Midnight screening venues created an exhibition circuit for underground film

Evidence

In early 1963, Mekas began a series of midnight screenings at the Bleecker Street Cinema. One of the first programs was titled “Newest Absurd and Zen Poetry,” which, in addition to Senseless, included several movies Mekas had discovered at the Charles the previous spring and summer: Jack Smith’s Scotch Tape, Ken Jacobs’s Little Stabs at Happiness (still without a fixed soundtrack), Bhob Stewart’s found-footage assemblage, The Year the Universe Lost the Pennant, and Ray Wisniewski’s Doomshow. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 425

Categorization

• XREF: Infrastructure of the scene — Mekas’s Bleecker screenings are the distribution/exhibition layer of the same material conditions that produced the density of invention.