Mekas framed underground film as continuing Baudelaire and Burroughs’ forbidden content

Evidence

These movies are illuminating and opening up sensibilities and experiences never before recorded in the American arts; a content which Baudelaire, the Marquis de Sade, and Rimbaud gave to world literature a century ago and which Burroughs gave to American literature three years ago. It is a world of flowers of evil, of illuminations, of torn and tortured flesh; a poetry which is at once beautiful and terrible, good and evil, delicate and dirty. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 436

Categorization

• DEFINE: Mekas’s vocabulary for describing the underground aesthetic — the canonical critical frame that defined the movement.