Close-Up pays tribute to Kenneth Anger with a screening of the Magick Lantern Cycle. Cinematic magician, legendary provocateur, author of the infamous Hollywood Babylon book, Kenneth Anger was a unique figure in post-war American culture. His iconic short films are characterised by a mystical-symbolic visual language and phantasmagorical-sensual opulence that underscores the medium’s transgressive potential. Anger’s work fundamentally shaped the aesthetics of 1960s and 1970s subcultures, the visual lexicon of pop and music videos and queer iconography.

Film at Lincoln Center announces New York, 1962–1964: Underground and Experimental Cinema spotlighting the rise of the New American Cinema, running from July 29–August 4.

1962 to 1964 was a pivotal moment in the evolution of American arts and culture, especially in New York City. These years, crucial to the development of Pop, Minimalism, and performance, saw the emergence of a new generation of radical artists, as well as venues that gave their iconoclastic work a home and a context. Movies, meanwhile, were undergoing a transformation of their own: the rise of a truly independent cinema, of works unencumbered by the medium’s aesthetic conventions and commercial imperatives.