By Dennis Harvey

AS THE 1960S drew to a not very encouraging close, it became increasingly apparent that the revolution was not going to happen anytime soon. For many, attention drifted from burning the American flag to flying their freak one; it is not for nothing that the '70s made the ambiguous term "lifestyle" ubiquitous.

Creative endeavors outside the usual institutional contexts grew ever larger yet more personal. Experimental cinema hit a height of interest and practice it's been receding from ever since. Even in the realm of fiction features, movies were made in communal ways – for private reasons – that weren't just outside the Hollywood frame but pretty well off the commercial grid entirely.

Not surprisingly, the Bay Area was a hotbed for this sort of activity. The Pacific Film Archive series "Recovered Memory: Bay Area Underground Features from the '70s" digs up cinematic nuggets from that very singular time and place. Curated by Steve Seid, it offers five titles of varying obscurity but unifying trippy amorphousness – these were movies conceived with an altered audience in mind, no doubt by altered minds. Each must have been created under circumstances at least as fascinating as the end product. At these screenings you'll likely get insight into both, as most will feature a director or surviving collaborator in person.

The Devil's Cleavage, George Kuchar's 1975 labyrinth of shameful passion (and his only true feature as director) kicks things off. Resembling an unending black-and-white loop of his most melodramatically purple shorts, its two-hours-plus follow a petulant nurse (Ainslie Pryor) tearing a tumid, humid path through humanity from San Francisco to Yellowstone.

Its softcore torments were but a nap-time boner anticipating the full-on orgasmic nightmare of Thundercrack! two years later, which Kuchar and former student Curt McDowell bizarrely conceived as a let's-hop-on-the-porn-train-and-get-rich-quick scheme. Showing at its lesser-seen, 158-minute maximum, this omnisexual old-dark-house horror-gy – how I treasure the memory of my freshman-year roommate blanching at those man-pussy penetrations – takes its visual template from the late McDowell's classic short Foggy Depot. But its Tennessee-Williams-on-crack horndog garrulousness is all scenarist Kuchar. The opening sequence alone, involving woman, monologue, bathtub, and one helluva cucumber, remains enough to send any raincoat customer scurrying, and the rest of us into (as the poster cried) "Ecstasy so great, all Heaven and Hell become but one SHANGRI-LA!"

Less graphic inner spaces – as well as sci-fi outer ones – were explored in John Coney's Space Is the Place, a 1974 dose of black-power cosmology masquerading (barely) as viable blaxploitation. It's hard to imagine urban audiences going from, say, that same year's Black Belt Jones to this Oakland-set psychedelic fantasia starring musical shaman Sun Ra and his Intergalactic Arkestra – not without suffering some serious wiggage, at least. The movie (again, showing in a longer-than-usual cut) offers one possible solution to racial inequity: transport all the African Americans somewhere better, then blow up the stupid Earth they've left behind.

Two features virtually unseen since their creation complete the monthlong flashback. Rick Schmidt's 1988 – The Remake is a 1977 faux doc put-on in the mode of David Holzman's Diary, with fictive behind-the-scenes drama interspersed alongside the "real" auditions of local talents for a projected futuristic Show Boat remake that in fact no one plans on carrying out. A tap-dancing nun turned stripper, complete with dog, is representative of the heads doing their own Gong Show-type thing here. Representing only his own glorious, bespangled self is disco diva Sylvester.

Philippe Makanna's 1971 Shoot the Whale is to westerns what Tom O'Horgan's Futz was to the poor-white-trash mellerdrammer – a theatrical happening-cum-filmic objet d'art juggling camp, politics, solarized images, stunning landscape photography (of Death Valley and Mono Lake), found footage, satirical songs, skits, and games. Summoned into being by street theater troupe the East Bay Sharks (featuring Ed Holmes, who's still in the like-minded S.F. Mime Troupe), its critique of frontier and warmongering machismo is the apex of stoned anarchy, too buzzed to do more than blissfully moon the Man.

'Recovered Memory: Bay Area Underground Oddities from the '70s' runs June 1-June 29, PFA Theater, 2575 Bancroft Way, Berk. $8. (510) 642-1412, www.bampfa.berkeley.edu.