Carlos Saura, the director of The Hunt (during his film festival visit to New York — after viewing Thanatopsis, Vivian, Chulum, Jerovi, The Dead and Amphetamine):
The conception of this type of cinema is extremely amateurish, elementary, and without the realization of what cinema is—like children playing with a camera. Amphetamine is a disgusting movie. Chumlum and Vivian? Painters should remain painters and avoid making films. Jerovi has a metaphysical pretensions and is vulgar. New York shocks me with its brutal, bestial images of violence, yet you let people play on the superficial and nonsensical. There is more responsibility to making films.
He walked out of Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls, commenting: “This underground cinema is disastrous and a disgrace.”
Agnès Varda commented on the films (and shows) of Stan Vanderbeek, Robert Breer, and USCO: “They are useless.”
Pasolini commented on Scorpio Rising: “This is an easy way of making films.”
I don’t know why I am giving all these nonsense quotes. But I thought we should know the state of mind of the “world cinema.”
Jonas Mekas, “On the state of World Cinema”
Village Voice, October 6, 1966
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