Deceased--Chris Marker [Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve]

 Chris Marker

[Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve]
July 29th, 1921 to July 29th, 2012

"French film-maker Chris Marker dies"

 
The controversial Left Bank Cinema director scored an arthouse hit with Sans Soleil and made the brilliant, haunting, highly influential La Jetée

 
July 30th, 2012

 
guardian.co.uk

Chris Marker, the enigmatic master of left-field French cinema, has died at the age of 91. The artist and film-maker was best known for his award-winning documentary Sans Soleil and for his haunting drama La Jetée, charting the quest for memory in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse.

Born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, Marker fought for the French Resistance and then cut his teeth as a journalist and a critic for Cahiers du Cinéma. He made his film debut with Olympia 52, a documentary on the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, and went on to become a leading light of the Left Bank Cinema movement alongside his friends Agnès Varda and Alain Resnais. In 1961 he sparked controversy with the documentary Si Cuba, a film that praised Fidel Castro, denounced America and was promptly banned in the US.

Marker's other notable pictures include 1985's AK, an essay on the work of the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa, and 1977's A Grin Without a Cat, charting the socialist struggle in the period before and after the 1968 Paris uprisings. He scored an arthouse hit with 1983's Sans Soleil, his elliptical meditation on travel and memory that darted from Japan to Africa via an appreciation of the 1958 thriller Vertigo. Hitchcock's movie, said the director, was the only film "capable of portraying impossible memory, insane memory".

Yet Marker's most influential production remains 1962's La Jetée, a 29-minute drama composed almost entirely of still images and tracing one man's attempt to reclaim an image from his past. Marker's poetic, provocative meld of global catastrophe and human frailty went on to inspire the 1987 drama The Red Spectacles and Terry Gilliam's 1995 blockbuster 12 Monkeys.

The teasing, elliptical nature of Marker's work was reflected in the man himself. He refused to give interviews, hated being photographed and claimed to have born in Mongolia despite contradictory sources that suggested he was a native of Paris. All of which, wrote the critic David Thomson, fostered the notion of Marker as "some mysterious if ideal figure, a hope or a dream more than an actual person". He was, Thomson added, "the essential ghost".
 

"Chris Marker dies at 91; avant-garde French filmmaker"

Marker directed 'La Jetee,' a short film that travels between past and future. Pauline Kael called it ' very possibly the greatest science-fiction movie yet made.'

by

Elaine Woo

July 31st, 2012

Los Angeles Times

Chris Marker, an enigmatic figure in French cinema who avoided publicity and was loath to screen his films yet was often ranked with countrymen Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godardas an avant-garde master, died at his home in Paris on Sunday, his 91st birthday.

His death was reported by Agence France-Presse, but the cause was not given.

Marker, who worked well into his 80s, made more than two dozen films during a six-decade career. Known as a pioneer of the film essay, he was most admired for "La Jetee" (1962) and "Sans Soleil" (1983), which explored time, memory and history in an unconventional and evocative style.

"La Jetee" ("The Jetty") was a 28-minute movie made almost entirely of stills that focuses on a man who travels between the past and the future to understand a haunting image from his childhood.

The most startling moment in the film is when, for a brief few seconds, the stills give way to moving images of a sleeping woman opening her eyes, staring at the camera and blinking. For British film scholar Janet Harbord, who wrote the 2009 book "Chris Marker: La Jetee," the motion causes "a gasp close to an experience of the erotic or the religious or possibly both," and conveys in an instant the magic and mystery of the medium.

Critic Pauline Kael called "La Jetee" "very possibly the greatest science-fiction movie yet made." Film critic and historian David Thomson went further, declaring in a 2002 article in the British newspaper the Guardian that "La Jetee" could be "the one essential movie ever made."

Its theme may sound familiar to contemporary audiences because it inspired a Hollywood remake, "12 Monkeys." Directed by Terry Gilliam and starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, the 1995 film was generally viewed by critics as less essential than the original.

Marker's other masterpiece, "Sans Soleil" ("Sunless"), is narrated by a woman who reads aloud the letters she receives from a nomadic cameraman during his travels in Japan, Iceland, Africa and other far-flung destinations. The letters describe wondrous sights, such as a blindingly white desert, a musical staircase and a temple dedicated to cats.

Cats appear throughout Marker's films and are named in two of them: the documentaries "A Grin Without a Cat" (1977) and "The Case of the Grinning Cat" (2004). The first film examines the New Left movement from the Vietnam War era to the ouster of Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1973. The latter film documents the political mood in France after the Sept. 11 attacks and incorporates images of smiling cat graffiti that began to appear in Paris then. Rare photographs of the filmmaker usually show a thin, balding man behind a camera with his cat, Guillaume.

Marker's politics were clear in other works, as well, such as "Cuba Sí" (1961), about Castro's Cuba; "Le Joli Mai" (1963), made from 55 hours of interviews with French citizens about their attitudes toward the French-Algerian War; and "The Last Bolshevik" (1993), conceived as a series of letters to Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin.

He also produced "Far from Vietnam," a 1967 documentary made in collaboration with Godard and Resnais that opposed American involvement in Vietnam.

One of Marker's later works, from the late 1990s, was an interactive CD-ROM called "Immemory" that consists of more than 20 hours of stills, film clips, music, text and sound bites divided into several sections, including poetry, cinema, travel and photography.

Little is known about Marker's life, which apparently was just as the filmmaker, who called himself "the best-known author of unknown movies," wanted it.

Most biographies say he was born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve in Neuilly sur Seine, France, on July 29, 1921, and studied philosophy with Jean-Paul Sartre in the late 1930s. It may be apocryphal, but some sources say his affection for the Magic Marker felt-tipped pen inspired him to change his last name.

Doubts also surrounded his birthplace. Marker told film historian Thomson during a meeting in Berkeley in the 1980s that Thomson's "Biographical Dictionary of Film" was in error and that he actually was born in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.

Thomson said he accepted the eccentric filmmaker's Mongolia story, explaining in the Guardian that it was "a part of Chris Marker's thinking that no place is actually farther away, more extreme or less plausible than another."

In Marker's view, history was fluid and a playful view was sometimes important. "Look what happened to dinosaurs," his narrator says in "The Last Bolshevik" as a child on screen hugs a stuffed version of the TV character Barney. "Kids love them."

"Chris Marker, Pioneer of the Essay Film, Dies at 91"

by

Dennis Lim

July 31st, 2012

The New York Times

Chris Marker, the enigmatic writer, photographer, filmmaker and multimedia artist who pioneered the flexible hybrid form known as the essay film, died on Sunday in Paris. He was 91.

His death was announced by the French Culture Ministry.

A transmedia artist long before the term was coined, Mr. Marker resisted categorization throughout his career; he once referred to “career” as “that despicable word.” His sprawling and constantly evolving body of work, which ranged from books to installations to CD-ROMs and included more than 50 films of varying length, was at once fragmentary and cohesive, united by an abiding interest in the nature of time and memory and by a strong physical and intellectual wanderlust.

Mr. Marker’s best-known film, the 1962 short “La Jetée,” about a man haunted by a childhood memory, was the basis of the 1995 Hollywood movie “12 Monkeys” starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt. Whether taking the form of time-warp science fiction like “La Jetée” or archive-rich historical surveys like “A Grin Without a Cat” (1977), about the fate of the New Left after the pivotal year 1968, most of his films involve a kind of time travel.

A lifelong leftist and perennial globe-trotter, he documented almost every political hot spot of the mid- and late-20th century: the Soviet Union, China, the new state of Israel, Cuba after the revolution.

In his later works — like the installation “Silent Movie” (1995) and the feature “Level Five” (1997) — he was also an early explorer of video, digital technology and cyberspace.

Born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve on July 29, 1921, Mr. Marker hid many aspects of his biography. He once claimed he was born in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, though some sources have cited his place of birth as the Parisian suburb Neuilly-sur-Seine. He granted few interviews and typically refused to be photographed. Information about his survivors was not immediately available. But in his work, at least, Mr. Marker was not anonymous so much as he was playfully evasive.

His films often feature a first-person narrator, a device he once called “a sign of humility.” They abound with avatars and alter-egos, including his own cat, Guillaume-en-Egypt, which sometimes appeared, in the flesh and in cartoon form, as his surrogate.

The pseudonym Chris Marker — which originally appeared in print as “Chris. Marker” — dates from the late 1940s, when he published criticism, editorials, poetry and fiction, including a novel, “Le Coeur Net,” set in Indochina.

After his first directorial effort, “Olympia 52,” about the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games, Mr. Marker wrote the narration for the documentary “Statues Also Die” (1953), which he directed with Alain Resnais. Ostensibly about African art, the film doubled as a critique of French colonialism. It received the prestigious Prix Jean Vigo but was banned by French censors for more than 10 years because of its political content.

Mr. Marker refined his signature approach to voice-over narration, at once intimate and quizzical, in the early works “Sunday in Peking” (1956) and “Letter From Siberia” (1957). The latter film’s provocative rethinking of the relationship between word and image — one sequence replays the same shots with vastly different commentaries — prompted the critic André Bazin to use the term “an essay documented by film.”

Borrowed from the poet Henri Michaux, the opening words of “Letter From Siberia” — “I write to you from a far-off country” — could serve as Mr. Marker’s motto. He had a foreign correspondent’s drive to “capture life in the process of becoming history,” as he put it, but there was also a science-fiction strangeness to many of his travelogues.

He retained his outsider’s perspective, his taste for oddity and digression, even when shooting at home. The ambitious “Le Joli Mai” (1963) was an attempt to map the national psyche as the Algerian War drew to a close, culled from dozens of man-on-the-street interviews in Paris. The film is often called an early example of the documentary mode known as cinéma vérité. But Mr. Marker rejected the term and proposed a more modest alternative: “ciné, ma vérité” (“Cinema, my truth”).

On days off from “Le Joli Mai,” Mr. Marker embarked on a photography project that became the half-hour “La Jetée.” Composed almost entirely of still images, this recursive loop of a film was both an homage to a beloved movie, Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo,” and a self-reflexive testament to cinema as a time machine.

Like many of his peers, Mr. Marker became increasingly politicized in the 1960s. In 1967, he formed a film collective called SLON (Russian for “elephant” and also an acronym for Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelle, or Society for the Launch of New Works).

SLON’s documentaries include “À Bientôt, J’espère,” about a strike at a French textile factory, and “The Sixth Side of the Pentagon,” about an antiwar march on the Pentagon. One of the collective’s major initiatives was the omnibus film “Far From Vietnam,” a protest against American involvement in Vietnam, with contributions from Mr. Marker, Mr. Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda, among other filmmakers.

“Sans Soleil” (1982), often acknowledged as the masterpiece among Mr. Marker’s late works, is one of his least classifiable, a free-associative mix of ethnography, philosophy and poetry. Purporting to be the footage of a fictional cinematographer accompanied by his letters to a nameless woman, the film roams from Iceland to Guinea-Bissau to Japan, a favorite destination of Mr. Marker’s since “The Koumiko Mystery,” which he shot in Tokyo during the 1964 Olympics. A bar in Tokyo’s famous Golden Gai district is named for “La Jetée” — an honor that Mr. Marker once said was “worth more to me than any number of Oscars.”

Mr. Marker also turned his attention to fellow filmmakers. He made two essays on Soviet cinema and history centered on the neglected director Alexander Medvedkin (“The Train Rolls On,” “The Last Bolshevik”), one elegy to his friend Andrei Tarkovsky (“One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich”) and a portrait of Akira Kurosawa on the set of the 1985 film “Ran” (“A.K.”).

He remained active into his 70s and 80s. His last film appears to have been a short about the history of cinema, commissioned as a trailer for the 50th anniversary of the Viennale Film Festival in October. The film is scheduled to be shown at the Locarno Film Festival on Saturday.

Mr. Marker gave one of his final interviews — in 2008 to the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles — through the virtual medium of Second Life. In response to a question about pseudonyms as masks, he said: “I’m much more pragmatic than that. I chose a pseudonym, Chris Marker, pronounceable in most languages, because I was very intent on traveling. No need to delve further.”

"In Memoriam: Chris Marker"

by

Richard Brody

July 30th, 2012

The New Yorker

The very subject of Chris Marker’s work is memory; his death today, at the age of ninety-one (indeed, the day after his ninety-first birthday), elicits a simulacrum of memory, in tributes such as this one, where the contrast between the immediate significance (to the protagonist in the drama and to those who know and love him) and its public reflection is stretched to absurdity. For Marker, memory isn’t passive; it’s an act of resistance—the edge that cuts a path into the future—and the effective work of memory is the very definition of art. Marker was a master of film editing—the part of the filmmaking process that Jean-Luc Godard, another master editor and memory-artist, defined as holding past, present, and future in one’s own hands—and the very possibility of remembering Marker demands a little editing, a splicing-in of excerpts from a surprising and crucial document.

Marker gave few interviews and hardly ever allowed himself to be photographed; in one of the few interviews that he did grant—in 2003, to Samuel Douhaire and Annick Rivoire, for Libération—he explained his reticence, calling himself “publiphobic”:

    At the beginning of the sixties, that was well-thought-of, now it has become literally inadmissible. I can’t help it. That way of putting the mechanism of calumny in the service of praise has always rubbed me the wrong way, although I recognize that this diabolical sponsorship sometimes offers the most beautiful images one can see on a small screen (have you seen David Lynch with blue lips?).

In this remarkable text, he provides several signal examples of what he considered abuses of the press: the silence surrounding the 2002 reissue of a 1945 book by the novelist François Vernet, a friend of his who died at Dachau; the lack of discussion of a recording of songs by Viktor Ullmann of poems by Hülderlin and Rilke (“one is seized by the truly vertiginous idea that, at that moment, nobody glorified true German culture more than this Jewish musician who would soon die at Auschwitz”). Marker defined the problem:

    The exponential progress of stupidity and vulgarity, everyone’s aware of it, but it’s not just a matter of a vague feeling of disgust, it’s a concrete fact, it’s measurable (it can be measured by the volume of the “Woof!”s that greet talk-show hosts, which has risen by an alarming number of decibels in the last five years) and which constitutes a crime against humanity. Not to mention the permanent assault on the French language.

It’s strange to hear (virtually) Marker speak for himself; in the interview, he describes his own ambition—in particular, regarding his longtime championing of lightweight and low-cost equipment: “Trying to give the floor to people who haven’t got it, and, when possible, to help them to find their means of expression. They’re workers at the Rhodia factory in 1967, but also the Kosovars I filmed in the year 2000, who had never been heard on television: everyone was speaking for them….” He spoke of teaching the editing of “Battleship Potemkin” to filmmakers from Guinea-Bissau and of the use of television equipment by Bosnian refugees, in 1993. But he distances himself from the label of “political” filmmaker: “What I’m passionate about is History, and politics interest me only insofar as it is the cross-section of History in the present.”

In his 1978 film “A Grin Without a Cat“—his vast and rueful look at what the events of 1968 actually were, and why they proved to be of so little consequence—Marker gathers an extraordinary set of documentary film clips and, assembling them along with his trenchant, provocative text on the soundtrack, brings them back from the dead. He infuses them—and, through them, history itself—with a shocking new energy. It’s as if his memory-piece—a memorial for dreams that died—actually reanimated the dreams and, by locating their traces in largely forgotten actions, offered a surprisingly practical map for making a glimmer of a stifled utopia burst forth with a new brilliance.

And as for the voice: as much as Marker masks his own—whether, literally, in Agnès Varda’s “The Beaches of Agnè” or virtually in his own distinctive reticence as a movie essayist who doesn’t speak of himself—he has made one of the greatest films about the use of the voice, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Singer” (scroll down) in which he follows Yves Montand in the rehearsals leading up to a return to the stage after a six-year hiatus. Montand’s natural talent, his relentless practice and rigid self-discipline, his tightly-focussed and highly-principled purpose, and his charismatic presence all contribute to an art that is centered on the body, its presentation, its projection. Marker’s modesty is that of a devoted craftsman and an exquisite aesthete: a nonperformer, a nonsinger, a nonathlete, a former writer who didn’t continue—he did the one thing that he cultivated with an unyielding devotion. In so doing, he left on the history of cinema, and on history as such, a mark more enduring and decisive than that of mere personality. He made his own conscience, of the cinema as the living embodiment of history, into the conscience of his time—and, now that he’s not here, of future times already.

Chris Marker [Wikipedia]

 La Jetée

1962

La jetée [Wikipedia]

Sans Soleil1982

Sans Soleil [Wikipedia]

Documentary

Independent avant-garde film makers of the 1940s...Eleanora and Hammid Deren

“The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra”

Laboring in the Shadow of Hollywood

by

Manohla Dargis

November 4, 2011

The New York Times

In January 1943 the Russian-born poet, essayist, former radical and future filmmaker Eleanora Deren wrote a friend that her husband, Alexander Hammid, was having a tough time finding work as a cameraman in Hollywood. The union, she wrote, was one of those “racketeer things,” though there might be a job at Paramount Pictures. “There are other prospects,” she added, “but in Hollywood prospects are a dime a dozen.” Four months later she and Hammid carved out a different future in the poetic form of “Meshes of the Afternoon,” a black-and-white, 14-minute silent film and a classic of the American avant-garde cinema that they shot a few blocks from the Sunset Strip.

Deren and Hammid made “Meshes” in their apartment on the border of Los Angeles proper, where gangsters and stars partied and played out of reach of the city’s laws. Shot for less than $300 and in 16 millimeter film, “Meshes” involves a woman (Deren) who, after returning home and falling asleep, dreams a dream involving a mysteriously hooded figure, a knife, shards from a broken mirror and multiple versions of herself. In “Meshes” Deren doesn’t just invite you into another person’s head; she also shows the whirring gears of consciousness. The film itself was a vision — that of a different practice far beyond Hollywood’s gates — and it inspired generations to see film as a means of personal rather than industrial expression.

It may seem surprising that a milestone of the American avant-garde cinema was made a few minutes from the Chateau Marmont, that favorite movie-star haunt. Yet almost as long as there’s been a Hollywood in Los Angeles, there has been an off-Hollywood too, the provenance of those toiling at the edge and far outside the mainstream. Some, like Deren (who died in 1961), were just passing through the city; others were there for the duration, like Kenneth Anger, who as a child appeared in the 1935 Warner Brothers version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and at 17 made “Fireworks” (1947), a landmark gay film that he shot at home with some burly male friends dressed as sailors while his parents were at a funeral.

It’s possible to follow one thread in the off-Hollywood story, its histories, productions and personalities in Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles 1945-1980, a six-month series coordinated by Filmforum, the longest-running avant-garde film organization in Los Angeles, and one of several moving-image programs in Pacific Standard Time. (Another, “L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema,” was coordinated by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, where it runs until Dec. 17.) An initiative of the Getty Institute, Pacific Standard Time is a sprawling collaboration of more than 60 Southern California cultural institutions that aims, as a Getty news release puts it, “to tell the birth of the Los Angeles art scene and how it became a major new force in the art world.”

There was of course an art scene in Los Angeles before 1945, and Deren was deep in it. She moved to the city in 1941 while working for the Katherine Dunham dance troupe and soon met Hammid, a Czech filmmaker, at a party, where they chatted about movies. Their conversation continued and led them to art houses, where, now a couple, they caught foreign-language titles. He took photographs, she wrote poetry and among their circle were the abstract filmmaker Oskar Fischinger (who worked on Disney’s “Fantasia”) and the art collector Galka Scheyer (who introduced the work of Klee and Kandinsky to America). Hammid schooled Deren, and in 1943 she bought a 16-millemeter camera. They made “Meshes,” and she changed her first name to “Maya” — Sanskrit for illusion.

“Meshes of the Afternoon” wasn’t the first avant-garde film made in the shadow of the Hollywood sign, that monument that became — misleadingly — interchangeable with Los Angeles. East Coast filmmakers migrated to the city at the beginning of the 20th century for assorted reasons, including weather, which allowed them to shoot outdoors for much of the year, and terrain, which provided nearby mountain, forest, ocean and desert locations. By the time Deren and Hammid lived there, the movie industry had fully consolidated and was an international cultural force. Legions went west, willingly or not, some yearning for that proverbial big break or just a blast of sun. Artists, bohemians, social outsiders, refugees: they came, made art, hustled for work, grappled with modernism, raged against the machine or were seduced by it.

In Alternative Projections the programmers Adam Hyman, the executive director of Filmforum, and Mark Toscano, a curator and film preservationist for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, zero in on those who, even when working in the belly of the beast, followed another, more experimental, expansive cinematic way than that offered by Hollywood. The 20-part series, which includes film and video abstractions, animations, gritty documentaries, experimental narratives, conceptual gags and even some early work by some guy named George Lucas, also make the case week after week, work after work, that the mainstream and the margins are never independent but are instead interdependent: each absorbs and presses against the other, consciously or not. Hollywood fed off the avant-garde while Hollywood, in the memorable phrase of the theorist Paul Arthur, became “the animating skeleton in the avant-garde film closet.”

The earliest work in the series, “The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra,” is a witty, 10-minute illustration of how some Los Angeles artists navigated the weird, alienating world in which they worked. Shot in 1928 and directed by three up-and-comers, Robert Florey, Slavko Vorkapich and Gregg Toland, this expressionistic mix of live-action and animation tracks an aspiring actor who falls on hard and then lethal times. The film wasn’t a calling card but a critique from inside the machine and as such was appreciated by the likes of Charlie Chaplin. Florey later directed films like “Murders in the Rue Morgue”; Vorkapich worked in special effects and created montage sequences; Toland was an assistant cameraman who became a cinematographer, most famously for “Citizen Kane.”

In addition to making montage sequences for movies like “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” Vorkapich was the chairman of the cinema department at the University of Southern California from 1949 to 1951. It was the first American university to offer a bachelor’s in film and is now perhaps most famous for its former students (and later, generous donors), Mr. Lucas and Steven Spielberg. But before either of those blockbuster titans left their imprint, the school was under the experimental sway of Vorkapich. His students included Art Clokey, who, inspired by his mentor’s techniques, created the little green clay animated figure, Gumby — and with it children’s television surrealism.

The film schools in Southern California, which include the University of California, Los Angeles, and the California Institute of the Arts, have long functioned as both official and unofficial adjuncts to the studio system, churning out generations of artists and technicians, but they’ve also served as important institutional alternatives, providing artists a means of living and influence outside the industry. Located about 30 miles north of downtown Los Angeles, CalArts was the brainchild of Walt Disney, who envisioned an art school along the elite lines of Caltech. The animator Jules Engel (another “Fantasia” veteran) established the school’s experimental animation program, an aesthetic counterweight to the straighter, commercial forces embodied by the Disney family; among his students were Tim Burton, and John Lasseter.

Other important teachers at CalArts include Pat O’Neill, part of its founding faculty. A Los Angeles native, Mr. O’Neill began making films while a graduate student at U.C.L.A., where he studied product design. He was influenced by the filmmaker Bruce Conner, whose work Mr. O’Neill first saw at the legendary Los Angeles Coronet Theater. (The Coronet showed avant-garde work and documentaries throughout the 1950s; the artist Ed Kienholz sometimes hung shows in the lobby.) Working with an optical printer, a pre-digital age machine in which filmed images are copied onto raw film stock, thereby allowing users to greatly manipulate visuals, Mr. O’Neill created a stunning oeuvre while often working in special effects, as he did for the first “Star Wars” movie.

Several of Mr. O’Neill’s early shorts are featured in Alternative Projections, as are some from Thom Andersen. Known for his monumental 2003 video feature, “Los Angeles Plays Itself,” Mr. Andersen is a filmmaker (and CalArts instructor) who merits a wider audience. Among his earliest works is a sensational 12-minute short titled “--- -------,” also known as “The Rock and Roll Film” (1967), that transforms mostly originally shot footage of musicians performing on the Sunset Strip into rhythmic visual and sonic bursts. Made with Malcolm Brodwick, who compiled the seamless patchwork of sound and music, the film reaches an apotheosis with a glorious shot of dancing feet — hovering on tiptoe as if unencumbered by gravity and accompanied by the song “Earth Angel” — that, when the camera pans up, turn out to belong to Mick Jagger.

Considerably further down the food chain are the demimonde subjects of the eye-opening matched set “I Don’t Know” and “Hats Off to Hollywood,” made by Penelope Spheeris around 1972. Now best known for commercial hits like “Wayne’s World,” Ms. Spheeris made these two shorts while she was a U.C.L.A. graduate student in film in an overwhelmingly male department. Located at the border of documentary and fiction, the films pivot on the funny and painful misadventures of a beautiful hustler, Jennifer (né Jimmy), whose liminal identity is a source of liberation (for her, for the viewer) and a periodic catalyst for trouble. Exquisitely intimate, the films offer a deeply human alternative to Hollywood’s then dominant vision of the pathological (or dead) homosexual.

There are other surprises and rediscoveries packed into Alternative Projections, including several experimental shorts by the actor Russ Tamblyn, who is perhaps best known for his role as a Jet in “West Side Story” (and the father of the actress Amber Tamblyn), but in the 1960s belonged to a group centered on the artist Wallace Berman. Mr. Tamblyn bridged Hollywood and off-Hollywood. Others had a rougher time making sense of these separate yet connected worlds, failed to find a balance, fled the scene or rejected the mainstream outright. Some, like the San Francisco native Robert Nelson, brilliantly incorporated their ambivalence about Los Angeles and its famous factory into their work. In “Suite California Stops & Passes Part 1” (1976), Mr. Nelson opens with a Godardian deconstruction of a Hollywood film, then heads into Death Valley before landing in Los Angeles, where he ends up in a park that is home to the Hollywood sign. He then turns his camera toward the megalopolis beyond, where the buildings stand wreathed in smog, totems of a city still trying to be seen.