BEBOP NEW YORK: the birth of American indie cinema at the Barbican

In Greenwich Village bars and Times Square burger joints painters, writers, critics and musicians were making a new world, one that would spark the counter-culture of the 1960s. Filmmakers were right there too. Like the Abstract Expressionists, like the Beats, filmmakers were advocating for freedom from convention and the expression of real feeling. They demanded a cinema liberated from calcified professionalism, from Hollywood, from ‘the system’, and for films that were “less perfect, but more free” (Jonas Mekas, 1959). This is the moment when indie movies as we understand them today – as expressive of artistic decisions and personal will – really came into being. 

Now the Barbican until June 25 presents a selection of films made in New York from the mid-50s to the mid-60s, all emerging from the city’s burgeoning bohemia. At a time when Hollywood films set in New York were still shot on Californian backlots, here are films shot on location, which capture urban life in its raw, unrefined state. Allied to this, there is a sense of spontaneity and immediacy that is new, and a first-person, experiential, shooting style which allows us to inhabit the filmmaker’s way of seeing. 

The avant-garde shorts go further, further into the realm of diaristic, first-person filmmaking, and into the realm of personal expression via non-representational imagery. Witness the birth of American indie cinema as we know it. 

For the season’s curator Tamara Anderson “with Lee Krasner: Living Colour showing in Barbican Art Gallery, this felt like the perfect moment to revisit some of the new independent cinema that was being made in New York in the 1950s and early-60s and to draw out the affinities between what was happening in painting and with filmmaking in this period,” she says.

“These are years in which taste, politics and culture in America underwent a profound transformation, one that unleashed the tidal wave of sixties counterculture and gave us the original hipster. The filmmakers in our season were at the creative – and creating – centre of America at this exciting time.”

There’s still time to catch:

Women Independents ^12A* + introduction
Wed 12 Jun 7pm, Cinema 3 
An evening of short films by women pioneers of Independent American cinema. 

Tonight’s trio of women directors – Marie Menken, Shirley Clarke and Storm de Hirsch – were all key figures in the independent New York film scene of the 50s and 60s, one united around a shared desire to combat ‘false, polished, slick’ Hollywood movies with films ‘rough, unpolished, but alive.’ 
This has been programmed to coincide with Lee Krasner: Living Colour, a career retrospective of the celebrated American artist, which runs in Barbican Art Gallery to September 1.

The Cool World ^15*
US 1963 Dir Shirley Clarke, 125 min 35mm presentation  
Wed 19 Jun 6.30pm, Cinema 1

Set to Dizzy Gillespie’s celebrated jazz score, this portrait of 1960s Harlem street life was the first feature shot on location in the borough. 

In the Street ^U*
Tue 25 Jun 7pm, Cinema 3

Feel the buzz and the hum of the sidewalk with this compilation of rare short films showing New York in the 50s, with lashings of jazz from Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk. 

Ticket prices: 
Box Office: 0845 120 7527, https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2019/series/bebop-new-york, Standard: £12/ Members: £9.60/ Concessions: £11
Young Barbican: £5.