This is a shame, but I guess Mekas shooed Landis away when the author tried to leave some flyers at the Anthology Film Archives once and he’s held a grudge ever since. The only time Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford really refer to “underground film” in Sleazoid Express - their exhaustive survey of the exploitation film scene in Times Square - is to knock it and particularly to slam Jonas Mekas, who oddly pops up a few times as a villain in the book. For example, the rise of NYC’s downtown Cinema of Transgression scene occurred at about the same time the old Times Square grindhouses were closing up and being razed to the ground. While the definition of what exactly constitutes an “underground film” has evolved over the years, it hasn’t - as far as I know - been used to incorporate exploitation cinema, even though much in the current underground scene is similar to the exploitation style of exploring taboos and other shocking subject matter. al., in what was commonly known as the New American Cinema movement. Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, et. The term didn’t become synonymous with avant-garde and experimental filmmaking until Stan Vanderbeek used it in 1961 to describe the work of his contemporaries, e.g. The term “underground film” was originally coined in 1957 by Manny Farber, but he used it to describe the work of under-appreciated B-movie directors like Howard Hawks and Raoul Walsh.
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