Saturday | October 5, 2024 7:00 pm

One Step Away

Directed by Ed Pincus and David Neuman.
US, 1968, DCP, black & white, 54 min.
DCP source: HFA

The same year that Joan Didion published her stinging critique of the Haight-Ashbury counterculture in her now legendary collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Ed Pincus and David Neuman offered their far lesser known yet equally critical cinema verité portrait of a San Francisco area commune run, and run to the ground, by a megalomaniac leader and endless fount of tautological and self-serving platitudes. Cutting closer to the bone than any of the recent run of reality television cult movement portraits, One Step Away delivers a bracing and truly sobering look at one example of how a self-righteous White privilege personality cult could be fueled by easy access to LSD, pot and family money to extinguish the promise of the counterculture. Most striking are the moments when the fathers of the commune leader and of his partner tenderly, yet directly, question the children’s ideology, drug use and direction. The last HFA screening of this film in 2012 ended with an outraged self-proclaimed ex-hippie screaming at the screen and now deceased filmmaker, unable to bear the truth of Pincus and Neuman's revelation.

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Report from Millbrook

Directed by Jonas Mekas.
US, 1966, 16mm, color, 12 min.
Print source: Film-Maker's Coop

Although Jonas Mekas showed little interest in drug use for its mind-bending perspectives in artmaking and did not consider himself part of the psychedelic scene, he was interested in visiting and documenting Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert’s post-Harvard “lab space” on a sprawling estate in idyllic Millbrook, New York during the summer of 1965. Sprightly images of luscious vegetation and playing children distinctly contrast with much of the film’s soundtrack, consisting of a deceptive 1966 interview between a journalist from the underground newspaper East Village Other—posing as a dry, mainstream reporter—and the local sheriff who raided the Millbrook estate. The result is a complex audiovisual diary that encapsulates the clash between the fear-mongering establishment and the freedom-loving counterculture movement of the 1960s. – Alexandra Vasile