Subversion : The Definitive History of Underground Cinema

Subversion is the first complete history of underground cinema, tracing the hidden life of subterranean filmmaking from its pre-history of Bohemian cabaret through the early cinematic avant-gardes of the 1920s to the worldwide blossoming of microcinema festivals in the 1990s. Part cultural history, part radical polemic, Subversion provides historic background and social context to such influential yet rarely discussed scenes such as the London Film Makers Collective of the 1960s, the New York Cinema of Transgression of the 1980s and the New London Undergound of the 1990s, plus original research into the world of amateur cin? culture from the 1930s onwards. Contextualising these movements within a broader historical and theoretical background of experimental media, and locating underground cinema as a popular and radical subculture distinct from both mainstream cinema and institutionalised avant-garde film, Subversion is set to become an essential text for all independent and guerrilla filmmakers.

Duncan Reekie is a filmmaker, performer and underground cinema activist, and a founder member of the Exploding Cinema Collective