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Silent
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 Silent Films
Genres / Avant-garde / Silent
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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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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 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
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At Land
AT LAND begins at sea. In the film’s stunning opening sequence, a woman (played by filmmaker Maya Deren) emerges on shore, climbs up a pile of driftwood... and finds herself in the middle of a formal banquet. She then moves from lush, verdant jungles to seaweed-strewn beaches, stealing chess pieces from other characters....Start your free trial to watch
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Aviary
Made in collaboration with Joseph Cornell. “Rudy Burckhardt photographed this impression of New York’s Union Square under Joseph Cornell’s direction. This location held a particular fascination for Cornell, who wanted to establish a foundation for artists and art therapy there. In the film he treats the park as an outdoor...Start your free trial to watch
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Black and White Trypps no.2
"A fine fine example of spaces between existing as objects themselves. A patternistic and memorializing offering to natural totems. Two kinds of reversal at play involving black and white as well as reflection and overlap. These simple elements create a hurried maze of twisting antler branches, twigs, and...Start your free trial to watch
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Continuum
In CONTINUUM, the world, the workers within the world and the labor of making the film itself are equated through montage and a brilliantly concentrated filmic "painterliness." The result is an experimental film which is at the same time a document of propaganda in the sense that at its conclusion, one finds oneself closer to...Start your free trial to watch
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The Death of Abraham Lincoln (in Three Parts)
Started in 1998 but completed in 2000, THE DEATH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN (IN THREE PARTS) is an ahistorical re-enactment of the strange and curious events that led up to the untimely demise of our nation's sixteenth president. Each chapter is loosely connected to the others via a gun motif and a visual style...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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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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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