The underground film scene defined itself against respectable cinema verité

Evidence

At the very end of August (while the eyes of the nation were fixed upon the March on Washington), Jonas Mekas, Ken Jacobs, Florence Karpf, Barbara Rubin, and Debra Feiner crashed the annual Flaherty Seminar in Brattleboro, Vermont. The focus was on cinema verité. “We took Flaming Creatures and Blonde Cobra to the seminar, two pieces of the impure, naughty, and ‘uncinematic’ cinema that is being made now in New York,” Mekas told his readers. The films could only be shown at midnight. “Midnight screening in Vermont! My God, we felt underground even at Flaherty’s. But a few souls saw our work and were shaken by it. Others just walked out and slept peacefully, dreaming of cinema verité.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 464

Categorization

• XREF: The dialectical self-definition against an establishment aesthetic mirrors how other avant-garde scenes define themselves against a mainstream — relevant to the reader’s general theory of scene formation. — connects to: Cinema’s image-reduction for commercial purposes blocks genuinely revolutionary film — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 2039