Sunset. A blue Buddha dissolves into a large grey Teddy bear that weeps tears the size of a quarter. A little girl stabs a pig. A little boy urinates. Sixty white gloves run run run across a table. Bits of broken plaster abruptly assemble themselves into a bust of Dante. An egg cracks and marbles tumble out. A python oozes lazily around a large transparent bowl in which a child is huddled. Beside a giant telescope stands an old man, his ears blazing like light bulbs. On a narrow cot, a nude woman sits giggling and jiggling while an enormous, sinister horseshoe crab . . .
Most people would call it a nightmare. Lloyd Williams, the 26-year-old New Yorker who created this sequence of images, calls it a work of art. The startling thing is that a great many Americans now agree with him. After five years of lurid reports about an "underground cinema," U.S. moviegoers have caught the show. For the first time, a large audience has tuned in on experimental film and is beginning to believe what a far-out few have been saying for years: the movies are entering an era of innovation that attempts to change the language of film and reeducate the human eye.
Image & Movement. The Marat of the revolution is Moviemaker (The Brig) and Movie Critic (Village Voice) Jonas Mekas, 44, a shy man with long greasy hair who looks like a slightly soiled Elijah. In print and in person, Mekas passionately proclaims the death of the film as an industry and the birth of the film as an art. "The new cinema is passion," he says, "the passion of the free creative act." The old cinema, as Mekas sees it, was esthetically no more than an extension of the theater. The new cinema, though it will also tell stories, will be essentially a cinema of image and movement composed by film poets. "The new cinema is an art of light," says Mekas grandly, "and it is bursting on the world like a new dawn."
At first blush, it seemed a dirty-fingered dawn. Two months ago, Mekas and some film-making friends leased an art house in midtown Manhattan to present The Chelsea Girls (Time, Dec. 30), a 3½-hour experimental peekture by Pop Painter Andy Warhol. Exclusively, explicitly and exhaustively, the film depicts homosexuality, Lesbianism, and drug-taking, and a majority of the critics (most of them over 40) found it dirty, dull and on-and-onanistic. But moviegoers (most of them under 30 and simply prurient) stood in long lines to buy the scene. All over the U.S., distributors suddenly sat up and begged for prints. In the next six months, The Chelsea Girls will be shown in at least 100 theaters—in addition to numerous college film societies. It figures to gross at least $1,000,000.
With that one blow the barricades fell, and the avant-garde came storming through. Robert Downey's Chafed Elbows, the shaggy-surreal saga of a Village idiot who hopes to get rich quick by persuading female midgets to use contact lenses as contraceptives, opened in a Lower East Side cin bin that was soon crammed by the cab trade from uptown. And Shirley Clarke's Jason, a harrowing 120-minute interview with a black male prostitute, was offered a midtown opening as a hard-eyed cautionary tale and a surefire succes de scandale.