What to Expect at the Counter Culture, Counter Cinema Film Festival
Oct 22, 2010 - By Tom von Logue Newth

http://screencrave.com/2010-10-22/what-to-expect-at-the-counter-culture-counter-cinema-film-festival/

This past weekend, the Film-Maker's Co-op out of New York and MOCA at the Pacific Design Center teamed up for what they billed as LA's first avant-garde film festival, three days celebrating the experimental and underground work distributed by the co-op from the 1960's to today. Enthusiastically curated by film-maker MM Serra (that's for Mary Magdalene) and academic of the underground David E. James, it also boasted the presence throughout of experimental legends Carolee Schneeman, Ken Jacobs and Jonas Mekas, each presented with some sort of over-sized commendation scroll on the opening night and treated to individual programmes dedicated to their work.

There's few opportunities to see underground cinema in the theatre, so despite the fact that most in attendance were already familiar with titles major and minor of the form, it was a great pleasure, to be offered programmes of classics as the opening and closing events. The festival kicked off with Jack Smith's staple, the legendary Flaming Creatures (1963), a bleached-out fever dream of transsexuals cavorting on a New York roof-top, a hymn to the trash glamour of Frances Francine, Mario Montez and others of their Factory superstar ilk and, for about half its length, an amusing advertisement for indelible lipstick. There's also a ->-bleeped-<- vampire, an ambisexual objet fétiche par excellence in the form of a hanging glass lamp and the mischievous use of flaccid penises which was the main bone of contention for the the authorities that perpetually called for the film's suppression.