In classic Fluxus style, Higgins employs the age-old comedic tactic of reverse motion to transform a piece of commercial propaganda into a witty commentary on the march of progress. Higgins noted that he “hoped the end would justify the means.”

Vostell was a prominent figure in the early development of German Happenings and Fluxus. 20 Juli 1964 Aachen (1967) references his participation in a notorious festival of performance art which coincided with the twentieth anniversary of the failed Stauffenberg coup against Hitler and “culminated” in Joseph Beuys being attacked by a right-wing student. In Sun In Your Head (1963, Fluxfilm #23) Vostell applies “dé-coll/age” to the medium of television, filming distorted images off the screen and re-editing the footage, while Starfighter (1967) highlights the jet aircraft that allegedly inspired the procedure. Notstandbordstein (1967) originated as an action in which Vostell projected a film loop from a traveling car, inverting the customary relationship between static projector/screen and moving image.

A central figure in every sphere of Fluxus activity, Watts’s cinematic and multimedia works of the early and mid-sixties engage many concerns that have since emerged as crucial to the development of “expanded cinema.” Receiving here its first public screening since 1992, 89 Movies is an extended collage of images from eighty-nine different films.

The complete Fluxfilm Anthology lists 41 titles, but the entire assemblage was never projected or distributed; the version presented here was compiled by Maciunas in 1966 for distribution through the Film-makers’ Cooperative.  Highlights include Yoko Ono’s Number 4 and Paul Sharits’s Unrolling Event, which speak to Maciunas’s penchant for physical humor and vaudevillian sight gags.