DVD Vol. III
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Awakener #1
sample film clip

DVD Vol. III Films:
He’s Here Now
13 min. silent 1967
Awakener
33 min. 1967
Sproul Plaza Drummers
15 min. 1967

By the late 1960s I moved from Berkeley to San Francisco where I met other like-minded artists and experimental filmmakers. It was the era of intense outrage  against the war in Viet Nam, psychedelics, and interest in Eastern mysticism.  Canyon Cinema was the focus of a renewed underground film scene.  While attending San Francisco State University, I met artists Ben Van Meter, Gary Pickering, Robert H. Ballad, and ML Carle. One stony day we took a day trip with our  cameras and filmed each other filming each other. This footage became the nucleus of an autobiographical compilation documenting some of my first experiments. “He’s Here Now” and “Awakener” (8 mm blowup to 16 mm with sound)  referenced the avatar  Meher Baba. 

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.  My film “Awakener” was shown at the first “Cinema Psychedelica” in Berkeley at the end of the 60s and was reviewed by Lenny Lipton who was a film critic for the Berkeley Barb at the time. Included in this dvd set is also some black and white documentary footage of the conga drummers at Sproul Plaza  on the U.C.Berkeley campus during the late 60s.