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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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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
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Just Another Girl
With the single-minded attention to detail of a teenager preparing for the prom (or an actress preparing for an award) but augmented by the boisterous camaraderie of friends, a group of San Francisco men pluck, primp and transform themselves into women for a performance (or perhaps an evening on the town)....Start your free trial to watch
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Kick That Habit
KICK THAT HABIT is a film created in the bleak eastern region of Switzerland. At first, a group plays a game of mini-golf, then the Swiss musicians Voice Crack (Norbert Möslang and Andy Guhl) rehearse in the studio, afterward heading up to Alpstein, at which point you are right in the middle of a concert, next stepping away...Start your free trial to watch
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Kimono
This half hour "ambient narrative" was made for the German TV series EROTIC TALES. Inspired by some of the more sensual readings in a collection of classical Japanese poetry, the film follows a young bride abandoned at a desolate roadside, and her dream-like descent into the depths of the forest. There, other aspects of...Start your free trial to watch
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Kindless Villain
In KINDLESS VILLAIN, two boys wander through a stone fortress, while the history of never-ending battle forms traces in the waters below. Seemingly alone in their island world, the boys succumb to fatigue, and to rituals of power. Scratched phrases from an ancient recording of Hamlet reveal a sad cry for...Start your free trial to watch
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Kingsbury Beach
Digital stills and video footage of a child on a beach in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, are manipulated and obscured to create a nostalgic atmosphere of remembrances. The Amiga computer has now been replaced by the Macintosh. The editing program is the Media 100.Start your free trial to watch
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Kluane
Filmmaker Louise Archambault captures the otherworldly beauty of Kluane National Park and Reserve in the Yukon Territory. Home to glaciers, Canada's highest mountains and grizzly bears, Archambault creates abstract art with natural formations, sometimes literally turning an image on its head to look at this remote world from...Start your free trial to watch
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Knuckleface Jones
Hailed as being "wildly surrealist" by Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader and called "a work of demented brilliance" by Dave Nuttycombe of the DC City Paper. KNUCKLEFACE JONES won some big fans at the 2001 Slamdance Film Festival and made a lot of enemies elsewhere. It was partially funded by the...Start your free trial to watch
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Kongostraat
“A diaristic view of parts of Paris, Belgium and Amsterdam. The Turkish family on their stoop, the woman on the train with her two pit bulls and an admirer, interiors, exteriors, the views from the train and the canals of the flat lands. Laid over are sound recorded at the same locations, providing correlating fragments of...Start your free trial to watch
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L'amateur
A bereft filmmaker asks a series of women to pose nude for his camera in this striking and moody short film by Belgium's Olivier Smolders. The silent encounters act as counterpoint to a contemplative internal monologue musing on love, loss and the subtle power-plays of aversion and desire underway in an atmosphere pervaded by...Start your free trial to watch
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The Last Trick
Jan Svankmajer’s debut film extends the madcap spirit of his Prague-based Theatre of Masks. Two magicians perform an escalating series of tricks, most of which involve strange objects entering or exiting their plaster heads. Once pried open, they resemble surrealist cabinets stuffed with grinding gears, violins and insects....Start your free trial to watch
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LBJ
Most definitely an unauthorized biography, Cuban agit-prop filmmaker Santiago Alvarez scavenges imagery from LIFE magazine, cowboy movies and Playboy to lampoon Lyndon B. Johnson’s tyranny. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert and Martin Luther King, Jr. are all laid at Johnson’s doorstep. Delivered with...Start your free trial to watch
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Letters, Notes
Conceptually, Stephanie Barber's short film LETTERS, NOTES is simplicity itself: found photographs hold the screen as animated texts transcribe brief notes and letters unmoored from context. And yet the elusive poignancy that emerges of this exquisite corpse structure is richly suggestive of the roots of narrative. If a code...Start your free trial to watch