The American avant-garde cinema of the 1960s has long since been engulfed – as silent cinema also was – by the forward march of film history.
The quarterly was a forum for the exchange of ideas and information about the emergent avant-garde cinema that would convulse the art and movie worlds for three decades: the new American cinema, as Mekas dubbed it, or American underground film, as it is now more commonly known.
So wrote the film-maker, archivist, cine-activist, ceaseless proselytizer, art-world provocateur and avant-garde impresario Jonas Mekas in 1959 (paraphrasing Rimbaud, as any good beatnik should).
But in his now-submerged Atlantean realm, Mekas was truly Poseidon with a trident, an impish poet who seemed immortal.