Spontaneous Festival of Underground Films

Over a period of six days between Halloween and Bonfire Night 1966, a ‘Spontaneous Festival of Underground Films’, organised by the recently-formed London Film-Makers’ Co-operative, took place at the Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre. This seminal event included films by the established American avant-garde, notably a screening of Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and several films by Stan Brakhage and Marie Menken, as well as work by a few British-based film-makers such as John Latham, Speak (1962), Stephen Dwoskin, Alone (1963) and Brighton’s Jeff Keen.

This festival acted as timely publicity for the newly-established Co-op and offered a selection of important mostly American work. It was the first time that seminal works by Anger and Brakhage would be shown to audiences in England as a representative programme of the important works of that time.

James Harding

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