In the middle of the twentieth century, particularly in the United States, there was a very clear divide between the mainstream and the avant-garde in cinema. While the modernist obsession with abstraction and experimentation swept the other arts, making celebrities out of artists who defied or reinvented conventions, when it came to movies, you either told a story - with a budget and release schedule provided by the Hollywood system - or you disappeared into the margins. Yet talent thrived on those margins and the postwar era saw the growth of a vital underground cinema, fostered and facilitated by institutions like Amos Vogel's Cinema 16, an inexpensive film society in New York (Vogel and his views of cinema will be the subject of the next installment in this series, going up Sunday evening).
Three figures - Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage - probably had a bigger impact and wider reach than any others, and so here I will focus on three of their early works: Deren's At Land (1944), Anger's Scorpio Rising (1964), and Brakhage's Cat's Cradle (1959).
