Making 1960 avant-garde films meant constant police harassment and public suspicion

Evidence

The filmmakers were chased out of Catskill woodlands and run off Long Island ponds. On July 14, Connecticut authorities arrested them for “trespassing” on a public lake. The cops were particularly tough on Adolfas because he had grown a beard for his part. On July 25, the filmmakers infiltrated the wetlands around Idlewild Airport. “During the shooting on the beach,” Mekas wrote, “a group of truck drivers stopped their trucks and came to watch us work. One said: ‘You are either communists or beatniks.’” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 172

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s core goal — cheap-but-harassed material conditions of the dense-invention period. Being chased off sites is a material condition that shaped what got made.