377 Week 3 questions on the underground and warhol

Why was the Charles Theater important for the development of “underground film” in New York City?

 

The Charles became an independent filmmakers paradise.  It started the Filmmakers Festival, which brought young high school drop out Ron Rice into the spotlight.  The Charles started the famous midnight showings of indie movies.  The audiences went crazy.  The audience would hoot, holler, and sometimes boo.  Jonas Mekas pushed to make it a theater where New York’s finest up and coming experimental filmmakers could showcase their work.  Tickets were only 95 cents a seat.  The Charles allowed the work of young artist to be shown for a reason price.  You didn’t have to have a big name to have your work shown.  The Charles became a theater with no limits.  The wildest films were shown and the church-like audiences loved it.

 

Which underground films encountered legal problems in 1964, and why?

 

Mike Getz was arrested and found guilty by a jury of all women for showing an obscene film, Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising.  It shows brief moments of male frontal nudity.  The film had only shown a week before he was arrested.  The other film to have legal problems was Flaming Creatures.  “On Monday, March 3, two detectives from the district attorney’s office broke up a screening of Flaming Creatures- ‘It was hot enough to burn up the screen,’ one would tell the press- impounding the film, some Normal Love rushes, and Warhol’s Normal love ‘newsreel,’ along with the theater’s projector and screen.”

 

The Chelsea Girls Question

 

Warhol is similar with Luis Bunuel because they both would find themselves making controversial films and being without a strong source of funding.  “The problem of financing has at one time of another limited, or completely curtailed, the work of such masters as Griffith, von Stroheim, Flaherty, Bunuel, and Orsen Welles.”  Mussman goes on to state, “The Chelsea Girls bears a rese,blance to L’AGE D’OR or SCARFACE specifically in terms of violence which is already manifest within the human psyche.”

 

Mussman discusses how Hitchcock’s manipulative films tell the viewer what to see and how to feel.  “His audience, “unlike Hitchcock’s for instance, is not being manipulated toward a calculated end, but rather is free to establish a line of communication with what is being shown on the screen or not.  Warhol’s cinema affords the spectator and open-ended response.

 

Realism is the greatest comparison of the works of Warhol and Godard.  Mussman describes, “Warhol’s direct approach has been has been in the air for some time, from the Italian Neo-Realist films coming out of documentary to Godard’s recent work.”   Both directors were not commercial artists.