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Avant-garde
see all genres ›The “front line” in the arts, the avant-garde defied (and continues to defy) the market and the masses. Cinema’s early avant-garde movements (impressionism, expressionism and others) spoke to film's intrinsic artistic properties. Often the creation of a single person or small group working on a shoestring budget, films of the avant-garde may not be straightforward “stories” as much as reflections on/refractions of the medium itself.
Discover Avant-garde Films
Genres / Avant-garde
SUB-GENRES · City Symphony · Culture Jamming · Nonobjective · Silent · Structural · Surrealist
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145 W. 21
One of photographer/filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt's earliest 16mm films, 145 W. 21 plays very much like an amateur movie, albeit one featuring an especially notable cast (Burckhardt pals Paul Bowles, Aaron Copland, Edwin Denby and Virgil Thomson, among others). A romantic pair leaves their flat for a desultory burlesque show and...Start your free trial to watch
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Above Below
Cam Archer's hypnotic short film takes form as a letter into the void. A middle-aged woman reads a note to a lost friend while slowed home movies of an adolescent boy flash across the screen. With movements blurred and the picture flaring with light, the image seems to register the uncertain memory of one left behind. "Have...Start your free trial to watch
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Acid Redux
When commissioned to make a Futurist-inspired film for the New York Biennial, George Kuchar responded in his characteristic way with this madcap vignette. Knocked out in a weekend (filmed Friday and edited Saturday), ACID REDUX was shot with his Electrographic Sinema class at the San Francisco Art Institute and features his...Start your free trial to watch
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Across the Border
ACROSS THE BORDER is a collage of found footage and documentary images, radio Spanish/English tracks and commentary by Philippe Bourgois, a Stanford Anthropologist trapped in an offensive by the United States-backed Salvadoran Military forces. The film’s position against U.S. intervention in the third...Start your free trial to watch
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Adagio
Subtitled “Eros in Psyche” and set to a composition by Tomaso Albinoni, Lawrence Jordan’s rapturous live action short contemplates two nude figures in California idyll. They remain physically separated but Jordan’s spellbinding cutting and tactile camerawork suggest a loosening of inhibition. Parisian fountains and classical...Start your free trial to watch
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Adoration
This dazzling yet graphic and unsettling film, shot in 35mm black-and-white, features a young Japanese man (Takashi Matsuo) lovingly filming and recording the voice of his female companion (Catherine Aymerie) before proceeding in a harrowing direction. Among the best-known works of acclaimed Belgian filmmaker Olivier...Start your free trial to watch
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L'age d'or
In 1930, following their short film triumph UN CHIEN ANDALOU, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí created an hour-long avant-garde tour de force that's both an aesthetic avalanche of boldness and a withering attack on a society that elevates pious morality over sexual freedom. As scorpions battle, partisans (led by famed surrealist...Start your free trial to watch
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L'amico Fried's Glamorous Friends
L'AMICO FRIED'S GLAMOROUS FRIENDS "...is built around a pas de deux by Ondine and Sally Dixon... with a quickness of breath and dryness of the throat one is apt to say, 'What is that!' as if peering into some exotic fog. The sometimes lovely and sometimes not beautiful but nearly always exquisite...Start your free trial to watch
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Ancient Parts/Foreign Parts
The first two in a series of in-camera edited films by Marjorie Keller. ANCIENT PARTS portrays the symbolic differentiation and mock conquest of a boy and his mother. FOREIGN PARTS portrays the poetics of family life in an unfamiliar context. Two joined together as one.Start your free trial to watch
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The Angelic Conversation
Derek Jarman's lyrical celebration of gay love set within the context of a series of William Shakespeare’s sonnets. Ethereal Super-8 images slowed to a magical, meditative pace follow the love affair between two men as Dame Judi Dench provides a soothing presence with her narration of the fourteen sonnets....Start your free trial to watch
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The Animal
A man meets a woman at a deserted railroad station somewhere in northern New England. It is the middle of winter; snow is falling. The two drive to a remote farmhouse. Two strange children, who never speak, appear at the window; an old woman calls them away. First isolation, then alienation, overcome the couple. The woman has...Start your free trial to watch
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The Answering Furrow
Georgic I: The annual produce first seen in spring. The furrowed earth ready for planting. The distribution, support and protection of young plants. The implements of the garden. Georgic II: The life of Virgil is recapitulated in summer, with a digression on the sacred. The sheep of Arcadia. The handling...Start your free trial to watch
