![]() ![]() The review also points to the reality that independent film screenings often drew a sparse public, and it notes that The Kitchen was one of the few places in which the art film enjoyed a regular, enthusiastic audience.įaced with the relative unknowability of the undocumented or unarchived aspects of the extensive three-day festival, I sought to trace the interconnected threads tessellating beneath text documents. Kathleen Hulser’s review in the Villager offered some clarity on this matter, pointing to the status of independent film in a pre-digital age: “The art film is like a mushroom, it grows in dark places, nourished by obscurity.” Hulser attributes this obscurity to independent film’s existence outside of the art market, which, on one hand, freed it from commercial pressures and traditional notions of success, but, on the other, determined its relative absence from museums and museum collections. I thought about what it means that the tangible, experiential quality of the events and the overall impact of the evenings can only be reconstituted through fragments of ephemera, despite the medium of film’s reproducibility. As I looked further into the festival, I was struck by the contrast between the event’s extensive programming, which brought together an array of canonical experimental filmmakers, and its archival afterlife. In addition to this press release, traces of the event glimmer to the surface via The Kitchen’s archive in a New York Times listing and a Villager review. ![]() As noted in the press release, the festival consisted of “16mm and super 8 work by over twenty filmmakers,” and was “a showcase for a variety of styles of independent work, with this emphasis on that of the independent avant-garde but including documentary and other work.” ![]() The fourth iteration of the Filmworks program series initially conceived in 1978 by Leonardo Katz, Filmworks ’ 82 was curated by author, filmmaker, critic, Kitchen artist and guest curator Amy Taubin. On May 25, 26, and 27 1982, The Kitchen screened a series of experimental films from an array of emerging and established filmmakers. ![]()
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