Underground films gained legitimacy as official festival short subjects

Evidence

The underground even infiltrated the Festival proper. Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou was preceded by Richard Preston’s collage short Son of Dada; Bernardo Bertolucci’s first feature, The Grim Reaper, by Goldman’s visceral hate-Manhattan montage Pestilent City. Shown as a short subject with a movie by Argentine director Leopoldo Torre Nilsson, Robert Nelson’s O Dem Watermelons served as a kind of trailer for the San Francisco Mime Troupe, who arrived in October with their satiric Minstrel Show (subtitled Civil Rights in a Cracker Barrel). — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 930

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the shelf claim about how avant-garde gets institutionally absorbed—Mekas’s habitual NYFF criticism versus expanded cinema being covered by Film Culture.