“The artist is always an anarchist, a revolutionary, a creator of new worlds imperceptibly gaining on reality.” (Gene Youngblood)

Our first evening devoted to Gene Youngblood’s groundbreaking 1970 book Expanded Cinema draws on his exploration of the various unfolding trends that marked 1960s experimental filmmaking as an evolving language of deep psychic and emotional articulation. In the book’s first two chapters, Youngblood identifies a new thread of cinematic expression that defined itself in response – and in partial opposition – to the emergence of television. Artists sought to reconcile and harmonize external and internal worlds through the uniquely expressive medium of film, devising and evolving numerous radical, even transgressive techniques for extending its imaging capabilities, including complex superimposition, hyperkinetic montage, photographic transformations, experimental hand-processing, and physical manipulation of the film strip. These techniques provided doorways for artists to explore deeper recesses of the mind and soul, through visionary ruminations on identity, memory, fear, sexuality, and the prismatic complexity of subjective consciousness.

We’ll be screening six 16mm films identified by Youngblood as exceptional and representative examples of the synaesthetic cinema he defines in Part Two of Expanded Cinema: Dog Star Man: Part 4 (1964) by Stan Brakhage, 7362 (1967) by Pat O’Neill, XFilm (1968) by John Schofill, Fuses (1967) by Carolee Schneemann, and Chinese Firedrill (1968) by Will Hindle; after a short intermission, the evening will conclude with Wavelength (1967) by Michael Snow.

Program by Zena Grey and Mark Toscano. Notes by Mark Toscano. Poster art by Robert Beatty. All films courtesy of the artists and Canyon Cinema. Prints of Dog Star Man: Part 4 and 7362 courtesy of the Academy Film Archive.