Don't Look Down [21/04/96]

1996-04-21
60m

A look at the American Underground via Scotland.

Don’t Look Down, Scottish TV’s primary arts programme, extensively covered the arts in Scotland and highlighted the goings on in and around Edinburgh. This edition pays homage to the career of the first poet laureate for Glasgow and former national poet for Scotland Edwin Morgan. It also features a retrospective on American Underground filmmaking.

The Edinburgh Fringe Film and Video Festival are covered here with a piece introducing the work of twins George and Michael Kuchar, instrumental figures in American underground film. Their experimental films were part of the movement which came to be associated with the work of Stan Brakhage, Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol. Jonas Mekas was a champion of their work. In this episode, you can see an extract from their 1965 camp sci-fi film, Sins of the Fleshapoids.

Includes a tribute to Scottish poet Edwin Morgan.

Edinburgh - Festival City

A taste of Edinburgh's extraordinary history as a centre for the arts.

The Edinburgh International Festival, founded in 1947, is one of the world's most celebrated cultural events, an annual feast of fine art, theatre, ballet, opera and more. Created to offer healing through the arts after long years of war, the festival brought a swell of excitement from the start. Immediately, eight uninvited theatre companies joined the festival, creating an alternative arts festival that was eventually termed the Edinburgh Fringe (where comedy would eventually become the dominant force). The international film festival, which sadly announced its closure in 2022, came into being in the same moment of artistic reformation. In this collection, we look at Edinburgh as a media, arts and culture centre, giving a taste of how these intersecting events conspired to make Edinburgh a global cultural hub.