Amos Vogel founded Cinema 16 as a membership film society in New York City. By regularly screening documentaries and avant-garde films, it helped create an audience and a screening culture that later underground filmmakers could build on. Cinema 16’s long run (ending in 1963) also showed that noncommercial film exhibition could be organized outside Hollywood theaters.
Jonas and Adolfas Mekas founded Film Culture in New York as a film journal. Over time, it became an important place to argue that experimental and independent filmmaking deserved serious attention, not just commercial evaluation. The magazine helped connect filmmakers, critics, and audiences who were looking for alternatives to mainstream cinema.
Jonas Mekas began writing a regular film column in The Village Voice. This gave underground and experimental film a public platform in a widely read alternative newspaper. It also helped Mekas promote screenings, defend controversial work, and build momentum for a new independent film movement.
Independent filmmakers in New York City began meeting to address a practical problem: their films were hard to show and distribute through normal channels. On September 28, 1960, the group publicly declared itself the “New American Cinema Group.” This step mattered because it framed underground film as a shared movement with common goals, not just isolated personal projects.
The New American Cinema Group, Inc. was founded on July 14, 1961 as a membership-based organization in New York. It was designed as a collective “self-help” solution for filmmakers whose work faced censorship or rejection by commercial distributors. The organization’s distribution function became widely known as The Film-Makers’ Cooperative, giving underground film a durable infrastructure.
The New American Cinema Group issued its “First Statement,” a manifesto arguing that official, commercial cinema was failing artistically and morally. The statement helped unify filmmakers around an explicit cultural identity: independent work would resist Hollywood norms in subject matter, style, and control. This made underground film not only a set of films, but also a public argument about what cinema could be.
Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising premiered in New York and became a landmark of the era’s underground style, mixing pop music with provocative imagery. Its visibility helped underground film intersect with fashion and subculture, especially in its stylized focus on biker/leather imagery. The film’s success also illustrated that experimental work could attract crowds without traditional mainstream marketing.
Jonas Mekas founded the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque to create a consistent showcase for avant-garde films. Unlike one-off screenings, the Cinematheque aimed to build a repeating public space where new work could be seen, discussed, and compared. This strengthened the movement by turning underground film into a continuous cultural practice, not just an occasional event.
Andy Warhol’s long-duration film Sleep premiered in New York, presented by Jonas Mekas as a fundraiser for the Film-Makers’ Cooperative. The event showed how underground film could use alternative venues and community support rather than commercial release patterns. It also signaled a shift toward radical experiments with time, attention, and everyday life as film subjects.
Screenings of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures led to police action and arrests, and a widely discussed obscenity case in New York. The legal conflict became a central episode for the underground film community because it linked exhibition to questions of free expression, sexuality, and state censorship. It also pushed the movement to defend its right to exist publicly, not only artistically.
Jonas Mekas released Walden: Diaries, Notes and Sketches, compiling years of personal footage into a film built from everyday moments. The work helped define a key underground approach: the “film diary,” where personal observation replaces conventional plot. This reinforced the New American Cinema’s emphasis on individual voice and low-budget, artist-controlled production.
In 1969, Jonas Mekas and collaborators including Jerome Hill, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, and others planned a film museum dedicated to avant-garde cinema. A selection committee began shaping the “Essential Cinema” repertory, an attempt to define a core canon for study and repeated exhibition. This marked a turning point from a loosely organized movement toward lasting institutions and archives.
Anthology Film Archives opened at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in New York on November 30, 1970. Its mission emphasized preservation, study, and regular exhibition—treating avant-garde cinema as an art form that should be seen under high-quality conditions and revisited over time. This opening provided a clear outcome of the 1960s underground push: a permanent home that could carry the movement beyond the decade.
The New American Cinema and Underground Film (1960–1970)