Description: This is a no-budget surrealist film that invites us to question male sexuality and the role of men in the nurturing/reproductive process.
DIRT (Piero Heliczer, USA, 1965, 16mm)
Description: "Its beauty is very personal and lyrical. And every frame of it is cinema. I can do not justice to this beautiful work in one paragraph. It was shot on 8mm and much of its beauty and its cinema come from 8mm properities of camera and film. It is all motion. Together with Brakhage's Songs, Branaman's abstractions and Ken Jackob's not yet released work, Heliczer's Dirt is one of the four works that use 8mm film properly and for art's sake" — Jonas Mekas, Village Voice.
JEROVI (Jose Rodriguez-Slotero, USA, 1965, 16mm)
Description: "Unjustly forgotten today, José Rodríguez-Soltero was active in the 1960s New York underground. JEROVI is a beautifully photographed version of the Narcissus myth that has all the languor and compositional sharpness of NORMAL LOVE or CHUMLUM. A handsome youth in a richly brocaded tunic saunters around a lush park, toting a big flower and pausing occasionally to admire himself in a hand mirror. Eventually he sheds his robe and rolls ecstatically in the grass." - Juan A. Suárez
MALANGA (A. Keewatin Dewdney, USA, 1967, 16mm)
Description: Gerard Malanga reads his poetry for 24 frames, dances to Velvet Underground for 24 frames, reads for 23 frames, dances for 23 frames, reads for 22 frames, etc., until he is doing both things alternately one frame at a time. An experiment in Audio-visual synaesthesia called Discontinuous film. No frame is missed however brief its exposure because the synthaesthesia increases efficiency of both eye and ear.
PROGETTI (PLANS) (Paul Bartel, USA, 1962, 16mm)
Description: "This film was made in Rome in the Spring of 1962 during my Antonioni period. I was on a Fulbright at the time, studying directing at the famous Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, and I wanted to sum up in a film some of my observations as a cinema student in Rome. So i made a film about two aspiring actors studying at the Centro who wanted to come to the Actor's Studio in New York and become movie stars overnight, and who actually believe that this is going to happen to them. The point of the film is that these actors are really incapable of acting in either sense of the word. but they certainly know how to go through the motions and are beautiful to look at and to listen to, if you don't mind Italian(s). When Oscar Werner saw PROGETTI in Paris in the fall of '62 he became very excited and showing for Truffaut and Clouzot, who were also reportedly enthusiastic about the film."
THE SECRET CINEMA (Paul Bartel, USA, 1966, 16mm)
Description: The Secret Cinema is a black-comic tale of a woman whose fears that her life is being filmed for the entertainment of her friends turn out to be true. The film presaged the sardonic tone of most of his later work (Eating Raoul), though he would mostly abandon Secret Cinema's experimental aspects in favor of linear narratives with perverse touches.