screening room host an intimidating array of avant-garde programming. The selections are eclectic in subject matter, submitted from all over the world, and interspersed with recently restored prints of older works. This practice means that no presentation is predictable. The only constant that carries across the festival is the artists’ collective push against the traditional boundaries of their medium.An example of this ethos...

Thundercrack!

Directed by Curt McDowell

Written by George Kuchar

USA, 1975

When one looks at the underground cult film scene of the 1960s and 1970s, the names Mike Kuchar and George Kuchar definitely come to mind. Twin-brothers who have spent the majority of their lives making short films, Mike and George utilized over-the-top titles and experimental storylines, all of the home movie variety shot on a rather “stylized” no-budget that Ed Wood would’ve been jealous of. Mike Kuchar’s work seemed to be inspired by pop genre films with a dash or two of wild fantasy: his best known film (well, best known in regards to the underground) is Sins of the Fleshapoids (1965), a trippy sci-fi/fantasy whatsit, all shot in color 16mm inside various rooms with limited art direction, utilizing dubbed-in narration and on-screen dialogue represented by optical cartoon-like speech-bubbles, and cribbing some music cues of Bernard Herrmann’s...

Curt McDowell and George Kuchar's comedy epic of oversexed sensationalists running amuck while trapped in a storm-battered house goes beyond strange. It's a legit experimental film but -- gasp! -- also 2.5 hours of hardcore porn and other forms of giddy depravity. A movie guaranteed to make conservative heads explode -- read with caution, please! Thundercrack! Blu-ray Synapse Films 1975 / B&W /1:33 flat full frame / 160 min. / Street Date December 8, 2015 / 39.95 Starring Marion Eaton, Melinda McDowell, George Kuchar, Mookie Blodgett, Ken Scudder, Bernie Boyle, Mark Ellinger, Laurie Hendricks, John Thomas. Cinematography & Film Editor Curt McDowell Makeup Mr. Dominic Original Music Mark Ellinger Written by Mark Ellinger, George Kuchar, Curt McDowell Produced by Charles Thomas, John Thomas Directed by Curt McDowell

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

*Not your usual Savant review.* As a student in the 1970s I worked as an usher at a couple of Filmex exhibitions at Grauman's Chinese. I then volunteered...

December 8th is a light week in terms of horror and sci-fi home entertainment releases, but for all you X-Philes out there, this Tuesday is pretty much like second Christmas, as 20th Century Fox is releasing The X-Files series in its entirety in a Collector’s Edition Blu-ray set (complete with a space for the upcoming TV event series in January).

Other notable titles being released this week include Knock Knock, Ant-Man, and the cult classics Thundercrack and Women’s Prison Massacre.

Knock Knock (Lionsgate Blu/Digital HD & DVD/Digital)

When a devoted husband and father is left home alone for the weekend, two stranded young women unexpectedly knock on his door for help. What starts out as a kind gesture results in a dangerous seduction and a deadly game of cat and mouse. A sexy new thriller from director Eli Roth, Knock Knock stars Keanu Reeves as the family...

Special Mention: Dressed To Kill

Directed by Brian De Palma

Written by Brian De Palma

1980, USA

Genre: Thriller

Brian De Palma’s films, like Tarantino’s, are a cinematic mash-up of influences from the past, and in De Palma case he borrows heavily from Alfred Hitchcock. Obsession is De Palma’s Vertigo, Blow Out his Rear Window, and with Dressed to Kill the director set its sights on Psycho. Dressed To Kill is more thriller than horror but what a stylish and twisted thriller it is! The highlight here is an amazing ten-minute chase sequence set in an art gallery and conducted entirely without dialogue. There are a number of other well-sustained set pieces including a race in the subway system and even, yes, a gratuitous shower murder sequence. Dressed To Kill features an excellent cast (Michael Caine, Nancy Allen, Angie Dickinson), a superb score (courtesy of Pino Donaggio) and...

The Royal RoadAttending the Ann Arbor Film Festival is a bit like stepping into a parallel universe. Here, dialogue and narrative lie on the margins, while abstract animation and ethnographic documentary take center stage. Absent are movie stars, paparazzi, and bidding wars; here, a “big name” is someone like Peggy Ahwesh or Lewis Klahr. It’s as if this one week in March at the historic Michigan Theater, just a couple blocks away from the University of Michigan campus, had been carved out of normal space-time and given over to the love of film as an art.At the Aaff, assumptions about 21st century moviegoing don’t necessarily hold water. Slates of short films dominate the festival’s schedule, and even the occasional feature tends to be paired with a short or two. Digital projection is hardly the default, and the sheer diversity of formats makes each program an object...

The Ann Arbor Film Festival celebrates its epic 53rd annual edition on March 24-29 with a colossal selection of experimental short films and features.

Feature film highlights include the documentary Speculation Nation by regular collaborators Bill Brown and Sabine Gruffat, which examines the recent Spanish housing crisis; a new ethnographic doc by Ben Russell, Greetings to the Ancestors, which plunges deep into the culture of South Africa; and Jenni Olson’s grand California study The Royal Road.

Short film highlights include the much anticipated new film by Jennifer Reeder, Blood Below the Skin, a narrative following a week in the dramatic and romantic lives of three teenage girls; a new music video by Mike Olenick called Beautiful Things with music by The Wet Things; new animations by Don Hertzfeldt, World of Tomorrow, and Lewis Klahr, Mars Garden; plus new experimental work by Vanessa Renwick, Peggy Ahwesh and Zachary Epcar.

Special...

On November 18 at the Academy Film Archive in Hollywood, California, Jeff Lambert of the National Film Preservation Foundation presented a selection of experimental films that will be included on the upcoming DVD box set Treasures VI: Next Wave Avant-Garde.

A follow-up to the hugely popular Treasures IV box set, which was released in 2009, the new Treasures VI will focus primarily on the so-called “second wave” of avant-garde filmmakers of the ’70s and ’80s, many of whom were taught and influenced by the “first wave” of filmmakers found on Treasures IV. As such, Treasures VI will include work by lesser known and appreciated filmmakers from a typically overlooked period in underground film history.

Lambert announced at the event that Treasures VI will include 33 films by 28 filmmakers, then proceded to screen six of those films. Those six were:

A Trip to Indiana, dir. Curt McDowell and Ted Davis

Plumb Line, dir. Carolee Schneemann

Radio Adios,...

Every year, we here at Sound On Sight celebrate the month of October with 31 Days of Horror; and every year, I update the list of my favourite horror films ever made. Last year, I released a list that included 150 picks. This year, I’ll be upgrading the list, making minor alterations, changing the rankings, adding new entries, and possibly removing a few titles. I’ve also decided to publish each post backwards this time for one reason: the new additions appear lower on my list, whereas my top 50 haven’t changed much, except for maybe in ranking. Enjoy!

****

Special Mention:

Shock Corridor

Written and directed by Samuel Fuller

USA, 1963

Shock Corridor stars Peter Breck as Johnny Barrett, an ambitious reporter who wants to expose the killer at the local insane asylum. To solve the case, he must pretend to be insane so they have him committed. Once in the asylum,...

Throughout the month of October, Editor-in-Chief and resident Horror expert Ricky D, will be posting a list of his favorite Horror films of all time. The list will be posted in six parts. Click here to see every entry.

As with all lists, this is personal and nobody will agree with every choice – and if you do, that would be incredibly disturbing. It was almost impossible for me to rank them in order, but I tried and eventually gave up.

****

50: Thundercrack!

Directed by Curt McDowell

Written by George Kuchar

1975, USA

Thunderstruck! is by far the most obscure film you will find on this list. It is without a doubt one of the true landmarks of Underground cinema. With a screenplay by veteran underground film maker George Kuchar (story and characters by Mark Ellinger) and directed Curt McDowell (than student of Kuchar),

Thundercrack! is a work of a crazed genius.

Since I skipped a links post last week due to other projects taking up my weekend, some of these are from awhile ago, but very, very worthy of a click:

Once again for this week’s Must Read, Mark Toscano has another amazing film restoration post up, this time discussing restoring two films by Will Hindle, Pastorale d’Ete (1959) and Later That Same Night (1971). This is an important article because, as Mark notes, Hindle’s place in the underground universe has been on a bit of a slide the past few years.If you’re interested in accurately archiving Shaw Brothers movie releases, then Temple of Schlock has the ultimate post for you.This interview on Experimental Cinema with German filmmaker Klaus Wyborny goes into fascinating depth on his theories of film construction.San Francisco’s Artists Television Access interviewed Chicago filmmaker/curator Amir George on his touring program called “Watch This!

Back in 2008, when Robert Nelson had just made some of his early films available again, most of them distributed by Canyon Cinema, Redcat staged a mini-retrospective in Los Angeles: "Known for prankster experimentalism and on-the-spot invention, the films of San Francisco native Robert Nelson are among the defining landmarks of the post-Beat American underground of the 1960s and 70s. His free-spirited approach, sharp wit, and artistic rigor marked inspired collaborations with William T Wiley, William Allan, Steve Reich, and the Grateful Dead, and helped shape a language and style for the burgeoning psychedelic culture."

Yesterday, Mark Toscano of the Academy Film Archive posted the news that Nelson had passed away at the age of 81: "So many filmmakers are filmmakers in some way or other because of Bob (among them Peter Hutton, Fred Worden, Chris Langdon, Curt McDowell, Mike Henderson, numerous others). Peter once told me that when he saw...

Fake Fruit Factory from Guergana Tzatchkov on Vimeo.

"Every year, Librarian of Congress James H Billington personally selects which films will be added to the National Film Registry, working from a list of suggestions from the library’s National Film Preservation Board and the general public," reports Ann Hornaday for the Washington Post. This year's list of 25 films slated for preservation:

Allures (Jordan Belson, 1961) Bambi (Walt Disney, 1942) The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953) A Computer Animated Hand (Pixar, 1972) Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment (Robert Drew, 1963) The Cry of the Children (George Nichols, 1912) A Cure for Pokeritis (Laurence Trimble, 1912) El Mariachi (Robert Rodriguez, 1992) Faces (John Cassavetes, 1968) Fake Fruit Factory (Chick Strand, 1986) Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) Growing Up Female (Jim Klein and Julia Reichert, 1971) Hester Street (Joan Micklin Silver, 1975) I, an Actress (George Kuchar, 1977) The Iron Horse (John Ford, 1924) The Kid (Charlie Chaplin, 1921) The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder, 1945) The Negro Soldier (Stuart Heisler,...

"At least one eternal truth can be abstracted from Dw Griffith's 1915 film The Birth of a Nation," proposes Dave Kehr in the New York Times: "people can be very, very advanced in some areas, and very, very backward in others…. Even now, in Kino International's fine new Blu-ray edition, The Birth of a Nation continues to thrill and confound, to exalt and appall in equal measure. Griffith's racial caricatures were crude in 1915; seen today, as the film approaches its 100th anniversary, these images may seem more ludicrous than dangerous (watermelon plays a major role), but in reminding us of how far we have come, they remind us how far we have yet to go. Paradoxically, the overriding theme of The Birth of a Nation is one of unification, of the harmonizing of diverse elements — social and regional, political and personal, North and South, male and female — into an original...

Underground film-maker with a bent for the tawdry and camp

If ever there were an exemplar of Susan Sontag's definitions of camp, it would be the work of the underground film-maker George Kuchar, who has died of prostate cancer aged 69. Although Kuchar was unknown to Sontag at the time she wrote Notes on Camp (1964), she could have been referring to his no-budget pictures with her general description of camp as being "serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious. The essence of camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. Camp sees everything in quotation marks. The ultimate camp statement is it's good because it's awful."

Around the time of Sontag's seminal essay, there emerged a series of influential "outrageous" camp films such as Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures (1963), which depicted a transvestite orgy, Andy Warhol's Blow Job (1963) and Kenneth Anger's gay biker movie...

The name George Kuchar (right, with Marion Eaton in Thundercrack!) will probably not ring a bell to the vast majority of moviegoers anywhere in the world. Yet, Kuchar, who died of cancer last night, September 6, directed more than 200 movies — mostly shorts and video productions — from the mid-1950s to the late 2000s. The New York-born (Aug. 31, 1942) Kuchar brothers' penchant for experimental, micro-budget underground films with bizarre plots and characters would inspire the likes of John Waters in the '70s. “The Kuchar brothers,” Waters wrote in the introduction to the Kuchars' memoirs Reflections in a Cinematic Cesspool, “gave me the self confidence to believe in my own tawdry vision.” Of course, whether or not that's a good thing depends on whether or not you appreciate Waters' "tawdriness." As for George Kuchar, among his efforts, solo or with his twin brother Mike Kuchar, are A Bathtub Named Desire (1956), The Naked and...

Scala Forever, London

For cineastes of a certain age, London's Scala cinema still symbolises a golden age of repertory, reaching its apex in the 80s when underground classics by Kenneth Anger, George Kuchar and Russ Meyer screened alongside imports from the likes of Paul Verhoeven, new films by Jim Jarmusch and silent milestones by Pabst and Murnau. This season scatters the Scala's legacy across the whole of London, beginning with the film that launched the cinema, King Kong, and ending with the film that, arguably, finished it – Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, finally shown legally under the Scala banner. The Scala's catholic mix of high art and low trash is represented by a wealth of titles, but few wave the flag as boldly as John Waters's Female Trouble (pictured) or Curt McDowell's Thundercrack, still shocking after 36 years.

Various venues, Sat to 2 Oct

Chichester Film Festival

The programme for...

Now this is what I always want to see more of: Filmmaker Chris Hansen started chronicling the shoot for his latest feature film, An Affair. He has several posts up, so I recommend going to his June blog archives to read up on how it’s going. (The shoot’s still in it’s very early stages.) I know blogging after a day of shooting probably sucks, but I love reading production diaries.In case you missed the fascinating recent dust up between the media advocacy group Reel Grrls and Comcast, Flip the Media has a great article on it, including the positive outcome of the whole thing.Usama Alshaibi’s Profane screened at the Chicago Underground Film Festival the other day and Ben Sachs has a capsule review of it in the Chicago Reader, which focuses on the film’s more lurid aspects.Speaking of Cuff, the Chicago Sun-Times...

The 24th annual Images Festival is once again overstuffed with experimental and avant-garde media goodness. From March 31 to April 9, Toronto will be overrun with film & video screenings, live cinema performances, artist talks, gallery installations, forum discussions and more.

The fest opens with Rivers and My Father — a documentary and fictional narrative blend that explores the family stories of filmmaker Luo Li — and ends with a live hardcore music soundtrack accompanying Todd Brown’s classic silent movie West of Zanzibar.

In between that, there are artist talks with John Gianvito, Paul Clipson, Mario Pfeifer, Beatrice Gibson, James MacSwain, Steve Reinke and others; several programs exploring the state of cinema in Africa; live cinematic performances by Andrew Lampert, Ellie Ga, Lindsay Seers, Icaro Zorbar and more.

Plus, don’t forget the experimental film & video screenings, including John Gianvito’s documentary essay Vapor Trails (Clark); and short works by Jodie Mack, Lewis Klahr,...

"Cinema has always been suffused with magic," writes Brecht Andersch, outlining some of the thoughts behind Bay Area Ecstatic, an evening of "mystically inclined experimental filmmaking that seeks to induce ecstasy in viewers," as Sfmoma phrases it. Andersch has been working on an oral history, An Ecstatic Cinema, that "will embrace many disparate modes of filmmaking — from whatever can be gleaned in the collective memory regarding the largely lost rhythmic abstract animations of hipster/trickster Hy Hirsch, to the outrageous, visionary camp absurdism of George Kuchar and Curt McDowell. [Tonight's] show focuses on several of the major figures of the Great 60s generation" — Kenneth Anger, for example, whose Invocation of My Demon Brother (1969, image above) is on the program — "and on a few of their key successors who came of age in the 90s."...

Oct. 12

7:30 p.m.

Light Industry

177 Livingston Street

Brooklyn, New York 11201

Hosted by: Light Industry

Restless nurses! Lovesick sheriffs! Sexed-up Girl Scout leaders! Lonely motel managers! And other degenerates populate George Kuchar’s early ’70s mock-Hollywood soap opera, The Devil’s Cleavage.

Ainslie Pryor stars as Nurse Ginger, who is stuck married to a total slob, so she takes to cheating on her hubby with anybody she cans. Eventually, she leaves home and becomes the object of obsession of a seedy Oklahoma motel manager played by Kuchar compatriot Curt McDowell.

The Devil’s Cleavage is one of Kuchar’s rare feature-length outings. The film is credited by its distributor, Canyon Cinema, as having been completed in 1973. While the film may have had screenings in that year and in 1974, it gained a wider release in 1975, perhaps to capitalize on the success of Thundercrack! the semi-pornographic cult comedy directed by McDowell and written and starring Kuchar.

David Cairns

The Forgotten: Remember

The Forgotten: Cold Warrior

The Forgotten: The Other Other House

The Forgotten: Girls on a Motorcycle

Adrian Curry

Movie Poster of the Week: The Alamo Roadshow Posters of Olly Moss

Movie Poster of the Week: The Movie Posters of Tom Whalen

Movie Poster of the Week: Iranian Cinema of the 60s and 70s

Movie Poster of the Week: "On the Bowery"

Doug Dibbern

For the Filming of Widescreen Snowscapes and Against the Interpretation of Dreams

Veronika Ferdman

Karlovy Vary 2010: A Bohemian Rhapsody

Matthew Flanagan

Image of the Day. Records of Material Objects in the Cinema #4

S. Hahn

Image of the day. Looming

Boyd van Hoeij

Venice 2010 Preview

Daniel Kasman

Mysterious Extracts from a Film's Subtitle Track

A Gentleman Prefers Friends

Image of the Day. Cinema Villains & Villainy #1

The McKay Way

Image of the Day. Frames We Love

Video Sundays. Cabaret Cinema

For The Icon,...

This week’s Must Read is an excellent profile of one of Bad Lit’s favorite fimmakers Usama Alshaibi, written by Ed M. Koziarski for the Chicago Reader. The article really captures Alshaibi’s growth as a film artist and his unique background that eventually led him to make the still-in-production documentary American Arab. Plus, a radio interview with Alshaibi for Wjjg. Second Must Read is Electric Sheep’s long, engaging interview with Peter Whitehead, who returns to film with Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts. Plus, the Sheep analyzes the new non-political U.S. war film genre. At long last, the great experimental media journal Incite! returns with its always insightful “back & forth” interview series. This time Penny Lane has tea and a very long and insightful chat with political animator Jacqueline Goss. Well, this is still relevant today and in the U.S.: Landscape Suicide...

Trembles is taking a well deserved two-week break from churning out new editions of his Motion Picture Purgatory so he sent over a blast from the past review of 1975's cult classic Thundercrack.

The black and white film, which was directed by Curt McDowell, is about a group of people who meet a mysterious woman at her foreboding home on one dark and stormy night. It's considered a highly controversial mix of horror, explicit sex, and amazing stylized photography.

For those whom Thundercrack has eluded all these years, you're in luck! Synapse Films will be releasing the flick later this year to coincide with its 35th Anniversary.

"Realism only comes to the screen when the film jams in the projector and the image begins to bubble" -George Kuchar

Discuss Motion Picture Purgatory in the Dread Central forums!

Genre DVD specialist Synapse Films has announced that it has begun the restoration of one of the most twisted midnight movies in cinema history, Curt McDowell’s 1975 Thundercrack!, for disc release to mark the film’s 35th anniversary next year. Set in an old dark house on a stormy night, the stylized black-and-white feature details the strange and explicitly sexual interactions between a number of over-the-top characters (including one played by underground film legend George Kuchar, who also scripted)…and a gorilla.

“Thundercrack! is a great film, and we are working with the director’s sister, and Thundercrack! actress, Melinda McDowell, to make sure the film is presented correctly, in exactly the way Curt would’ve wanted it released,” says Synapse’s Don May Jr. “We’ll be releasing the film in its restored, longer form, using the one and only original 16mm film print. And we’re loading it with extras,...