Underground political cinema blended drug imagery with found-footage collage

Evidence

Reviewing Horror and Fantasy, Mekas described a two-hour-plus presentation of three untitled films, each approximately forty-five minutes long: The opening piece “starred a most beautiful marijuana plant, a gorgeous blooming white queen with her crown reaching toward the sky.” The second and third parts featured “Jack’s creatures” in fantastic gowns and plumed hats, first in color and then faded gray and white. Another account of the program, published by the psychoanalyst Joseph Aliaga in José Rodríguez-Soltero’s short-lived arts journal, Medium, has Reefers of Technicolor Island, accompanied by “tooty flutes” and “the ominous tom-tom of drums,” followed by images of “boys in drag.” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 1373

Categorization

• XREF: The collage-and-appropriation aesthetic parallels the earlier material on Horror and Fantasy mixing original with found footage; also connects to the reader’s test-case interest in how scenes become markets.