Strategies of Opposition

Abstract

Many of the films and film-inspired work of the late 1970s and early 1980s we have discussed looked to film as it is practiced in its narrative form. In a Warhol-like fascination, these works sometimes contemplated Hollywood, and European art film, traditions that typically reached wider audiences through narrative practices. Amos Poe’s early films had approached narrative form, and Poe too had an eye on wider distribution. Poe, for example, premiered his film The Foreigner at the Deauville Film Festival, and then in Paris he showed it to Jean-Luc Godard himself.¹ Inspired by these possibilities, Eric Mitchell also looked to more expanded exhibition. After the closing of the New Cinema, Mitchell devised a new plan. In 1980 he arranged to “four wall” his film Underground USA at the St. Marks Cinema in New York City. That is, Mitchell paid the theater owner for the privilege of showing his own film at the Saturday midnight screenings. With this arrangement, Underground USA played at the St. Marks for two years.