Underground at Eye Filmmuseum

Amsterdam - The Eye Filmmuseum brings a homage to American Avant-Garde Films from the 1960s with their new exhibition Underground, consisting of a fascinating display of the movement’s history, film screenings, talks and special events.

Written by Rafaëlle van Nispen

Stan VanderBeek

Movie Mural (1965-1968) Estate of Stan VanDerBeek

© Hans Wilschut for Eye Filmmuseum

What is a film when you leave out the story and the characters? What is left when the only thing you see is light, darkness, color and movement? Eye Filmmuseum's new exhibition Underground provides a dive into a fascinating era within film history, while connecting it to our current political issues and film landscape. “This is one of the most important exhibitions for Eye”, the director of exhibitions, Jaap Guldemond, states in his welcoming word to the gathered journalists. The initiative for the exhibition started as a collection of 1920s filmliga leftovers, a group of Dutch filmmakers that strived for film as art. The ‘ligisten’ joined the international avant-garde movement that started in the roaring twenties in Europe. It took over forty years for the movement to reach overseas, to the United States.

Experiment

Eye Filmmuseum puts the spotlight on the American avant-garde cinema of the sixties. “It’s also a homage to our own history as Eye”, elaborates Guldemond. Shortly after the Second World War, the films of the Filmliga ended up in the archives of the Nederlands Historisch Filmarchief, the precursor of the Filmmuseum. “But mostly it’s about the experiments of the avant-garde in which the medium of film was used for artistic expression, and the mixing of the disciplines in film and visual arts.”

The activists of the avant-garde

Underground shows how filmmakers protested against mainstream cinema that was dominated by Hollywood. “The sixties were turbulent times with politics everywhere and nowhere to escape it”, director of Eye Bregtje van der Haak says. The 1960s were a period of global unrest with the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement reshaping society. “The avant-garde artists experimented with film as an act of activism. The films made in this period deny the social structure of the time. It is historical material that is still relevant today, because it’s about issues that are still going on, like war, racism, stuck gender roles and how artists relate to this world.” With their experimental films, the makers tried to break free from cinematographic conventions, looking to renew by using a lot of light sensitivity, grain and color saturations. Other experimental filmmakers mostly played with the medium film, searching for an alternative for the prevailing visual culture.

Empire

Andy Warhol (1928 - 1987) is probably the most famous member of the avant garde. His 8-hour long film Empire (1965) can be watched in full at Underground, but it’s possible to walk in and out of the cinema hall as you please. Warhol was already established as a visual artist and a commercial illustrator for advertisements. With this he is characteristic for the avant-garde filmmakers, because they all started as poets, visual artists or painters. 

Andy Warhol, Empire, 1964

16mm film, black-and-white, silent, 8 hours 5 minutes at 16 frames per second

© The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, PA, a museum of Carnegie Institute. All rights reserved. Film

still courtesy The Andy Warhol Museum

Friends of the avant-garde cinema

Jonas Mekas (1922 - 2019), considered one of the pioneers of the underground film movement, plays a significant role in the exhibition. Mekas was born and raised in Lithuania and fled to New York at the end of the Second World War. He started writing film criticism and founded Film Culture, the first American magazine devoted to film. A lot of copies from the magazine can be found at Underground, together with publicity pictures with Film Culture readers, the filmmakers newsletter, Mekas’ ‘unchained letter to all friends of the avant-garde cinema’, his correspondence with other filmmakers, his curriculum vitae and multiple versions of his lifetree. 

‘Boring’

Mekas’ 1961 manifesto for the New American Cinema Group is a great example of the spirit of resistance. Mekas, along with other filmmakers, rejected the constraints imposed by Hollywood’s commercialized industry, proclaiming that "all over the world, cinema is running out of breath” and that the films of that time were ‘temporarily boring’. Mekas and other avant-garde filmmakers didn’t trust any classical principles, rejected interference of producers and distributors, and pleaded for good, internationally marketable films that could be made on a budget to displace the idea of earning money as a goal.  

© Rafaëlle van Nispen. Editions of Film Culture. Exhibition Underground at Eye Filmmuseum 2024. 

Film is life

Mekas’ work, such as Lost Lost Lost, uses personal archive footage to blend documentary with a poetic sense of time, memory, and exile. His first script was rejected in 1951, showing that the pioneering of the avant-garde filmmakers didn’t always come easy. Mekas' advocacy for a cinema that is deeply personal is crucial to understand the avant-garde movement. For these makers, making films was an unconditional necessity and this belief maintained importance for Mekas until his death in 2019. In Mekas’ first film Walden: Diaries, Notes and Sketches (1969) you hear him say: “cinema is light, movement, heartbeat, breathing, life, frames.” 

Jonas Mekas, Walden, 1968

© Jonas Mekas, courtesy of Re:Voir

Weapon

The film programmer of Eye admires the special generation of artists for their courage. “The work of these makers is about how they could use their camera as a weapon to break the current power structures”, Anna Abrahams says. “They wanted to prove that they didn’t need to be a part of the commercial film industry to make an impact, something that still concerns contemporary filmmakers.” The film programmer wished that she was there to witness the avant-garde movement coming together. “There must have been so much vibrant energy. A new language was discovered and film was alive again. The avant-garde was screaming that things had to change. They didn’t have an answer on how that would be, but they were searching for it.” Abrahams also emphasizes how the avant-garde movement created a moment of emancipation. “There can be a lot of female artists found in Underground.” Director Maya Deren (1917-1961) was one of the pioneers. Her Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) still sets a benchmark for American avant-garde cinema. “These women didn’t get into Hollywood, but with the avant-garde they had a chance.”

Films and guests

In addition to the archival material and sequences of beautiful and innovative films being shown at the exhibition (which can be visited with or without a tour guide), fifty films are presented at the cinema hall of Eye. All the analoge films and the longer ones (like Empire, Lost, Lost, Lost and the documentary In the Mirror of Maya Deren) can be watched there. For those seeking some deepening and broadening of the subject, nineteen guest (speakers?) will be a great addition to their visit. They will discuss topics ranging from the makers, other trends within the avant-garde, events that went on in other countries and other art forms in the ‘60s, to how we can translate the American avant-garde films to today's political, sociocultural and artistic climate.

Election night

Even during the American election night on November 5th, multiple speakers will explore how the underground scene created discussion of political issues and how that connects to our own political climate. Those who crave music other than silence, early electronic or asian music of the avant-garde, can be satisfied by the psychedelic film - an important theme in the America of the sixties and a genre that is having a true revival.