Ben Van Meter

Bay Area filmmakers and Canyon Cinema co-founders Ben Van Meter and Bruce Conner were invited to L.A. to talk about Underground Film on the Art Linkletter Show.

(After or for Jean Vigo). A study in visual rhythms and structure, using the same basic element repeated with variations.

Through the veils of multiple exposure at an "Acid Test" party in San Francisco (toward the end of "He's Here Now" ) one might catch a brief glimpse of Ken Kelsey and Neal Cassidy. During those years, when picking up processed film at Multi-Chrome labs in San Francisco, I would sometimes run into and chat with another hero, the great filmmaker Bruce Baillie, one of the original founders of Canyon Cinema.

This film follows a young man's adventures from his arrival in the big city, till he passes out in an apartment having been kidnapped and abandoned by 5 voluptuous hippie maidens.

Make Love, Not War, or Brown Rice, uses three projectors, and takes advantage of all the possibilities. Similar images with different superimpositions combined with single images or different images, images which appear simultaneously or recur at different times on alternate screens. The film mixes live location with studio shots, newsreel footage with set-up scenes, like one of a big boat which was built in the studio, filled with pretty girls and then floated on a lake in Golden Gate Park.

The Poon Tang Trilogy (1964, B/W, sound) is a brief film composed of three 3-minute segments: in the first tableau, footage of the Hindenburg disaster is projected on the nude body of a young woman; in the second section, Civil Rights protesters are dragged away into police vans to the accompaniment of the '50s r&b hit "I Just Love Your Sexy Ways"; in the final portion of the film, another young woman attempts to remove a floating black bar which seeks to obliterate from the spectator's gaze various portions of her anatomy.

First shown on January 30, 1967, FOR LIFE AGAINST THE WAR was an open-call, collective statement from American independent filmmakers disparate in style and sensibility but united by their opposition to the Vietnam War. Part of the protest festival Week of the Angry Arts, the epic compilation film incorporated minute-long segments which were sent from many corners of the country, spliced together and projected. The original presentation of the works was more of an open forum with no curation or selection, and in 2000 Anthology Film Archives preserved a print featuring around 40 films from over 60 submissions.

Bay Area filmmakers and Canyon Cinema co-founders Ben Van Meter and Bruce Conner were invited to L.A. to talk about Underground Film on the Art Linkletter Show.

Magic is alive and living in Bolinas. A folkfilm, a personal poem about my family and my town. Includes "Bear-Hunt," Bolinas 4th of July," "Rummage," "Oilspill," "Horseplay," "Lila's Birthday," and "Benjamin's Bath." Rated "G" by me. Suitable for home, church, school, and film society. A patriotic, devotional homemovie. Completed August 1971.

Created in 1968 by Robert Comings and Ben Van Meter in Bolinas, CA. Original sound & music performed on homemade acoustic instruments. Including a very funky clavichord with numerous drone strings, gongs were found pipes. Script is based on: "The Book I Always Reach For But Never Find" by Boc Ging. This film was created before any digital equipment was available to the general public. Some sections of the film were embellished with dyes by hand. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.

Filmed and sound recorded at the Human Be-In during the summer of love, 1967.

A joyous, chaotic and colorful romp through nature; A psychedelic dance troupe rehearses in a studio.

Hilariously terrifying satire of an interrogation session by the thought police.

A color sound meditation on the erstwhile Warhol superstar.

Van Meter had three camera rolls of 7242 Ektachrome EFB, which he fully ran through his camera each day of the 3-day Trips Festival. The end result was three 100 ft. rolls of film that each had been triple exposed in-camera, each layer of exposure representing a day of the festival. Aside from just two or three necessary structural edits, Ben spliced the three rolls together essentially unedited. This was then set to a soundtrack that was achieved in roughly the same manner, via triple layering of sound he recorded throughout the festival; He calls the film “a documentary of the Trips Festival from the point of view of a goldfish in the punch bowl.”

Experimental documentary about the San Francisco scene.

Rathyahatra Festival San Francisco 1970.

A film exposing the staged commodification and banality of the American "beauty contest" with color overlays of fireworks in reverse-motion. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2011.

A chicken farmer takes LSD.

Alexandra Jackonetti recounts the building of a children's playground of macrame in Bolinas, Calif., including her conception of the project and the process of obtaining community financial support, knotting of macrame, and erection of the structure.

Nymphs in the woods... exotic... sensual. Featuring two lovely pregnant young ladies doing centuries old dances in green woods with see through veils.

The astrological signs of 12 young women.

Colored lights and lovely ladies. Snatches of kinetic beauty.

One of the most powerful, thought-provoking collage films produced during the New American Cinema Movement. Almost schizophrenic in its kaleidoscopic barrage of images, this film dynamically conveys the bewilderment, frustration, annoyance, and anger of the modern generation in a stream-of-consciousness audio-visual onslaught of superimpositions. Produced by one of the leaders of the San Francisco New American Cinema Movement and a top producer of light shows.

Steve Miller Blues Band sequence by prominent San Francisco filmmaker Ben Van Meter.

First experimentation with in-camera multiple exposure as a technique of self-expression.