Underground Film by Parker Tyler is one of the earliest, sharpest attempts to map the wild frontier of American avant-garde cinema. Tyler writes not as a historian ticking boxes, but as a poet-critic who treats underground film as a living mutation — erotic, rebellious, surreal, and defiantly anti-Hollywood. He explores the filmmakers who turned 16mm cameras into weapons and toys: Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage and the whole post-war experimental wave.
The book digs into what makes underground film tick — its obsession with dream logic, taboo imagery, symbolic sexuality, ritual, camp, queer aesthetics and personal mythology. Tyler reads these films like moving sculptures: raw, handmade, half-improvised, often more about feeling than story. He positions the underground as a necessary counterculture, a zone where art, performance, fetish, politics and the body collide in ways mainstream cinema can’t touch.
It’s stylish, brainy, a little decadent, and very much of its moment — a foundational text for understanding the birth of truly independent film in America.
