Ben Van Meter
Birth : 1941-02-09, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA
Death : 2019-08-08
History
Ben Van Meter began making films and light shows in the mid-1960s in San Francisco and soon became a leading figure in Bay Area-underground filmmaking. His films, especially S.F. Trips Festival, An Opening (1966) and the epic Acid Mantra or Rebirth of a Nation (1968), are compelling attempts to visually and sonically inscribe psychedelia, as experience and philosophy, in the medium of film. Van Meter’s films were unavailable for many years, but their ongoing restoration by the Academy Film Archive and their inclusion in the de Young Museum’s 2017 exhibition, The Summer of Love Experience: Art, Fashion, and Rock ‘n’ Roll, has gained them a new audience.
Cinematography
Personal diary-style documentary of German Gay rights activist Von Praunheim's sojourn in the US.
Director
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.
Director
The astrological signs of 12 young women.
Camera Operator
The shadowing forth of Our Lord Lucifer, as the Power of Darkness gather at a midnight mass. The dance of the Magus widdershins around the Swirling Spiral Force, the solar swastika, until the Bringer of Light—Lucifer—breaks through.
Director
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.
Director
Steve Miller Blues Band sequence by prominent San Francisco filmmaker Ben Van Meter.
Director
Nymphs in the woods... exotic... sensual.
Director
Experimental documentary about the San Francisco scene.
(After or for Jean Vigo). A study in visual rhythms and structure, using the same basic element repeated with variations.
Director
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.
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.
Director
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.
Director
Filmed and sound recorded at the Human Be-In during the summer of love, 1967.
Director
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.
Himself (voice)
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.
Director
No money, just sheer inspiration and artistry, and a real commitment to embracing chance in the process of creating S.F. Trips Festival, An Opening.
Director
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.
Director
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.
Director
A film exposing the staged commodification and banality of the American "beauty contest" with color overlays of fireworks in reverse-motion.
Director
A film by Ben Van Meter
Director
Director
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.
Director
A color sound meditation on the erstwhile Warhol superstar.
