John Hofsess’s “Film as Guerilla Warfare” offers one of the filmmaker's clearest statements of his therapeutic cinema. Appearing in 1967 in Take One, while Hofsess was making Palace of Pleasure, his essay begins with the domestication of the American underground, of household names and commercial runs, an insurgency brokered in the halls of commercial culture that could increasingly be treated as another fashion. Hofsess insists that the underground’s dissent lies somewhere deeper than its violations of industrial procedure or its challenges to censorship. Its more radical and volatile strengths reside in what cinema might do to the viewer.
Elsewhere I have described Hofsess’s idea of cinematherapy as a therapeutic confrontation: his cinema is not a soothing experience, but as an instrument for bringing the spectator into contact with sensations, desires, fantasies, and fears ordinarily organized or suppressed by social convention. With “Film as Guerilla Warfare,” Hofsess rejects the expectation that images should be made to yield symbolic or metaphysical meanings. In place of those, he proposes the cultivation of sensation itself. The ideal spectator becomes what he calls a “metaphysically naked” organism, capable of encountering sensory experience without filtering them through political, religious, moral, or psychological lenses. Sensation, for Hofsess, is “self-sufficient.”
This gives his essay’s invocation of guerilla warfare another meaning. Hofsess is interested in underground cinema as an oppositional culture, but the revolution he describes operates at the level of perception. Quoting Jonas Mekas, he endorses the proposition that social change must begin within the self, through an expansion of sympathy, imagination and sensory experience. Cinema becomes therapeutic precisely because it can interrupt the habits through which experience has been compartmentalized and labelled.
Palace of Pleasure was Hofsess’s surviving attempt to put these convictions into practice. Its dual-projection form was integral to a work conceived according to criteria alien to conventional dramatic cinema, while its erotic and sensory material sought to enlarge what Hofsess calls the “circumference of perception.” His invocation of Huysmans’s À rebours and Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death place his project within a broader discourse that desired to restore bodily and imaginative life from systems of repression. The therapeutic cinema that emerges from this essay is therefore inseparable from Hofsess’s understanding of the underground itself: a cinema to transcend the shallow representations of liberation, and to produce an encounter capable of altering the spectator. His underground does not merely want to “blow” the viewer’s mind for an evening, but to “blow their mind forever.”
- Stephen Broomer, August 2026
FILM AS GUERILLA WARFARE
by John Hofsess
For several months an advertisement sponsored by Grove Press in New York has been asking, "Do you have what it takes to join the Underground?" And dilettantes by the thousands have been saying yes. A double-bill of Chafed Elbows and Scorpio Rising runs four months in uptown New York. Time and Newsweek make Warhol a household word (albeit a dirty one) with their middleclass legions. Even Playboy has clasped the underground to its bosom. O Underground, where is thy sting?
When the movement began in New York, it was distinguished by several "subversive" characteristics. Union regulations were ignored: actors and technicians volunteered their time and services. Precensorship rules were flaunted: groups met informally in coffeehouses and churches and showed their films freely, as a poet is free to read without running to a state board for approval. The films experimented with new subjects, techniques and forms.
West Side Story, My Fair Lady, A Man for All Seasons, Night of the Iguana, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? ... anyone running down a list of American films produced during the last five years might be led to believe that Broadway is Alive and Hiding in Hollywood. If the creative nerve centre in American cinema shifted during these years from the Hollywood professionals to the decentralized underground, it is largely because the world-famous expertise of the former has become a matter of being all dressed up with nowhere to go. For exuberant inventiveness, underground film-makers resemble nothing so much as a new generation of Marx brothers let loose in a staid and stereotyped industry. Many of the underground films are bad, but none are quite so depressing as a bad Hollywood film. There is a considerable difference between realizing that some seventeen year old wasted five hundred dollars trying to make electroencephalograph patterns with a rock'n'roll soundtrack a viable film experience, and realizing the waste incurred when a distinguished cast of nineteen stars headed by a famous director has bored you to death with a biblical-musical (an obvious new genre, I should think: Thoroughly Modern Jesus) scripted by five Nobel prize-winners and filmed at a cost of twenty million dollars.
In a tape-recording made last summer, Jonas Mekas described the aims of underground films: "Ten years ago people like ourselves went on marches, protesting this, decrying that. We failed of course. Then we began to realize that the change, if change is possible, must come from within ourselves. It is an experiment in living: if we cannot change ourselves in any way, the rest is hopeless. We believe in what we're doing, we believe it to be much more beautiful than what Hollywood is doing, because really if you want to change man, if you want to change any of the horrible things around us, you can change it only through the sense of beauty, through the beautiful aspects in ourselves, or in our works of art. Blaise Cendrars in an essay he wrote in 1921 entitled ABC of Cinema said, 'every object touched by man is impregnated with humanity,' and that, I would say, is what our films are doing: expanding human sympathy, stretching the imagination, teaching the eye new sensations. It is what we mean when we say that films are to be made with love. That is our purpose."
Underground cinema is an intrinsic part of a scene that includes peace marches, draft-card burnings, pop music, topless chamber concerts and love-ins. The emergence of this "religion of the young" is viewed increasingly with shock and alarm by older generations, and while the shock they feel may be genuine, it is nevertheless self-induced. Conservatives are very much aware that they are living in an age of "moral decline." They create this disagreeable illusion for themselves through their own inflexibility; instead of possessing a creative morality, one that is self-corrective and which collaborates with life, they have chosen views which are frozen into immobility and eventual irrelevance. Once they take a stand, they stay there. And while it may induce security never to reopen one's mind to doubt, or to suffer what Eric Hoffer calls "the ordeal of change" the world to which these standards supposedly relate is nevertheless alive, and undergoing permutations. Obviously a gap soon grows between one's dead-letter laws and the behaviour of living people, and as the gap widens, so does one's estimate of the moral decay, and its attendant moods of rage and despair. In an age when increasing numbers of people die for political illusions and abstractions that have no functional meaning, one can be grateful for the Underground's passionate affirmation of concrete beauties and freedoms.
In speaking with other Canadian filmmakers and distributors, it is clear that the underground's idea of making personal films doesn't impress them: to them the only way to make films is the prevalent way, and all roads lead to the Drive-in. To be seen in Superscope, in a 4,000 seat theatre, by line-ups of people who come and go in the darkness without speaking to one another, and hawked on billboards as "greatest Academy award winner ever" is their vision of success. It is business-as-usual in the film world, it is my vision of hell.
In beginning The Palace of Pleasure, I deliberately chose what might be called the "alternative future" for films. It faces permanent difficulties in distribution due to its dual-projection technique, and the concept of "cinematherapy" meant creating a film in which content and structure are determined by criteria unfamiliar to critics. Audiences are accustomed to films which manipulate reality to create a symbolic order, supposedly rich in metaphysical "meanings"; whereas I cannot divine any value or meaning below or above the surface sensation of anything. Man's penchant for something more, something higher, has given sensuality a reputation for superficiality (people always seem to seek truth as if it were the opposite of what they are) but invariably the something more turns out to be something less – something no one has even seen or ever felt – religious and political illusions which men die for rather than lead a full-bodied life.
In the spirit of La Rochefoucauld's epigram that "most people would never fall in love, except for hearing about it," I expect that people are more interested in judging sensation and having an instantaneous opinion, than in profoundly experiencing it. More than any other reason, this is why underground films have had such a bad and hostile press. The sexual mores of our society are a clear indication that abstract judgments with no empirical foundation have triumphed over the earthbound reality of sensation. The irrational rage which divides heterosexuals and homosexuals is mutually neurotic and destructive. In pure terms, in terms of physiological sensation, some of their sexual acts are in fact identical. But no one would ever guess that from the exaggerated horror which characterizes both groups. It is an axiom in the advertising world that the brands which advertise the most and declaim the loudest – toothpastes, detergents and cigarettes – are precisely the ones with the greatest similarity between themselves and competing products, and all of them spend millions trying to create in the public mind notions of spurious differences. Our sexual mores could not be more trivial, arbitrary and unconvincing than if they were the result of a promotional snow-job for Mr. Clean and Betty Crocker. In what might be called, with a trace of irony, the objective reality of the laboratory, the only detectable differences in some sexual acts is based on the proficiency of individuals, not their sex. (An obvious hair-splitter is intercourse. Some claim it makes a vas deferens indeed!) The profound cultural bias so often expressed against any research of erotic sensation that does not include "spiritual" values, psychological and social attitudes is ill-founded. It is precisely these "attitudes" which frequently impede or impair the perception of experience. Instead of experiencing life through a Marxist filter, a Catholic filter, or even the filter of personal eccentricity, a major psychological breakthrough is reached when a person becomes metaphysically naked: a finely tuned and purely sensing organism that neither distorts, disorders, adds to nor negates an experience. To bite into a tomato and feel the skin burst, it is enough to be conscious of texture, shape, color, taste and possibly nutritional content; sensation is self-sufficient; there is no justification for using it as a springboard into ghostly unrealities: seeing tomatoes as a manifestation of God, as a mythological symbol, as part of nature's providence to please and feed man.
The direction of underground art is toward the unification – or at least the reconciliation – of many such items normally presumed to be warring opposites. The Mugwumps may have been the first to unite rock and folk music, but the Beatles' new album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band spans from Bach to Stockhausen. Eclecticism is its keynote, but fused into a new and dynamic language. It may not fully be realized as the intention of such work, but it is understandable that in a world where atomization and specialization set the dominant social tone, the Underground would respond by trying to put the various pieces of man back together again.
The ethic embodied in such work is clear: whereas earlier artists of this century were as fragmented as the age itself, and produced work that is, in the final analysis, so private and unsociable as to be almost inaccessible (I have in mind the authors of Finnegans Wake, Cantos, Mythologies, Waste Land, and Remembrance of Things Past) we are observing today a convergence of long separated strains – a mixture of media – an attempt to mold a new social consensus. The most pronounced and damaging characteristic of our society is its tendency to fabricate dualisms, to maximize differences into antagonism: communist versus democrat, conservative versus liberal, white versus negro – the list of these "polarities" is endless. What the psychic drop-out rediscovers however is the spectrum: the realm where all differences are shades in a graduated continuum, a realm where male and female are reunited in an ambience of sensuality; a non-violent realm wherein nothing is divorced from the scope of one's understanding.
Of course no century is ever entirely of one age: although we live in 1967, there are still 11th Century priests about; there are 18th Century scientists who dwell in ivory reactors; there are 19th Century artists who find retreat the most congenial way of life and the expression of individuality the only suitable topic. I mean only to say that, with a Dylanesque drawl, the times have changed since they last crawled out their windows.
In basing The Palace of Pleasure on Joris-Karl Huysmans' novel (Au Rebours, 1884) I was particularly drawn to its prophetic, modern spirit.* In relating the story of a retired aristocrat who conducts a systematic exploration of his senses to their uttermost limits, and who pits against his spiritually impoverished and violent society a secret garden of wonders, the book practically carries out the psychological project recommended by Norman O. Brown in Life Against Death (1959) as the singular hope for modern man. Like the hero of the novel, viewers should be willing to have an aesthetic and emotional experience uninfluenced by any temporal value system. For this reason, I contend that the film is only of minority interest: the number of people willing to enlarge the circumference of perception is quite small.
In marked contrast to the young people intent upon opening the doors of perception, the majority of the world's population are locked in patterns of behaviour and recurrent events that have always brought ruin and shame to us. They have stereotypes for breakfast, clichés for lunch, platitudes for supper and perhaps an idée fixe thrown in for a bedtime snack. This making of life a routine doesn't actually succeed in taming it; it only fosters the illusion that everything's under control, which has as much merit and success usually as conservatism in a shipwreck. The Underground has not "emerged" as some writers claim.
Its dissent remains unintegratable despite the blandishments of commercial distributors and the cooing of dilettante fans who say it blows their mind. lts purpose, if only they knew, is to blow their mind forever.
When the most advanced weapon was the crossbow, one could forbear man's monotonous self-destruction; one could always console oneself with the notion that the battlefields were strewn with likeminded men. Today however, civilians, women and children are all enclosed within thermonuclear rings of fire, and neither the power of love nor the energies of art are comparable to the forces of destruction.
Yet precisely when one might expect the depression and demoralization of art, there has occurred this remarkable change.
The songs, poems and films of the Underground are created against all odds: one sings A Day In The Life against a backdrop of Auschwitz; one reads Howl at the gates of the Steel Company; one views Flaming Creatures on the walls of the Pentagon.
James Joyce called for an "awakening" from the "nightmare of history"; that awakening, in fits and starts, is to be found in the work of Bob Dylan, the broadsides of Paul Goodman, in the sharply delineated prose of Claude Brown (Manchild in the Promised Land) and James Baldwin; it flowers in the films of Gregory Markopoulos (notably The Illiac Passion), the Songs of Stan Brakhage, and in the salutary humour of Jack Smith's new film Normal Love. Though unmistakably of modern sensibility, underground art is a triumph of the human spirit and imagination that brooks comparison with the art of life created by Socrates.
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* Those portions of the film released under the separate titles Redpath 25 and Black Zero would have more accurately been dubbed The Rushes are Coming. They are in fact what John Barth calls "test borings" – mere fragments of dreams and memories of the protagonist of the feature film.
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John Hofsess (1938–2016) was a Canadian filmmaker, writer, journalist, and human rights activist. In the late 1960s he directed the experimental films Palace of Pleasure and Columbus of Sex, the latter becoming the subject of an obscenity trial. Hofsess subsequently pursued a long career in journalism, most notably as a film critic for Maclean’s, and published Inner Views, an essential collection of interviews with Canadian filmmakers. In 1991, Hofsess founded the Right to Die Society of Canada and became one of the country’s most prominent advocates for assisted dying, a cause to which he devoted much of the final decades of his life.