Anthology Film Archives

Film Screenings / Programs / Series

J. HOBERMAN SELECTS: EVERYTHING IS NOW: THE 1960s NEW YORK AVANT-GARDE

June 20 – June 24

June 20-24, 2025

The appearance of a new publication by J. Hoberman – one of our most indispensable cultural historians and film scholars – is always a cause for celebration. From his work as film critic for The Village Voice (where he was on staff from 1983-2012), to his numerous books, which include “Midnight Movies” (written with Jonathan Rosenbaum), “Film After Film”, and the extraordinary trilogy of volumes focusing on 1950s-80s popular culture and Cold War politics (“The Dream Life”, “An Army of Phantoms”, and “Make My Day”), Hoberman has displayed an unparalleled gift for combining the plugged-in, close-up engagement of a journalist and critic with the interdisciplinary, panoramic insights of a cultural and political historian. Hoberman’s writing moves freely between different art forms (film, visual art, performance, music) and different forms of inquiry – he displays both an appreciation of the formal and aesthetic dimensions of a given work and an understanding of the inextricable interconnections between artists and the political and social landscapes in which they work. All these qualities are embodied in his new book, “Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde – Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop”, which will be released in late May.

Where the three separate volumes of his recent trilogy were grounded in the intertwined culture and politics of specific decades, “Everything Is Now” is anchored not only in a particular time but a particular place: New York City in the 1960s. The result of a lifetime of engagement with and research into avant-garde culture, and infused with the experience of Hoberman’s own cultural coming-of-age, the new book chronicles the explosion of artistic energy that erupted here in NYC at the time, a creativity that encompassed and blurred the lines between every possible medium. As in all of Hoberman’s work, he expertly toggles between the micro and the macro, painting a much fuller portrait of the era than we’re used to both by zooming in on the molecular details that most writers gloss over (specific addresses, nearly minute-by-minute chronologies, virtually forgotten events) and by zooming out to reveal the larger social, political, and economic currents of the time. While “Everything Is Now” features many of the seminal figures of the era – Warhol, Dylan, Sun Ra, Yoko Ono, Jack Smith, Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) and so on – Hoberman brings to light a whole constellation of relatively unknown and under-studied artists and personalities, whose creative energy and experimentation were an integral part of the cultural matrix of the time. By showing how all these figures were shaped by – and helped shape in turn – their social and political environment, “Everything Is Now” makes most accounts of the era seem anemic by comparison.

To mark the publication of “Everything Is Now”, we’ve invited Hoberman to guest-program a film series that reflects the artists, aesthetic ideas, and political convictions that he explores in the book. These seven programs demonstrate the richness both of the era and of Hoberman’s research, and provide an opportunity to screen some of the lesser-known gems of 1960s American experimental cinema.

Guest-programmed by J. Hoberman, who also wrote the individual film descriptions (unless otherwise noted), and will be here to introduce each of the programs in the series!

“Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde – Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop” will be available for purchase at the box office. For more info about the book visit: https://www.versobooks.com/products/2974-everything-is-now

Special thanks to J. Hoberman; Canyon Cinema; Rebecca Cleman & Karl McCool (EAI); Erica Hill (Zipporah Films); Robin Klein (ABKCO); and Roselly Torres (Third World Newsreel).

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