Day Tripper / Le voyageur diurne (1966 | 11 min | France / Canada)
Homeo (1967 | 40 min | France / Canada)
Chromo Sud (1968 | 19 min | France / Canada)

Étienne O’Leary’s filmography is a vibrant, majestic reflection of late 1960s youth culture and avant-garde cinema. A 1960s French dandy by way of Montreal, O’Leary possessed an exceptional creativity as reflected in his paintings, music and films, and became intoxicated by the sights and sounds of bohemia. His films, populated by French underground luminaries like Pierre Clémenti, Jean-Pierre Bouyxou and Pierre Molinier, display the flow of life in its purest, most abstract and primitive essence. A student of the New York underground and surrealism, O’Leary uses a variety of notebook-style shooting, image layering and fast cutting to capture the era’s heady decadence and political possibilities. Adding to the hallucinogenic visuals, O’Leary composed his own singular soundtracks with a myriad of found instruments and tape recorders, a new music genre in and of themselves. O’Leary’s films are the cosmic nexus aligning Warhol’s Factory, Jonas Mekas’s home-movie poetics, and Kenneth Anger’s pop subversion.