Kenneth Anger, for instance, has stated that his film Scorpio Rising (1963) documents the exploits of an actual motorcycle gang from Brooklyn (295). In fact, the makers of these films often encouraged audiences to regard their films as documentaries of subterranean communities. For many audiences of the time, these films appeared to uncover previously hidden worlds–underground worlds– whose inhabitants eschewed 1960s American middle-class values.
In the early 1960s, a group of artists and filmmakers working primarily in New York City began to make and exhibit films that displayed the kind of willful excesses that would later define the decade as a period of cultural and sexual upheaval.
