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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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I Will Walk Like a Crazy Horse
Arrabal's second film, I WILL WALK LIKE A CRAZY HORSE (aka. J'IRAI COMME UN CHEVAL FOU) forsakes the political allegory present in VIVA LA MUERTE! for a dramatic discovery of faith and rejection of organized religion. The story follows a man, Aden, played by the American George Shannon, who flees society...Start your free trial to watch
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I'd Rather Be in Paris
I'D RATHER BE IN PARIS depicts the filmmaker's visual concern with his physical environment by autobiographically exploring his alternatives: Chicago, San Francisco and the editing room itself. These urban explorations tend to concentrate on high-speed assemblages of cityscape abstractions.Start your free trial to watch
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Immer Zu
IMMER ZU is an elliptical, experimental animated film which evokes a mysterious undercover world of secret messages, cryptic language and indecipherable codes. Shot in luminous black and white, IMMER ZU uses miniature two and three dimensional figures and sets, as well as shadow puppetry, to suggest the urgency of a nocturnal...Start your free trial to watch
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Imperceptihole
A correspondence film: rolls of high-contrast black-and-white film were sent back-and-forth in the mail over the course of a year until the film began to reveal itself as a science non-fiction fairy tale, a speculative quest (circling and searching, falling and landing, entering and exiting) to recapture elisions in light...Start your free trial to watch
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In a Summer Garden
Part of a trio of films that also includes ADAGIO and WINTER LIGHT, IN A SUMMER GARDEN "draws much of its power from the way it is constructed and the ways it deals with images... [T]he camera pans and pauses, almost passively looks at the fields of flowers, and then plunges through them, carrying us...Start your free trial to watch
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In Absentia
IN ABSENTIA is a remarkable collaboration between filmmakers Stephen and Timothy Quay and the celebrated avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (who composed and conducted the original music for the film). Shot in black and white (and, occasionally, color) in Cinemascope, IN ABSENTIA combines live action and animation...Start your free trial to watch
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In the Mirror of Maya Deren
With IN THE MIRROR OF MAYA DEREN, documentary filmmaker Martina Kudlácek has fashioned not only fascinating portrait of a groundbreaking and influential artist but a pitch-perfect introduction to her strikingly beautiful and poetic body of work. Maya Deren is arguably the most important and innovative...Start your free trial to watch
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Inside Dope
A pseudo-educational, fictitious documentary survey of the ups, downs, ins and far-outs of Dope. Very funny and slightly sinister, like Red Skelton in the sky with diamonds. - Ron Padgett. With Jacob Burckhardt, Jim Carroll, Edwin Denby, William Dunas, Larry Fagin, Joan Fagin, Red Grooms, Yvonne Jacquette, Edmund Leites,...Start your free trial to watch
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Intervals
INTERVALS is the Peter Greenaway’s self-described “attempt” at creating an entertaining, abstract film; a series of bustling streetscapes from that most photogenic of cities, Venice. Using a self-conscious experiment in frame rate and a structure borrowed from the most Venetian of concertos (Antonio Vivaldi’s "Four Seasons"),...Start your free trial to watch
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Introduction to Oobieland
Using hand-painted film, animation and an inventive soundtrack, INTRODUCTION TO OOBIELAND is an exploration of gateways: a repeated series of movements from the familiar and safe to the unknown and dangerous. Cycles are left incomplete. Chases are never consummated; the day ends with no promise of rebirth....Start your free trial to watch
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Introduction to the Holy Scrolls
THE HOLY SCROLLS was an eleven hour assemblage of Bruce Baillie's extraordinary later work, including the complete ROSLYN ROMANCE along with DAY ASHORE, THE CARDINAL'S VISIT and an assortment of other pieces (finished and unfinished) or, as Baillie himself described it, "hitherto unseen films" made since...Start your free trial to watch
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Jews
JEWS excavates a lost world of manners and ritual in home movies shot by several Chicago families from the 1920s through the 1940s. Much as in similar found footage soliloquies by Péter Forgács, Jay Rosenblatt and Ken Jacobs, director Roger Deutsch wrings unexpected pathos from mundane traces of the past. Children mug for the...Start your free trial to watch
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A Journey to Avebury
Composed of fixed scenic views bathed in golden shades of sunset, A JOURNEY TO AVEBURY evokes the solitary experience of a walk. The film is a pure expression of Derek Jarman’s enduring attachment to England’s landscape and heroic past. Avebury’s magnificent Neolithic monuments appear as dark masses...Start your free trial to watch
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Julie
Swiss-American filmmaker and photographer Rudy Burckhardt references his earlier and similarly autobiographical observation MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA with JULIE (made four decades later), shedding the former film's soldier narrative in favor of a snapshot from his own life in rural Maine. A quintessentially New York experimental...Start your free trial to watch
