The History of Sex in Cinema

In the basement of a dingy building a half block from Times Square, some 200 devotees of the far-out film huddle together nightly in a shabbily rococo auditorium, The Film-Makers' Cinémathèque, to witness the collected works of Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, the Kuchar brother and other gods and gurus of the cinematic underground. In a somewhat gaudier base on Hollywood's Sunset Strip, the all-night Cinémathèque 16 grinds away at similar fare for West Coast fans of the experimental film; while Chicagoans who like their kicks cinematic support the screenings of the Aardvark Cinémathèque, an organization of underground enthusiasts that has successfully invaded the premises of Second City, a satiric cabaret theater, on Monday nights. Coast to coast, comparable establishments have been springing up in the major cities, with more undoubtedly to come. It's what's happening, baby. The underground is rising to the surface and an impressively large audience is beginning to catch up with the avant-grade. Significantly, not long after Warhol's fourhour, dual-screen psychodrama, The Chelsea Girls (see our review on page 40 of this issue), had opened at the New York Cinémathèque, it was moved uptown to a West Side art house--"by popular demand." This new audience may include all too many culture vultures from a new generation that will accept any insult to its intelligence or eyeballs provided that it carries the tag "experimental"; but for the first time in movie history, an avant-grade has reached through to a public large enough to support it and vocal enough to make an impression upon the citizenry at large. The films themselves may not be great; often they are downright dreadful. Their subject matter is a compound of exotica, erotica, neurotica and lurid samplings of psychopathia sexualis. But today, for anyone with intellectual pretensions who wants to be "with it," who feels he has to "make the scene," some acquaintance with the work of the New American Cinema is an absolute must.

Since 1960, the field of American experimental films has been dominated largely by New York's self-styled "underground" film makers, abetted by the vigorous propaganda of their self-appointed leader, critic and occasional director, the messianic Jonas Mekas. With such publications as the freewheeling Village Voice and his own esoteric Film Culture as his pulpits, Mekas flails at Hollywood with one hand and scratches the backs of his cohorts with the other. By forcing a screening of Jack Smith's flaringly erotic Flaming Creatures in Belgium after it had been barred by Catholic authorities from the country's Third International Experimental Film Competition in 1964, and by risking a jail sentence to exhibit Creatures and Jean Genet's explicitly homosexual Chant d'Amour in New York soon after, Mekas won for the movement not merely publicity, but the kind of notoriety that rouses public interest.

Audiences that support the various underground screenings around the country are almost defiant in their determination to adore the fare provided for them. It isn't always easy. Technically, the films often seem shockingly crude--grainy, under- or overexposed, with faulty sound tracks and sloppy editing (or, in the case of Pop artist-movie-maker Andy Warhol and his "camp" followers, no editing at all). As critic Susan Sontag has put it, "The newer films--both the good ones and the poor, uninspired work--show a maddening indifference to every element of technique, a studied primitiveness." For some, such as Warhol, Jack Smith and the late Ron Rice, this indifference has been elevated to a jarring but distinctive style. For others, however, it is merely the by-product of incompetence--or worse, a hubris based on the assumption that the eye of the would-be artist is all that is necessary to produce a work of art, thus echoing the old Eastman Kodak advertising slogan, "You push the button, we do the rest." Recently, enormously impressed by Warhol's Empire (in which New York's Empire State Building is observed from a single camera position for eight interminable hours), one of these "instant artists" returned to Los Angeles to make a movie of his own, using a similar technique. For his subject, he chose an outsized statue of a cowgirl that revolves on Sunset Strip and urges passers-by to visit the Sahara hotel in Las Vegas. When his footage came back from the laboratory, however, the young man complained bitterly that the lab had failed to maintain consistent light values as the cowgirl's twirlings progressed from slow motion to rapid motion, then back again. This aspiring underground genius didn't even know that he must adjust the lens of his camera to compensate for the differences in film speed.

But quite apart from any question of technical competence, many of the new film makers consciously--and consciencelessly--conceive of their works as an all-out assault on the senses and sensibilities of their patrons. Typically, San Francisco director Carl Linder, introducing a group of his own works, wrote, "I try to debase my art, to violate it, to impregnate it. Often you will note an image which deflates--or a gesture that castrates. The importance of image in my art is in its special nature...It is almost supernatural--it is a totemic, occult and devilish thing. It overpowers with ugliness." As if calculatedly repellent imagery were not sufficient, some of the film makers throw in double or triple exposures that keep the screen awash with never-quite-definable layers of picture, or edit down to a flashing hail of all but unrecognizable and unrelated images--or leave a single shot on the screen for so long that it becomes quite literally an excruciating experience simply to watch it. The first shot of Andy Warhol's Sleep, showing only a man's abdomen almost imperceptibly rising and falling as he sleeps, lasts a full 45 minutes. When the picture was run in Los Angeles, a near riot almost tore the theater apart before the first hour had passed. The luckless manager had advertised it as "The Most Unusual Film Ever Made; So Daring It May Never Be Shown Again"--and his infuriated (text continued on page 196)Sex In Cinema(continued from page 140) patrons did everything short of lynching him to see to it that he kept his word.

One suspects that what keeps the customers coming back, despite such deliberate barriers to enjoyment or comprehension, is neither fascination with film technique nor a deep devotion to the art of the cinema. Rather, it is a sense of being at the outer edge of all things filmic--the strong strain of eroticism that increasingly pervades these pictures, their concentration upon such "forbidden" topics as perversion, homosexuality, transvestism, sadism, drugs and psychedelic experiences. If the function of an avant-grade is to remain far out, the leaders of today's underground can at least claim the virtue of consistency. As the mainstream of film making grows increasingly bold in the handling of hitherto controversial material, these young men continue to provide themes and scenes that are still too hot or too raw for the major studios. They are, in the classical tradition of an avant-grade, thumbing their noses at conventions and the conventional. And their audiences, fired by the zeal of rebels with a cause, feel that they are thumbing right along with them simply by attending their screenings.

This same impulse, a violent reaction against the conventional, inspired the first filmic avant-grade in Europe during the Twenties. Artists such as Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger, Man Ray and Hans Richter, already established in other fields, suddenly discovered the motion picture and thought it the ideal medium through which to convey their dissatisfaction with bourgeois concepts of art and morality. The nihilism of Dada and, later, the irrationality of Surrealism found cinematic expression in films that were deliberately shocking. At first, the shocks were purely visual: eye-blinding patterns of abstract forms writhing and jiggling frenetically and meaninglessly, or odd juxtapositions of unrelated objects within the frame. Nevertheless, even in such a pure and essentially nonliteral work as Léger's classic Ballet Mécanique, it is difficult not to associate the recurrent close-ups of plunging pistons with the sex act, while the climatic intercutting of a man's straw hat with a woman's shoe is little more than an anagram for intercourse. A strange eroticism flows from shots of a lovely woman on a garden swing, gently smiling and turning her head like a placid pendulum, or from shots of a mannequin's legs twisting in a convulsive dance around a clock placed between them. Man Ray, in his Dadaistic Le Retour à la Raison (The Return to Reason), teasingly inserted the photograph of a nude girl over perhaps a dozen frames of his film; but since in projection it was glimpsed for only a fraction of a second, no one in the audience could actually perceive his little joke.

Once Surrealism took over as the major art movement of the late Twenties, however, the sexual content of avant-grade movies became far more overt and explicit. Almost from the outset, Surrealist writers, painters and film makers sensed the connection between their own work and the concurrent investigations of Sigmund Freud. Both were concerned with the subconscious--with, in Surrealist authority Julian Levy's phase, "the more real world behind the real." Both found new significance in the supposedly irrational images induced by sleep or delirium, and in the emotional charge such images contained. Best of all, Freud supplied the Surrealists with a whole new language, the language of symbols, Freud's symbology attached specific meanings--generally sexual--to those objects and apparitions that turn up so disturbingly and persistently in dreams. With this language as their tool, substituting the symbol for the fact, artists could now work in areas that had in the past been considered too inappropriate or too clinical for art. And the motion picture, with its inherent tendency to translate everything and everybody it looks at into a symbol, was suddenly elevated by the Surrealists into a major art from. They loved the movies, wrote glowingly about them, composed poems in their praise--and not a few of them went so far as to actually make pictures of their own.

One of the first of the true Surrealist films to appear was L'Etoile de Mer (The Starfish), 1928, by Man Ray, an American photographer then living in Paris. Based on a poem by Robert Desnos, a leading Surrealist poet, it depicts a series of encounters between a man and a woman as seen by each of the participants and as remembered in the distorted glass of a dream. The images, some harshly distinct, some murkily distorted, are all intercut with lines from the original poem. The girl is a news vendor, and flying newspapers symbolize her presence--as does the starfish itself, with its greedy tentacles feeding into a gaping maw. More symbols--the smokestacks of an ocean liner, the widening space between the ship and its dock, the ship's discharge of water into the harbor--represent their coming together. Her fears are suggested by the juxtaposition of a knife and the starfish on the pages of an open book, upon which she sets her naked foot. At one point in the film, Ray even kidded, quite consciously, the double standard prevalent in Hollywood movies of that time: The girl brings the young man to her apartment, obligingly strips for him, and stretches out on her bed--whereupon our hero politely tips his hat, says "Adieu" and backs out of the room.

At just about the same time, early in 1928, Germaine Dulac unveiled her best-known Surrealist work, La Coquille et le Clergyman (The Seashell and the Clergyman), developed from a scenario by one of the foremost Surrealist wirters and critics, Antonin Artaud. Although Artaud later vociferously rejected her adaptation, claiming that it was far too literal and against the spirit of Surrealism, perhaps for that very reason one can perceive clearly what the Surrealists were trying to do in films. In no other picture have the symbols been so precisely marshaled, or a plot line so fully developed in symbolic terms. Its central character is a clergyman, ascetic in appearance, but whose repressed sexual life is suggested by his repeated filling of glass phials with liquid from a large seashell, and then promptly smashing them on the ground. Opposing him is an excessively masculine figure of authority, dressed variously in the robes of a bishop and in the bemedaled tunic of a general. Between the two is a beautiful blonde woman, the object of both men's passion. The clergyman, who grovels after her like a small animal, finds that he can reach her through the confession box. Roused by one of her confessions, he snatches of her bodice, exposing both of her breasts, and begins to chase her through the endless corridors of his cathedral, the material of her bodice turning to fire in his hands. Later, when he finds that his rival has usurped his place in the confessional, the young priest flings himself upon the floor and masturbates furiously under his long robes in an agony of frustration.

True to the spirit of Surrealism, the picture can be read in many ways. On the surface, at least, it has all the elements of the familiar triangle of conventional films; but because it is told symbolically, with strange juxtapositions and elements of the irrational, it can also be interpreted as the dual nature of man in pursuit of an impossible ideal, as the aesthete frustrated by Philistine society (the authoritarian clergy, the authoritarian military) in his search for beauty; or as an allegorical exploration of the sexual drives and tensions that churn within all of us. In point of fact, such is the nature of this kind of film that no single explanation quite covers everything. Its whole purpose is to provide several layers of meaning simultaneously through emotion-charged and disturbing images.

Perhaps no movie has ever achieved this purpose more dramatically than that Surrealistic masterpiece, Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), directed by Spain's Luis Buñuel in collaboration with his compatriot, Salvador Dali. Drawing upon Paul Eluard's theory of the "dreamer awake" as the source for their Surrealist fantasies, and using Dali's "paranoiac criticism" methodology--the rejection of all images for which there exists any logical or conscious explanation--the two concocted their scenario in a swift three days. The film, only 17 minutes long, opens with a sequence that immediately sets the tone for all that follows. A young man (Buñuel himself) strops a razor, then steps out upon a balcony where a girl is sitting. For a moment or two, the contemplate the night sky together. A thin silver of cloud is cutting across the moon. Wordlessly, the man then steps behind the girl and, in an enormous and traumatic close-up, slashes her eyeball. Following this brief prolog is the title "Eight years later," and we see the hero of the film (dancer Pierre Batcheff) somnambulistically pedaling a bicycle through the streets of Paris dressed in a woman's apron and with a strange, striped box hanging from his neck. In a room, the girl we had seen previously on the balcony flings aside a book, which falls open to a Vermeer painting of a woman with a similar apron, and walks nervously to a window just in time to see the cyclist topple from his machine into the gutter.

He appears in her apartment, stretched out on a bed, and the box seems to hold a special attraction for her. As she takes it in her hands, along with is striped tie, the man becomes sexually aroused and a look of cunning crosses his face. A few moments later, again at the window, the two see a Lesbian in the street below poking a severed hand with her cane while a throng gathers about her. A gendarme politely picks the hand up and gives it to her, then breaks up the crowd. She slips it into what seems to be the same striped box, and a moment later is struck down by a passing car. This moment of violence moves the man to action: He pursues the girl about the room, brutally mauling her breasts under her thin dress. As he backs her against a wall, blood and saliva dribbling from his mouth, the dress dissolves away to reveal her breasts, which quickly dissolve into her buttocks. His mouth tightnes like a sphincter as the girl slips away and defends herself in a corner with a tennis racket. But now the man has a new plan to reach her. He seizes two ropes that are attached to two enormous grand pianos on which lie the bleeding carcasses of two freshly slain donkeys; to the ropes are tied several prone clergymen bearing on their backs what seem to be the tablets of the Ten Commandments. The girl, suddenly aghast, flees the room, slamming the door upon the man's forearm as he reaches toward her. In close-up, we see his clutching, agonized hand, ants (a favorite Dali symbol for masturbation) streaming from a hole in the palm.

From this point on, the film becomes far less intelligible--or at least, far less describable. Motifs mentioned earlier--the box, its strap, the tie, the apron--recur frequently and are shown at the finale as if washed up by the sea. The hero's gentler alter ego arrives at the apartment in the night and flings these accouterments out a window, then is gunned down when some books that the hero is holding turn suddenly into revolvers. Although he is shot indoors, as his body falls, the scene immediately transforms into a Corot-like forest, and his dying hand tremblingly caresses the back of a nude girl--who dissolves into thin air with his death. Other images are far less agreeable. A moth appears on a wall and in close-up we see it has a death's-head marking; the shot dissolves to a livid, burned-out image of Batcheff, the mouth missing from his face. Frantically, the girl applies lipstick to her own mouth. Hair sprouts on the man's face where the mouth should be. The girl, alarmed, clutches at her naked armpit and discovers it is her underarm hair that now decorates the hero.

It would be futile to attempt a rational explanation of all that happens in Un Chien Andalou--particularly since Buñuel has repeatedly made it clear that anything for which either he or Dali could provide a rational explanation was promptly expunged from their script. Nevertheless, the whole hangs together with the logic and consistency of a nightmare, a terrible, vivid dream whose images continue to haunt long after the dream has passed. What makes the film particularly notable is that, with a minimum of specifically sexual imagery, it seems surcharged with eroticism throughout. The hero's naked hunger in the early sequences, the scene with the Lesbian and the had (while several of the onlookers clutch nervously at their own hands), the funeral cortege through the woods (which is joined unconcernedly by a dwarfish older man and his kept companion), the final sequence in which two lovers joyously embrace at the water's edge only to be discovered, descicated and buried up to their armpits in the sand in the final shot--all these, and more, sustain a sense of sexuality that is at once profoundly disturbing and repellent yet altogether fascinating. Small wonder that it remains the classic oeuvre of the first avant-grade.

But even when it was made--in 1929--time was running out. The world was perilously close to the brink of a depression that was to last for ten long years. Art-for-art's-sake explorations of spatial relationships, or even of the ego and the id, had little relevance to people whose primary concern had suddenly become just staying alive. Furthermore, the arrival of sound films, which occurred almost simultaneously throughout the world that same year, drove the cost of picture production far beyond the reach of most individuals--though in 1930, with the patronage of a wealthy French nobleman, Buñnuel produced the impassioned and often erotic L' Age d' Or (The Age of Gold). The theme of this feature-length sound film is organized society's conspiracy to thwart the natural consummation of love. Violently anticlerical and virulently anticapitalist, Buñuel not only arrayed all of these forces against his two lovers but then proceeded to take an almost sadomasochistic delight in detailing their frustrations. The woman, unable to have her man, sucks passionately at the toe of a marble statue in her garden. The man, unable to have his mistress, bites fiercely on her fingers and kicks ferociously at a little dog who barks at him as he is being led away from the woman he loves. It is, as one critic has said, "the representation of the total passion of a human event pushed beyond previously known limits." Unfortunately, the limits existed. Attacked by rightist elements in Paris at its premiere, the film was banned by the censors forth with and its negative ordered destroyed. Somehow a print survived; but L' Age d' Or was not shown publicly in the United States until it was given a long-overdue revival at the New York Film Festival of 1964.

Also working with private funds supplied by the French nobleman, the protean Surrealist artist Jean Cocteau created his feature-length Le Sang d' un Poète (The Blood of a Poet), perhaps the first avant-grade film to enjoy an impact beyond the rarefied ciné-club circles of Europe. Undoubtedly, this was due more to Cocteau's superb sense of cinematic trickery than to any widespread comprehension of his highly personal symbology. His hero, a poet, discovering in the palm of his hand a mouth that entreats him for "Air, air," sensually passes it over his body and down, out of the frame, in what critic Parker Tyler has termed "an erotic abuse." Soon--or as Cocteau arbitrarily puts it, "the next morning"--the half-naked poet plunges through a mirror that leads into a long corridor of the "Hotel des Folies-Dramatiques." At each door, he peeps hungrily through the keyhole. In one room, a Mexican peasant is being shot down (repeatedly) by the rifles of a firing squad. In the next, a little girl dressed in brief circus tights and sleigh bells is being taught to fly by an old woman who lashes at her with a whip. Another room contains Chinese opium addicts, another a hermaphrodite who appears section by section--female torso, male leg, male arm and, under a bit of cloth that conceals the sex organs, a sign reading danger of death. A woman's arm emerges from the wall and hands the poet a revolver, while a voice instructs him in its use. Placing it to his temple, he commits symbolic suicide, then races back down the corridor, through the mirror and into his studio, where he violently smashes the statue of his muse. "By breaking statues," says the voice of Cocteau, "one runs the risk of becoming one himself."

In the next sequence, the poet has indeed been transformed into a statue and sits brooding sadly in a wintry public square, where schoolboys smash at him with their snowballs. In a scuffle, one of the boys is killed. Near his dying body, close to the pedestal of the ruined statue, an elegant table suddenly appears. At it are seated a beautiful woman and the reincarnated poet, both in handsome evening clothes. Oblivious to their surroundings, they are playing cards. A crystal chandelier and two theater boxes crowded with fashionable men and women suddenly transform the snow-covered exterior into a kind of stage setting. From the body of the dead boy the poet snatches a card--the ace of hearts. Quietly, a Negro angel enters, spreads his cloak over the boy and bends over him in a gesture of tender embrace. When he rises, the form has vanished, leaving only a hollow in the snow. The black hand of the angel seizes the ace of hearts from the poet's cards and disappears. Without it, the poet realizes he has lost the game. Once more, he holds a revolver to his temple and pulls the trigger--while the people applaud in the loges above. (It was typical of Cocteau that at first he had filled the boxes with his friends from the nobility, including his patrons, the Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles--and no less typical that, when they discovered they in fact applauding the suicide of an artist and objected to this bit of lèse-majesté, he substituted a group of actors led by the well-known female impersonator Barbette.)

Although The Blood of a Poet has continued to be seen with fair frequency ever since its stormy premier at the Vieux Colombier in Paris in 1931, it proved no harbinger of things to come. Throughout the Thirties and well into the Forties, there were few attempts to continue the work of the avant-grade pioneers. Perhaps the most notable were Lot in Sodom (1934), by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber, an impressionistic account of the frenzied orgies and ultimate destruction of that disreputable city; and Joseph Berne's Dawn to Dawn (1934), a drab tale of thwarted love on a remote, impoverished farm, with ethereal Julie Haydon sadly miscast as the work-worn farm girl. But by the time the second avant-grade appeared soon after World War Two, many had so completely forgotten these precursors that they hailed the new efforts as an exciting innovation that would blaze fresh trails of cinematic art. Like Alexander King's story of the man who, in lonely isolation, reinvented the typewriter, this post-War generation of experimenters spent considerable time rediscovering the themes and techniques that had been developed 20 years earlier. Maya deren, until her untimely death in 1962, was both high priestess and prime mover of this renaissance; but even the quartet of films upon which much of her fame is based--Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land, Choreography for Camera and Ritual in Transfigured Time--is crowded with images, symbols and juxtapositions that are strikingly similar to the works of Cocteau and the other Surrealists. Knives, keys and flowers are introduced in their Freudian connotations. A black-draped figure, its face a mirror, walks slowly past the camera; but a girl pursuing it, running at full tilt, is unable to catch up with it. No less reminiscent of the first avant-grade is the sequence in which Miss Deren crawls the length of a banquet table while her dinner guests continue their meal and conversation without the slightest indication that their hostess is acting in a somewhat unconventional manner.

But whatever her talents as a film maker--which were considerable--Maya Deren was primarily a catalyst, a woman who made things happen. Indefatigably, she wrote and lectured from coast to coast, showing her pictures and urging other young people to be creative. The times were ripe. The Army Signal Corps had trained thousands of men to run a camera during the War years. The film schools were training thousands more--and, through their constant showings of films from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, suggesting that the medium ought to be considered as something more than merely an entertainment or propaganda device. No less important, the equipment manufacturer had drastically upgraded the standards for their relatively inexpensive cameras and projectors to make them more flexible and serviceable in combat areas; and laboratories had improved to the point where they could supply the opticals, dissolves and multilight prints that soon made 16mm stock technically almost in terchangeable with its big 35mm theatrical brother. For a few hundred dollars, a young man could equip himself to turn out pictures that, physically at least, were virtually on a par with the professionals. And in the new era of post-War prosperity, people were once more disposed to devote themselves to art-for-art's-sake experimentation. All it took was driving energy, conviction and devotion of a Maya Deren to get things moving.

The first stirrings came when, early in 1946, Miss Deren rented the tiny Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village for a single night's showing of what she called her "three abandoned films." The crowds so choked MacDougal Street that extra performances had to be scheduled until well into the early-morning hours, and the program was repeated on weekends for the next several months. As a direct result of her success, Amos Vogel was inspired to form his Cinema 16--also at the Provincetown Playhouse--for the presentation of "outstanding social documentaries, controversial adult screen fare, advanced experimental films, classics of the international cinema and medical-phychiatric studies"; within a few years, it had developed into the largest and most stimulating film society in the country. Meanwhile, the fiery Miss Deren had embarked with her films on a tour of the nation's universities and art centers, proselytizing as she went. Symptomatically, when she appeared at the San Francisco Museum of Art late in 1946, to participate in a ten-week series devoted to experimental films, the old-hat Surrealism of Hans Richter's feature-length Dreams That Money Can Buy (which included a sequence based on Marcel Duchamp's famous Nude Descending a Staircase) and her own four pictures were the only new items on the programs; everything else, of necessity, was drawn from the past. But two years later, when San Francisco offered a second ten-week experimental series, it was devoted entirely to contemporary works--with many of them contributed by people who had been converted to this aspect of the cinema by Maya Deren herself.

As in the Twenties, two dominant forces shaped the thinking of this new movement: a lively discontent with the conventional movies coming off the studios' assembly lines and the conviction that the medium could be, and should be, developed as a means of self-expression for the serious artist of the 20th Century. But where, in the first avant-grade, the participants had been established artists, often of the first rank, the unknown members of the new avant-grade soon discovered that their greatest difficulty lay in finding audiences who would take them seriously. Their abstract films, whether set to classical music or to progressive jazz, resembled nothing so much as animated doodles, polka dots gone mad, eye-blinding assaults of forms and colors that seemed, to put it most charitably, capricious. Images were scratched onto raw celluloid; modeling clay was tortured into new shapes and animated frame by frame; mosaics were photographed and spliced together into such quick, sharp bursts as to be almost unidentifiable. The point of these films, of course, was not the recognition of the image as such but the enjoyment of its synchronization to the accompanying score, the simulataneous gratification of both eye and ear. Len Lye in England and Norman McLaren in Canada had been experimenting in this area for a number of years; but to most film-society members in the late Forties and the Fifties, it was still a totally new experience--for some exhilarating, for others painfully tedious.

Far more disturbing, however, were the nonabstract films that began to appear--pictures that, whether consciously or unconsciously, had their roots in the Surrealism of the Twenties. For these were pictures meant to disturb. Rejecting both the themes and the styles of the commercial movie, the new cinéastes were determined that their pictures would be as various and unconventional as their own personalities. It was as if, having discovered the camera, they had decided to use it to discover themselves. "Agony and experience films," Maya Deren once called them. As a result, a strangely narcissistic atmosphere pervades them--in no small part because their directors were as often in front of the camera as behind it ("for budgetary reasons," they would modestly explain). And because sexuality--often homosexuality--figured largely in their youthful concerns, a strong element of eroticism was present as well.

The best-known film from the first years of this avant-grade resurgence--perhaps because it was the most shocking--was young Kenneth Anger's Fireworks, dealing quite specifically and openly with the then-forbidden them of homosexuality. His picture, as Lewis Jacobs has written, "has a rare individuality which no literal summary of its qualities can reproduce." Certainly, its maker wanted no literal summary; his intent, rather, was to have his audiences participate in the emotions of a homosexual, to empathize fully with both the dread and the exultation of his teenage hero. To this end, the story is fashioned in the form of a dream, its wishful nature established immediately by the shot of a gigantic erection beneath the sheets of the cot on which the boy lies sleeping. Later, at a bar, he encounters some sailors who boastfully display their muscles and excite the youth, then mercilessly turn on him and beat him with chains, bloody his nose, slash him with glass and finally pour a trickle of symbolic cream over his broken face. But Anger is entering no plea for sympathy toward his battered hero. The sadistic beating has an orgasmic quality that was clearly what the boy was seeking, as expressed at the film's climax--a screen-filling shot of the boy, now dressed as a sailor, with what seems to be a giant penis protruding from his tight white pants; he sets a match to it and it erupts in a shower of sparks, then turns into a Christmas tree, with which the boy dances about the room. But is it all fantasy? Back in his own room again, he methodically rips up photos of himself with the sailors who had earlier assaulted him and consigns them to the flames in his fireplace.

Similar, and made at the same time, was Curtis Harrington's Fragment of Seeking. Its hero, played by Harrington, is portrayed as a narcissistic young man disturbed by his ambivalent reactions to the many attractive girls who crowd around him. Returning through prison-like corridors to his own cell-like room, he flings himself down on his cot. One of the girls enters and offers herself to him, but he thrusts her aside. The girl leaves and, after a moment's hesitation, the young man runs after her, following her to her room, where she awaits him lying seductively on her couch. He leans forward to kiss her, then draws back in horror. Beneath the long blonde hair is a grinning skull on a decaying skeleton. The boy rushes from the room, past skeletal figures in a courtyard, and stares at himself in a mirror, aware at last of his own homosexual nature. In Mother's Day, made by San Francisco poet James Broughton, adults are seen playing children's games, punctuated by sharp outbursts of apparently unmotivated sadism--all supervised approvingly by a handsome, self-centered, emasculating mother. (The final shot shows the mother wearing her husband's bowler hat and holding his riding crop.) Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome also belongs to this group of avant-grade experiments; it is a lushly beautiful homosexual fantasy in which gaudily, gauzily costumed mythological figures participate in vaguely obscene bacchic rites. In these "agony and experience films," one is almost painfully aware that they are the externalization of their makers' own neuroses, the cinematic equivalent of an analyst's couch.

Anger, Broughton and Harrington were all products of the West Coast school. Meanwhile, back in the East, Maya Deren was joined by a host of others attracted to the medium by its possibilities for self-expression, self-revelation--and, it must be admitted in a good many instances, for self-aggrandizement. By the end of the Fifties, what had begun as a number of earnest young film makers working feverishly in near isolation had escalated into something of a movement. Film cooperatives, such as poet Willard Mass' Gryphon in New York, were springing up. Maya Deren's Creative Film Foundation had brought together an impressive list of intellectuals to award prizes, organize symposia and push for financial aid to the more promising--and impoverished--talents in the group. And Jonas Mekas was beginning to form his New American Cinema group to promote the films of its Members. By this time, too, air travel was swift enough--and cheap enough--to minimize the differences between the coasts. Anger went to Italy to film his Eaux d' Artifice, Broughton to England for The Pleasure Garden, Harrington to Italy for Assignation; others, such as Gregory Markopoulos and Stan Brakhage, were young Lochinvars who came out of the West to settle in New York and help make it, temporarily at least, the focal point for all experimental work in the United States. Significantly, when the Ford Foundation made its awards to creative film makers in 1964, only three of the twelve winners were based on the West Coast.

What distinguished the "far-out" films of the Fifties from the underground films of the Sixties, however, was neither their point of origin nor their choice of themes. It was their technical polish, their obvious concern for the physical appearance of the image, their feeling not only for the surface but for the form of the completed work. By contrast with what was to follow, Willard Mass' films of the early Fifties--Geography of the Body, with its Vesuvian nipples and craterlike navels, and Mechanics of Love, with its phallic knives and telephone poles, its vaginal letter boxes and furnaces--were meticulously photographed, scrupulously edited documentaries. During the Fifties, Gregory Markopoulos, who had studied film at the University of Southern California, created his Psyche trilogy (1947-1948), a poetic odyssey to the wilder shores of love; there was a lushness in his imagery, an absorption with the evocative power of raw color that made each episode a remarkable adventure. In his most recent film, Galaxie (1966), he offers little more than interminable, rather self-consciously arty close-ups of 30 of his Greenwich Village friends, punctuated by long stretches of blank film and the occasional ringing of Hindu bells. During the Fifties, the youthful Stan Brakhage explored the medium in a series of films notable for their vigor, terseness and technical daring. More recently, he has displayed a grim determination to retain every foot of film that comes from his camera, be it overexposed, underexposed or bearing reel-end punctures; and he incorporates this raggle-taggle footage into such nonstop epics as his five-apart Dog Star Man (78 minutes) and The Art of Vision (four and a half hours). Though still talented, he has succumbed to the self-indulgence and self-absorption that have come to characterize most of the films that have been pouring out in the past few years.

In a pointed refutation of the Marxist theory of an evolution from quantity to quality, beginning in the early Sixties--beginning, in fact, with the Robert frank-Alfred Leslie production of Pull My Daisy (based on an unpublished play by Jack Kerouac) and with Jonas Mekas' feature-length Guns of the Trees, an intellectualized essay on miscegenation--the field; of the avant-grade has undergone a marked expansion and transformation. Whereas formerly each new film of Anger, Broughton or Harrington was an event, today the products of the underground are produced in such profusion that it is all but impossible to keep up with them. In less than five years, the Kuchar brothers--Bronx-born twins still in their early 20s--have alone been responsible for about two dozen titles. (And what titles! Pussy on a Hot Tin Roof, Sins of the Fleshapoids, Hold Me While I'm Naked... American-International might well consider hiring them solely on the basis of their title-writing abilities.) And Andy Warhol can turn out a new picture in little more time than it takes for the film to pass through his cameras (with such descriptive titles as Sleep, Eat, Harlot and Blow Job). Fourtunately, this fair-haired boy of Pop art also has a few other things going for him, or Cinémathèque screens would be inundated by Warhol, instead of being merely awash with his works. These days, more experimental films are being produced in a single year than appeared in the entire decade of the Fifties; but they show every sign of their hasty orgins, and they succeed largely on their calculated power to shock and disturb. They are pictures to talk about, pictures that it is "in" to see.

And what do they look like, these "in" pictures? Perhaps the best known--or most notorious--is Jack Smith's scandal-rousing Flaming Creatures (1963), which has served as a kind of rallying point for all true underground enthusiasts ever since. Because it was banned by the New York police the year after it was made on the charge of obscenity, and has had such ardent--and vocal--champions as Jonas Mekas and Susan Sontag to speak in its behalf, this "pageant of Transylvestria" has, almost too literally, been more honored in the breach than in the observance. For a full hour, Flaming Creatures celebrates the campy world of homosexuals, transvesties and their sexless ladyfriends. Without any formal plot, and set to a haphazard collection of phonograph records that range from Siboney to rock 'n' roll, from bullfight music to Chinese singsong, the picture wanders through beach frolicking, a parody of an old Valentino movie and gang rape in an Arabian seraglio. Part of the fun, apparently, is that only when the women in the film expose their ample bosoms is one certain that they are women and thus subject to all the indignities that their flesh is heir to. Much of the time the screen is crowded with painted and bewigged men wearing what Miss Sontag has aptly described as "flamboyant thrift-shop women's clothes," who dance together, tease each other and strut their pitiable finery for the delectation of their lacy pals. There is an abundance of nudity--penises are displayed as casually as breasts--and a final orgy that is virtually a homosexual's handbook; but the film's erotic charge derives less from overt overexposure than from the voluptuous, undulating movements of these pretty young men in their satins and silks as they fan the desires of their little friends. The charge, however, never crackles and rarely sizzles, because, despite its audacious subject matter, Flaming Creatures persistently dampened by Smith's ineptitude with the camera. Shots jiggle on the screen, heads are cut off by the frame line, scenes are played far too long, and the photography has the gray graininess that betrays the amateur's unfamiliarity with film stocks and lenses. All in all, the picture resembles nothing so much as a stag film for fairies.

Quite different is Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising, although it, too, is tinged with homosexuality and has consequently had more than its share of run-ins with the police. But Anger is a film maker who is always in control of his material--precise when he needs to be, imprecise when he wants to be. As a result, his picture, which probes the psychological and sociological roots of today's motorcycle gangs, has a style and certitude about it, an awareness of what it wants to say and how best to say it, that is shared by precious few of its underground contemporaries. Scorpio opens as one of the cyclists prepares for his evening on the town. He is lying in bed reading a comic book, his walls bedecked with pictures and posters depicting violence and death. He rises and fondles the gleaming mechanism of his motorbike, then almost ritualistically dons his uniform--the tight jeans, the black-leather jacket, the heavy, chrome-studded belt. The camera is placed low, so that he appears to be what he thinks he is--a 20th Century knight preparing to sally forth from his castle on his trusty charger. Since there is no Grail for present-day knights, he must settle for kicks. The cyclists meet at their clubhouse, a room adorned with swastikas, Nazi flags and photographs of Hitler. To Anger, the motorcycle has become a cult symbol with strong nihilistic--neo-fascist connotations--a new paganism that mocks the Christian theology. (On a TV set, newsreels of Hitler alternate with scenes from some ancient and corny version of the Passion play.) That the cult is also tinged with homosexuality is evidenced by the initiation cermony for a new member, during which one of the young men displays a gigantic dildo; and degrading rites are performed upon the neophyte. The film ends with a wild Walpurgisnacht of cyclists on the road intercut with the flashing, flaring red signal lights of police cars, that symbol of a hated authority. A wild rock-'n'-roll score, repeated cutaways (via the TV set) to Marlon Brando in The Wild One and inserts of such comic-book heroes as Superman contribute to the film's sense of youthful contemporaneity. Without undue moralizing, Anger seems to be saying, "This is how it is." Apparently, the censors who have cracked down on his picture would rather not find out.

The Andy Warhol films are something else again. Whereas Anger has repeatedly won prizes all over the world for his film-making abilities, and Jack Smith is merely slovenly, Warhol abjures technique altogether. The camera is simply loaded, set into position and turned on. Whatever happens to be in front of it--a man getting a haircut in a barbershop (33 minutes), a man eating a mushroom (45 minutes) or the Empire State Building (eight hours)--is photographed from the one setup, with breaks only when it becomes necessary to reload. One young and admiring critic, Thom Andersen, has pointed out that Warhol's function has been "restoring to film its original irrational function of presenting things to look at without comment or artifice"--a reference to the primitive one-shot-one-film movies of Edison and Lumière. But the Edison and Lumière pictures not only showed something with a certain amount of motion to it--a train pulling into a station, a dancer doing the shimmy--but managed to do it all in about 50 seconds. Actually, there is more unconscious irony than truth to Andersen's assertion that Warhol's first films "managed to astonish people merely by their reductive simplicity, their overweening length and their insistent silence." They either bludgeoned their audiences into a bord submissiveness or sent them roaring for their money back.

It did not take Warhol long, however, to realize that this same technique, if applied to material with sexual connotations, could become not only more controversial but more commercial as well. Shortly, instead of a man eating a mushroom, he was showing a female impersonator eating--with obvious oral gratification--a banana. Instead of a middle-aged man getting a haircut, he showed a leather-jacketed youth getting--or at least responding to--a blow job. Instead of eight hours of the Empire State Building, there was eight hours of The Chelsea Girls (mercifully reduced to four by the simple expedient of running two 16mm films cheek by jowl on a single Cinemascope screen). Purportedly a cross section of the inhabitants of New York's venerable Chelsea Hotel, its "girls" include a bull dyke who gets her kicks from shoving needles (sometimes doped) into the posteriors of the tender young things who come her way, a whiskey-sodden mother who sporadically beats her homosexual son with a whip while his Lesbian girlfriend looks on approvingly from the next bed, a wealthy pervert who tries (in vain) to keep his young man away from the two teenagers who drop in from across the hall and offer themselves to him, and a hyped-up fanatic who beats and screeches after a girl he imagines has insulted him. Typically of Warhol, these episodes are not always projected in the same sequence or combinations, nor are the same sound tracks heard at each performance. It is also typical that, in the sequence with the fanatic, the actor runs out of inspiration well before the camera has run out of film. "Keep it going," Warhol's voice commands audibly on the sound track. "We've got three more minutes."

In several of his more recent pictures, Warhol has attempted to tell stories--but still with the most primitive of movie techniques. Tarzan and Jane Regained--Sort Of, a parody with an embarrassingly homemade air about it, features the underground's only star, the wispy, kewpie-faced Taylor Mead as Tarzan, and fleshy underground film maker Naomi Levine as Jane. Jerky, hand-held camerawork, random editing, an irritatingly nonsynchronous sound track haphazardly compiled from phonograph records and an improvised commentary by Mead complete the film. In Vinyl, a more recent effort, Warhol reverts to the single-take film, crowds his seven or eight performers into a corner of his aluminum-foil-lined studio and, against the pounding beat of disc-jockey music, plays out a long scene (70 minutes) that consists primarily of scratchily recorded dialog. (For some reason, the sound recording in Warhol's movies is always terrible.) Its youthful, long-haired hero, Victor (played by Village poet Gerard Malanga), fingers his tight pants and says, "OK, I'm a J.D. So what? I like to bust things up and carve people up and I dig the old up-yours with plenty of violence so it's real tasty. And then if I get busted by the cops, so what, so what the hell, I say. You can't have J. D.s like me running loose all over the city. Then it's me that loses if I get busted, so what the hell do you care? But, babies, while I am free, it's me that is having the fun, you dig, with breaking up china shops and carving up cuties and the old up-yours with lots of real smooth violence to give it some juice..." Victor and his pal Scum deliver the old up-yours to an older man, Pub, after ripping up the books he is carrying. But the two have a falling out, whereupon Scum rats on Victor to the fuzz. What follows is a homosexual's sadomasochistic fantasy as Victor is cured of his antisocial ways by a "doctor" who, with a caressing viciousness, tortures the youth until, in Pavlovian fashion, he begins to associate evil and violence with pain and nausea. When Victor is released, all his old cronies set upon him and beat him up.

Throughout Vinyl, for no discernible reason--except, perhaps, as critic Robert Hatch has suggested, to illustrate "the irrelevance of females in the emotional affairs of men"--New York society playgirl Edie Sedgwick sits impassively on a steamer trunk at the back of the stage, totally uninvolved in the action at any point. Miss Sedgwick, a slender, large-eyed blonde with a butch haircut and a well-developed instinct for self-display, moved to stage center for Warhol's Poor Little Rich Girl--70 momentously uneventful consecutive minutes from her young life filmed in her luxurious Central Park West apartment. Between listening to records, munching on a sandwich and stripping down to bra and panties to try on some clothes, she list lessly answers questions that Warhol, off-camera, disinterestedly throws at her. For a climax, she slips into a pants suit for a party that night. Typically, the first half of the film is badly out of focs. Typically, Warhol uses it anyway.

Perhaps the most ambitious--and certainly the most popular--of Warhol's pictures to date has been My Hustler, which tells a story (of sorts) filmed entirely on location on Fire Island. Again, the subject is--you guessed it--homosexuality: Ed, a wealthy, aging queer, has hired Paul, a handsome, well-muscled young man, from something called Dial-a-Hustler and brought him to the island. Immediately, both Genvieve, Ed's attractive neighbor, and another hustler named Bob--described by Ed on the sound track as "the sugarplum fairy"--announce their designs on the boy. Ed bets with them that neither will make it. Genvieve tries to seduce him as they swim in the surf together; Bob makes his pitch as the two are showering and driving in a small bathroom, with the older man promising to use his business connections in return for Paul's favors. Ed appears in the doorway, holding out his wallet. "Have you ever seen so much money in one wallet in your life before, Paul? It could be yours.... I can take you places, Paul. Beautiful places. The important thing to remember is that we will go together." Paul remains impassive as Ed leaves and a woman, unidentified, takes his place at the doorway. "Get away from these old faggots," she tells him. As the film ends, Paul stands alone in the bathroom, still unable to reach decision.

Astonishingly enough, all of this is narrated from only two camera setups. The first shot zooms in on the porch of a beach house where Ed is sitting, microphone visible beside him. (His is the only voice heard in the first shot, but it is heard incessantly.) Occasionally, the camera pans to Paul lying on the beach, and the reel ends with a zoom to Paul and Genvieve in the water. The second shot, completely static, has the camera just outside the bathroom door, its constricted view enlarged only when someone swings open a small mirrored cabined. The result of this (for want of a better name) technique is to make an already longish film seem interminable. When Bob and Paul are in the bathroom drying themselves, shaving, endlessly applying deodorants and powders, their improvised dialog strays repeatedly from the central proposition; yet obviously Warhol would never dream of cutting a precious word or losing a still more precious frame. There is an oddly obsessive feeling about these films--their claustrophobic settings, their self-absorbed, perverse characters, their single-minded, simple-minded techniques. But as with all too many obsessive people, they quickly degenerate into bores.

No less obsessive is the thread of homosexuality that runs through so many of these underground pictures. It is not so much expository or explanatory, as in the earlier films of Anger and Harrington, but rather exultant--and not infrequently, exploitative. There is, for example, Andy Milligan's Vapors, which is "underground" merely because commercial films still do not permit such a forthright treatment of the problem. Its hero is a thin, somewhat effeminate young man who is visiting a notorious homosexual pickup spot for the first time. The entire action, which strongly resembles a one-act play, centers on his encounters with the various queens who frequent the place. The secret of The Secret of Wendell Samson, by Mike Kuchar, is that Wendell, too, is a homosexual, and unhappy about it. Invited to accompany a rich boyfriend to Haiti, Wendell runs away; but soon after, he accepts another's invitation to have a cup of coffee. In the next shot, showing the young man and his new friend together in bed, Wendell says blankly, blandly, "That was a good cup of coffee." After rejecting the advances of the girl next door, he is kidnaped and taken to a small room filled with men and women dressed as gangsters. At pistol point, he is forced to make love to a gaudy blonde. Wendell makes a token effort (both he and the girl are fully dressed), but finally shouts, "I can't do it!"--whereupon the spectators line up like a firing squad, shooting at him and pelting him with various missiles, until his white shirt is splotched with red. In the final shot, the girl next door appears again, but she falls limply to the ground, leaving Wendell alone on a wintry plain.

Somewhat less lurid is Clifford Solway's The Gay Life, no doubt because it is actually a documentary originally produced for--but never shown by--canadian television. A camera investigation of gay bars, it begins with shots of men dancing together in one such establishment while the owner of the place coldly explains the house rules on the sound track: They can dance, but they may not touch each other; nor can they approach another customer to make a pickup. The scene shifts to a table, where four young homosexuals--three white, one Negro--discuss the gay life and agree among one another that faggots, like blondes, have more fun. The major portion of the film is devoted to female impersonators as they prepare for their performances, and then the shows themselves. One does a striptease down to bra and panties, ending with the removal of his wig; others, in floor-length ball gowns, sing such ballads as Love for Sale and I Enjoy Being a Girl. The film is not without its poignant moments, particularly when, at the finale, several male couples are seen dancing together to Barbra Streisand's recording of People (who need people). Gradually, their husky voices pick up the lyric--"They're the luckiest people in the world." Suddenly, homosexuality is revealed as neither mere camp nor perversion but as a pathetic from of escape from loneliness.

Masturbation, still a shocking subject to many, also turns up with increasing frequency in these films. Often it is purely incidental, as in Smith's Flaming Creatures and in William Vehr's Brothel (in which one of the young men lies naked on a pallet for much of the picture while his friends, garishly garbed in Arabian costumes, idly play with his penis from time to time.) Nathaniel Dorsky's Ingreen and Fall Trip Home are clearly masturbation fantasies, but with emphasis more on the psychological than on the sexual disturbances of their youthful heroes. In Plastic Haircut, Robert Nelson characteristically has fun with the entire notion as his astronomer hero struggles with a vast paper pyramid that protrudes from his cloak, massages rubber balls and copes with a sausage-shaped balloon that persistently inflates and deflates. More direct is Japanese film maker Takahiko Iimura's Onan, a satire on onanistic sexual gratification. In it, a young man studies intently the pictures in a number of girlie magazines, plays with himself and, as a result of this ersatz stimulation, gives birth to a large, sterile, plastic egg. More direct still is Stan Brakhage's Vein, in which a young boy, his face a doll-like mask of innocence, masturbates in front of the camera. His face is seen only briefly; most of the film consists of closeups of the penis being stroked and rubbed, intercut with shots of a starry sky.

At the other end of the scale, the amount of heterosexual activity depicted by underground directors is also sharply on the rise. The aforementioned Stan Brakhage, the father of five children, has recorded in almost clinical detail the birth of each of them, from conception to delivery. In Blue-White, for example, he zooms his camera from his wife's vagina to her pain-racked face, then back again, as his child makes its entry into the world. In still another of his pictures, he superimposes upon scenes of his children at play a shot of himself and his wife copulating (and calls the result An Avant-Garde Home Movie). The Kuchar brothers, Mike and George, separately or together, have turned out some of the wildest, wackiest pictures being made today. "Whoever has the money to pay for the film, he gets to direct," said George in a recent interview. Apart from their talent for thinking up far-out (and generally irrelevant) titles, they have also mastered the knack of luring stunning young nonactresses into their films and photograph them in the manner of Playboy centerfolds. Should a young lady have second thoughts after shooting has begun--or catch pneumonia, as happened to one shapely miss after having spent hours in a drafty shower for Hold Me While I'm Naked--the Kuchars are not upset. They simply revise their plot and go on shooting. What makes their films unique, quite apart from the plump, bare-breasted Bronx sexpots (with their raspy Bronx accents) who populate them, is the fact the Kuchars take neither themselves nor their movies too seriously. For the most part, the underground is a dreadfully intense bunch of people.

Nudity is merely incidental to Stan Brakhage, who treats it simply as one more facet of the cosmos that he explores in his ambitious and poetic films; similarly, it is merely coincidental to the Kuchar brothers, whose pictures have been in the main lighthearted parodies of gangster and science-fiction movies. Nudity, however, is central to such films as Naomi Levine's Yes, in which a number of her friends--men, women and children--romp thorough the countryside as naked and unconcerned as Adam and Eve before the serpent arrived. But Yes, unlike so many of the voyeuristic nudist films that it superficially resembles, retains a quality of innocence and wonder, a respect for nature's creation that is almost spiritual. Decidedly less innocent--yet not voyeuristic, either--is William Vehr's erotically sensual Avocada, in which dancer Carole Morell, after writhing amid yellow-and-orange flames, symbolically kills a male victim, covers her nude body with his blood and continues her dance, languorously caressing her body and the blood-stained knife. In Ed Emshwiller's Relativity, a master photographer celebrates the female body--and the act of creation--as one of the few beauties in a world made hideous by death, deformity and decay. On the other hand, Bruce Conner, a West Coast painter and sculptor, has assembled some of the nudest nudes ever shown on a screen--beautiful, sexy girls who stroke their breasts and flaunt their public hair for the delectation of the audience--and quick-cuts these as collage elements in his three-minute Cosmic Ray. Set to the wailing of Ray Charles, and intercut with snippets of everything from the flag-raising at Iwo Jima to a Mickey Mouse cartoon, the film fashions a popart parable of love and death that is at once ebullient and sobering but never for a moment pornographic. In To Parsifal, as his color camera moves past a green, virgin wood, Bruce Baillie creates a moment of ineffable loveliness with the fleeting glimpse of a pink and pearly nude in a clearing. She is never seen again.

And yet it must be admitted that many of today's underground film makers use nudity solely for its exploitative shock value. Ben Van Meter, in his Poon Tang Trilogy, gathers together shots of wars, cataclysms and assorted disasters much in the manner of Bruce Conner, but he photographs them off the living screen of a naked girl who sits, legs apart, facing the camera. They are distorted and distended by the convexities of her breasts, belly and thighs, absorbed in the black of her public hair. Later, a busty nude dances in an empty room, a hand-drawn asterisk covering her pubic area. At times, the asterisk seems to be trying to keep up with her; at other times, she seems to be trying to escape from it. (Eventually, she does.) In Bustbag, by Don Duga, blasts of paint--symbolic sperm--are superimposed over girlie-film footage, and the whole set to rock-'n'-roll music.

Robert Nelson, another West Coast artist, obviously revels in nudity. In Oiley Peloso, the Pumph Man (whatever that may mean), much of the footage is devoted to the antic cavorting of two totally naked girls swinging on a rope deep in a forest, and it includes a huge closeup of a gaping vagina on which is superimposed a man's hand, as if reaching out from it. ("Due to footage in which pubic hair is visible," cautions the distributor, the Creative Film Society, "this film should not be shown where objections may arise.") In The Confessions of a Black Mother Succuba, Nelson superimposes and intercuts elements of pop culture--glimpses of Ed Sullivan, old movies, comic strips--with fleshy striptease artists and even fleshier nudes wrestling, all played against a mélange of old-time records that includes Helen Kane singing I Wanna Be Loved by You and Betty Hutton's swinging rendition of Murder, He Says. In his satiric Oh Dem Watermelons, the melon is used as a symbol for the oppressed Negro. It is thrown off buses, flushed down toilets, eviscerated and, at one point, joyously embraced by a naked white girl who crushes it to her bosom and grows ecstatic as the pink fruit and juices flow over her body. Barbara Rubin's Christmas on Earth, whose two reels are generally projected superimposed one on the other, moved Jonas Mekas to rhapsodize: "A woman; a man; the black of the public hair; the cunt's moon mountains and canyons. As the film goes, image after image, the most private territories of the body are laid open for us.... From now on, the camera shall know no shame. Cinema has discovered all of man: as painting and sculpture did from the very beginning. But then: Cinema is in its very beginning."

If so, then it has precious little farther to go--at least along the tracks set down by Mekas and his friends. The late Ron Rice, one of the gods of the underground's private pantheon, wrote revealingly shortly before his death, "All film makers should forget that they're film makers. Everyone can reach the heights of creation if they understand that art has no definition. It encompasses all. Art is everywhere in the sewers in the buildings in the air like a bird. Why bother to analyze anything. See where analysis has brought the human race, the world is on the brink of destruction...isn't it absurd?" The fact is that too many of the film makers in the New American Cinema movement not only fail to analyze anything, and have forgotten all too readily that they are film makers (if, indeed, they ever were), but most of them prefer to search for "art" in the sewers than in the air. They inspect their navels with ecstatic self-preoccupation; they discover sex with a great whoop and holler; yet when they turn their flickering attention to the world around them, it is with the enthusiastic destructiveness of small children. Unlike the Dadaists and Surrealists of 40 and 50 years ago, however, who destroyed in order to clear the way for new forms of beauty, most of them find their satisfaction--their "kicks"--in the act of destruction itself.

Oddly enough, in Europe, where it all began, the avant-grade movement has become on the whole far more sedate than in this country. In part, this is due to the fact that much of the experimental work is carried on in state-supported or semi-official film schools, and the young film makers gravitate toward less inflammantory, less personal material. In addition, since most European nations encourage the production of short films "of artistic merit" by an elaborate system of rebates, underwriting or direct cash awards to officially approved pictures, experimentation tends to be concentrated on such irreproachable areas as fine art, the dance and new ways to look at the French or Italian countryside. Not coincidentally, each time Belgium has held its binnual International Experimental Film Competition (begun in 1958), more than half of the total entries have come from the United States--and invariably, more than half of the prizes go to American contestants.

Perhaps because so much of the European experimental activity is oriented toward ultimate theatrical exhibition, the route from avant-grade to feature production is considerably shorter and more direct over there than in this country. Roman Polanski, who scored internationally with his first feature, the tension-charged Knife in the Water, was a product of his native Poland's film schools and had directed half a dozen experimentals as a student before graduating to feature-length productions. In England, under the aegis of the British Film Institute's Experimental Production Committee (better known as "British Free Cinema"), such directors as Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson made their professional bows. Among the Italian directors who took the giant step are Michelangelo Antonioni, Luciano Emmer and Dino Risi. In France, virtually the entire New Wave--Georges Franju, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, François Truffaut, Agnes Varda--were originally either avant-grade film makers or critics, or both. Franju, a founder of the Cinémathèque Française, first won attention as a film maker with his 1949 documentary Le Sang des Bêtes (The Blood of the Beasts). A shcoking, bloody, revoltingly intimate description of the slaughter and processing of animals in a Paris abattoir, it was a picture that required a strong stomach to sit through--and a broad streak of sadism to enjoy. Nevertheless, in the poetry of its approach and the sheer professionalism of its technique, it has come to epitomize the European version of the far-out film.

Closer to the American avant-grade is Agnes Varda's prize-winning, autobiographical L'Opéra Mouffe (1958). The petite Mlle. Varda, pregnant at the time she made the film, transformed an impressionistic study of a Paris quartier into a vivid, highly personal account of her own fears and erotic longings. As the camera scans the faces of the poor and the aged, of women made grotesque and awkward by the children they are carrying, of lovers meeting in streets and crowded parks, the sensitivities of the film maker are always uppermost. Arranged in the form of a suite, set to various popular French street songs, the film gains its effect in part through the contrasts and contradictions discovered by the camera, in part through the unabashed intimacy of its photography--including, inevitably, the prostitutes of the district and a protracted, lyric sequence in which a pair of naked lovers explore with pure delight the secrets of each other's bodies. This same sense of intimacy and lyricism was to be found again in Varda's more recent features, such as Cleo de Cinq à Sept (Cleo from Five to Seven) and Le Bonheur.

As in the earlier avant-grade, the movement on the Continent since World War Two has drawn to itself on occasion (although invariably on a short-term basis) artists from other fields--perhaps most notably the controversial French poet and playwright Jean Genet (The Blacks, The Balcony) and the German-born playwright Peter Weiss (The Investigation, Marat/Sade). Genet's Un Chant d'Amour, which he wrote and directed in 1950, is a silent film--and all the more disturbing for its silence. Possibly drawn from his own prison experiences, it is an utterly candid description of homosexuality in a jail, featuring a brutal and depraved warder who alternately spies upon his prisoners as they commit various acts of sodomy and taunts them for their offenses. (Within the past year, the film has been banned both in New York and in California.) During the mid-Fifties, Peter Weiss produced half a dozen experimental films in Sweden (including the feature-length, Kafka-esque The Mirage) before turning to dramatic writing. Of the six, Hallucinations and Interplay are not only replete with nudity but are specifically erotic in content. Hallucinations, for example, consists of a dozen brief tableaux (set to musique concrète) in which abstract forms are set against fragmented, semi-abstract nude figures. (In one of the tableaux, a woman's legs spread invitingly from the bottom of the frame; beyond them, a naked man angrily gesticulates his rejection. In another, a luch female torso fills the right side of the screen; beyond it, a naked man lies with his head on a table, surrounded by clenched fists.) In Interplay, two lovers, both nude, are presented in combinations that Film Culture has described as "a tantalizing ambivalence of sexual attitudes."

Like the United States, France, too, has its "underground" film makers today. But in France, the connotation of the word is altogether literal. Men such as the American expatriate Noel Burch and the French writer-philosopher André Labarthe have been making throughly professional films on somewhat esoteric themes; but there seems to be an unwritten agreement that these will be shown in private. (Perhaps the recent French ban on the release of Peter Goldman's New York--made Echoes of Silence on the grounds that it dealt exclusively with young people's search for erotic adventure, and that it showed pubic hair, indicates that the agreement is not so much unwritten as understood.) In any case, Burch's Noviciat, which has now been seen in New York, suggests the nature of these films: It recounts the misadventures of a young man who is surprised while peeping on the karate lessons of a group of Lesbians, enslaved by their teacher (a formidable lady in black tights and high heels) and forced to undergo all sorts of humiliations while serving "in durance vile." It is, quite explicitly, a homosexual's nightmare of what women are really like.

But the wildest films being made today emanate from Japan's underground. Donald Richie, the American-born author of The japanese Film now living in Japan, has noted that these are intended for no audience at all and hence, more than films made anywhere else in the world, conform without compromise to their makers' vision. Ofter--as in The Holeless Vagina--they are deliberately shocking. Complexe, by Nobuhiko Ohbayashi, is reminiscent of the French Surrealists. Musashino, by Yoichi Takabayashi, makes elaborate use of nudes and nature to create an atmosphere of pure eroticism. Uninhibited by either external censorship or self-restraint, these young film makers purposefully howl down the doors of traditional production not only in their own country but wherever films are made.

And yet, despite the willful yahooism and youthful arrogance of this new generation the world over, it is still far too early to write off the entire movement as a total loss. There may be an unseemly eagerness on the part of many of its members to assume, or bestow, the mantle of the artist on the basis of a handful of half-baked shockers; but already, in the relatively few years of its existence, the New American Cinema has turned up at least half a dozen first-rate and authentic talents--which is not a bad average for any movement. Bruce Baillie, for example, has the poet's ability to communicate an emotion swiftly, clearly and with an intensity of image that makes each of his pictures a moving experience. The brief Mr. Hayashi, a tribute to a simple Japanese gardener, has the controlled perfection of a haiku; in his more extended Mass, the anonymous death of an Indian on the streets of San Francisco is translated into an indictment of the callousness of an entire civilization. As with any artist, sex is part of the life he celebrates--but without insistence. Bruce Conner's special gift lies in marshaling pop elements into collages of great ebullience and bite. Nudity abounds in his films--but never for its own sake. Shirely Clarke, trained as a dancer, in A Moment in Love, creates an almost-perfect, dance-styled, visual impression of the love act. More recently, in such uncompromising feature-length pictures as The Connection and The Cool World, she has been a good deal less poetic but no less candid. Ed Emshwiller, a painter, is certainly the ace cinematographer of the underground, combining he artist's eye for composition with a dancer's instinct for natural movement. He was the photographer of Adolfas Mekas' Hallelujah the Hills! (in which Mekas was assisted by his brother Jonas), and his ingenuity in emulating the camera styles of the great directors, from Griffith to François Truffaut, is perhaps the happiest aspect of this extended underground "in" joke. On his own, he has worked experimentally in both black and white and color--and photographs nudes with superb artistry in both. The precocious Kuchar twins display a marvelous improvisatory quality, a great sense of being with it, and an even greater sense of humor about the whole underground scene. And Stan Vanderbeek, who also likes to do collage films, combines wit, imagination and indignation in pictures that both entertain and shock. When, in Breathdeath, a naked girl writhes lasciviously on a couch, her head a TV set filled with disasters, Vanderbeek is trying to arouse us in only one way--socially.

Also, it should be noted, this new avant-grade, unlike its predecessors in Europe during the Twenties, is no hermetically sealed unit, making films that are intelligble solely to an esoteric coterie of the initiated. Last year, when Lincoln Center played host to the prize winners of a nationwide student film competition, precious few of the almost 150 entrants had tried to present Hollywood stories in Hollywood styles. There were attempts to imitate Antonioni, Godard and Resnais; but many more were obviously strongly influenced by the underground films--and not merely by their film-making techniques. Both sex and nudity were present in astonishing quantities. Hey, Little One, from New York University, used the hand-held camera and tape recorder for direct, revealing interviews detailing the nocturnal prowlings of Greenwich Village's teeny boppers. Catullus Silent, from UCLA, dealt in dramatic terms with a homosexual who fears that his boyfriend is about to walk out on him. In Stillborn, another NYU entry, a completely naked boy and girl play hide-and-seek in a forest, splash in sylvan streams and embrace and each other in prolonged amorous clinches. All the nude scenes in this experimental picture, however, are shown only in negative--a rather lovely effect that makes it seem as if the light is emanating from their bodies. No such reticence surrounded the painfully autobiographical Mitzvah, by John Madrigal of the University of Southern California; in it a young man, shattered by an event in his childhood, finally awakens to a realization of himself in the arms of a marvelously willing girl he had picked up on the Paris Metro. It won a special jury prize. Top honors went to Andrew Meyer's Match Girl, in which a sexy, suicidal high-fashion model spends much of the film in black bra and scanties, gazing at old Marilyn Monroe movies on TV. Significantly, although Meyer is a student at Boston University, part of the picture was shot in Andy Warhol's Manhattan studio, and two of his earlier efforts have been distributed by the Film-Makers' Cooperative for the past few years.

Because the underground is beginning to spread, however, because its audiences are widening, it is also becoming subject to hitherto nonexistent censor pressures. The larger film societies, such as Cinema 16, have functioned under an educational charter, while those affiliated with universities have generally been considered part of the schools' extension programs. In both instances, the censors have adopted a hands-off policy: If it's educational, it has to be harmless. But this situation no longer obtains. Scorpio Rising was chased off the screens in both New York and Los Angeles, as was Jean Genet's brutal, eloquent study of homosexuals in prison,Un Chant d'Amour (French-made, but distributed in this country by the FilmMakers' Cooperative). When a Los Angeles art house held an experimental-film competition a few years ago, Naomi Levine's Yes was prudently withdrawn from the screenings: The theater manager had been informed that cops were in the house. In Chicago, one of the few cities still to retain its antiquated censor setup, the film societies at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago and the Art Institute are all on notice that the police will act on any complaint from patrons. Recently, at the Second Chicago International Film Festival, a woman objected violently to a sequence in Gregory Markopoulos' Galaxie in which poet Allen Ginsberg laughingly kissed his friend Peter Or-lovsky on the mouth. "It's disgusting and degrading and I can't see what's the last bit funny," she fumed as she made her way up the aisle. "It's just people, baby," came a voice from the darkness, "and what's funnier than people?" Apparently, the woman did not call the police; and soon after, Markopoulos began teaching film courses at Chicago's famed Art Institute. What she--and the police--will do when he screens his long-awaited, three-hour-long Illiac Passion is anybody's guess. In this retelling of the Greek myth, according to advance reports, everyone strolls about without a stitch of clothing--with the sole exception of Andy Warhol, who, as the messenger of the gods, rides a bicycle clad in a silver-lamé jump suit.

But the dangers of censorship still remain, and most members of the underground are well aware of them--particularly since their leader, Jonas Mekas, has (at the present writing) been under indictment for better than two years for his New York screenings of UN Chant d'Amour and Flaming Creatures. For some, a satisfactory solution lies in the sale of 8mm prints for home projection--"just like you would buy a book, a record or a reproduction of a work of art to hang on your walls," as one film maker put it. Although a good many titles are now available for purchase in this fashion, the major effort of the New American Cinema makers remains the extension and strengthening of existing audiences. If their present trend continues, lacing their experimentals with far-out experiments in sex and relevant insights on the contemporary scene, they can hardly fail. After all, that's where the action is.

In the next installment of "The History of Sex in Cinema," authors Knight and Alpert turn their attention from the overt avant-grade erotica of the experimental scene to the sexploitational voyeurism of "The Nudies."