A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Alias:
Humble Ben
Birthplace:
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA
Born:
February 9, 1941
Died:
August 8, 2019
Ben Van Meter began making films and light shows in the mid-1960s in San Francisco and soon became a leading figure in Bay Area-underground filmmaking. His films, especially S.F. Trips Festival, An Opening (1966) and the epic Acid Mantra or Rebirth of a Nation (1968), are compelling attempts to visually and sonically inscribe psychedelia, as experience and philosophy, in the medium of film. Van Meter’s films were unavailable for many years, but their ongoing restoration by the Academy Film Archive and their inclusion in the de Young Museum’s 2017 exhibition, The Summer of Love Experience: Art, Fashion, and Rock ‘n’ Roll, has gained them a new audience.
Camera Operator:
1969 Invocation of My Demon Brother
2019 Magick Lantern Cycle
Cinematography:
1969 Invocation of My Demon Brother
1979 Army of Lovers or Revolt of the Perverts
2019 Magick Lantern Cycle
Director:
1964 The Poon-Tang Trilogy
1965 Bolex Peyote Bardo
1965 Colorfilm
1965 Some Don't
1965 Up Tight, L.A. Is Burning... Shit!
1966 Acid Camp
1966 S.F. Trips Festival: An Opening
1967 BE
1967 For Life, Against the War
1967 Make Love Not War
1967 Me & Bruce & Art
1968 Acid Mantra
1968 Garden of Proserpine
1968 Steve Miller Blues Band
1969 Invocation of My Demon Brother
1969 Naked Zodiac
1969 Vivid Color 3D Nude Models
1970 Boc Ging
1970 Interrogation
1971 Homegrown
1971 Krishna's March to the Sea
1974 Set Your Chickens Free!
1974 The Saga of Macrame Park
1979 Army of Lovers or Revolt of the Perverts
2019 Magick Lantern Cycle
???? Nico
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.