Underground film festivals aggregated an emergent scene by 1962

Evidence

Six months of open screenings culminated in July 1962 with a grand, competitive Filmmaker’s Festival. First prize went to Michael Putnam’s The Hard Swing, a twenty-four-minute cinema verité portrait of a North Beach stripper. Rice, named “most promising filmmaker,” was represented by two films—The Flower Thief and his twenty-eight-minute nonnarrative Senseless, the title a play on Godard’s Breathless as well as a riff on the movie’s genesis and deceptively random quality. (In lieu of a soundtrack, Rice played a Béla Bartók LP found in the Charles’s projection booth.) — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 375

Categorization

• XREF: Absence of tight budget forcing improvisation (soundtrack = whatever LP was in the booth) — material condition enabling invention. Fits the ‘cheap rent, ignorable art forms’ thesis.