By 1962, Jonas Mekas began hosting Film-Makers’ Cooperative screenings at his loft at 414 Park Avenue South, between Twenty-Eighth and Twenty-Ninth Streets. “A normal evening at the Film-Makers’ Cooperative,” Mekas recalled, “you could see Allen Ginsberg, you could see Robert Frank, you could see Larry Rivers, you could see Bob Kaufman or Jack Smith—all the filmmakers, painters, or musicians. It was a mix, and not as separated as today. They were very close, they were using each other.” Mekas’s loft was the office of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, a space lined with shelves of films and an old Moviola film-editing machine that Jonas slept under to save space. “It was also the office of Film Culture magazine,” he recalled, “and then we built a space with a screen that was good enough for twenty people or so. Every evening, filmmakers used to bring their own films and friends to check what they did just a few days ago. It was very, very active. The low-budget or no-budget filmmakers stuck together because they had nothing to lose and nowhere to go. Nobody wanted to distribute our films, but here we had our own distribution center. The rule was, no film was rejected. The film, good or bad, is your ticket.”

From Chapter 2 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore

Shirley Clarke’s early films were multimedia experiments that explored how dance movements worked in dialogue with camera movements and edits. Her first short film—Dance in the Sun, a collaboration with choreographer and dancer Daniel Nagrin—effortlessly melded the expressive worlds of cinema and dance. “She would have a gesture that Daniel was making with his arms onstage in the rehearsal hall in New York,” her daughter Wendy Clarke said, “and there would be a cut to the completion of that gesture that was shot on the beach. When she got into film, she was a really good networker, and people came over all the time. Jonas Mekas and other people came over for dinner and they would all show each other the films that they were working on.” Mekas and Clarke were classmates in 1950 at City College of New York, where she studied film with Dadaist Hans Richter. Mekas and Clarke stayed in touch and eventually formed the New American Cinema Group in 1960, along with other likeminded filmmakers, as well as the Film-Makers’ Cooperative. This group advocated for a low-budget, more personal and auteurist approach to cinema; their manifesto stated: “We don’t want false, polished, slick films—we prefer them rough, unpolished but alive.”

From Chapter 2 of The Downtown Pop Underground — order online, or from a local independent bookstore