The Brooklyn Rail

Getting Away With It

Your inside is out/and your outside is in: Conceptual multimedia artist John Baldessari’s “Six Colorful Inside Jobs” (1977) is both a document of and a vehicle for a conceptual serial painting.

UNKNOWN PLEASURES
Pacific Film Archive's Radical Light

Recalling the genesis of her 1971 film Near the Big Chakra, Alice Anne Parker, a k a Anne Severson, says, “I started asking women friends, ‘Have you ever seen any vaginas?’”

RE-ENTRY: Thoughts on Jordan Belson: 1926–2011

Jordan Belson died in September at the age of 85. In his later years, Belson was an intensely private, almost hermetic, figure. The 30 films he made as an independent, artisanal filmmaker are suffused with mystery, navigating inner and outer spaces via slowly mounting flames of deliquescent light, shimmering starfields, and rainstorms of color.

DREAM REELER
Jud Yalkut (1938-2013)

In a 1969 interview with the psychedelic light show outfit Pablo for the New York underground magazine Changes, filmmaker Jud Yalkut was asked by his interview subjects about his own work—more specifically, the installation art of the commune-dwelling multimedia group, USCO, for which Yalkut made some of his most beautifully disorienting films.

In Conversation

BEN VAN METER with Andy Ditzler & Gregory Zinman

Ben Van Meter (b. 1941) began making films and light shows in the mid-1960s in San Francisco and soon became a leading figure in Bay Area-underground filmmaking. His films, especially S. F. Trips Festival, An Opening (1966) and the epic Acid Mantra or Rebirth of a Nation (1968), are compelling attempts to visually and sonically inscribe psychedelia, as experience and philosophy, in the medium of film.