"From The Third Eye: The Evergreen Review Film Reader" Edited by Ed Halter & Barney Rosset (Seven Stories Press)

ISBN: 978-1-60980-615-6

The Evergreen Review was an off-shoot publication/ journal of the Grove Press, edited by the legendary publisher Barney Rosset.   When I went to used bookstores, it wasn't hard to find old issues of the Evergreen Review.  What strikes my fancy is that reading the review in the late 1960s is so different than reading it in the 21st century.  Even the stylish prose of that period is so 1968 and almost dated in a beautiful manner.  Languages do change, and it's interesting to pick up a book or especially a magazine from a specific decade or time and notice how the style has changed.  "From The Third Eye" is a collection of articles and even ads from The Evergreen Review that focused on the film culture of that period.  For me, the most important film magazine of that era was Jonas Mekas' "Film Culture," which he published through the Filmmaker's Co-op and Film Anthology.   Evergreen Review, although they did essays and reporting of either film, filmmakers, and film festivals, at its heart was a literary magazine.  The publication was set-up as a promotional tool for Grove Press, but also here, for Grove Films, which distributed and produced European films, and actually help made/presented works by Jean-Luc Godard, and writers/filmmakers Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet, which by the way, are all interviewed for the magazine as well as being in the book.  

Without a doubt, a perfect snapshot of the concerns of underground or radical cinema, but also the politics of the Vietnam world, and the counterculture that was lurking in Manhattan at the time.   Nat Hentoff, Norman Mailer, Parker Tyler, and Amos Vogel are the writers that comment on cinema, but the featured filmmakers are Andy Warhol, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ousmane Sembène, Duras, Robbe-Grille and William Klein.  Also two pieces on Dennis Hopper, one on "Easy Rider," and the other focusing on the making of his "The Last Movie."  

Throughout the book there are the original ads that were placed in the magazine, all either focusing on film scripts published by Grove, or film ads distributed by Evergreen/Grove.  In a sense, it was a small world, but everyone in that world was an essential figure for culture and the arts.  And here at that time, politics was very much part of the creative cultural world.  A fascinating document and a fun trip back in time, when things were lively.