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.
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Genres / Avant-garde
SUB-GENRES · City Symphony · Culture Jamming · Nonobjective · Silent · Structural · Surrealistic
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Crime Scene Greenpoint
On the morning of May 2, 2006 a fire broke out in the Greenpoint Terminal Market. The blaze spread so quickly that the Fire Commissioner immediately suspected arson. After the ten alarm fire was put out the block was shut down as investigators combed the site for evidence....Watch Movie
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Drift and Bough
Lynne Sachs spends a winter morning in Central Park shooting film in the snow. Holding her Super 8mm camera, she takes note of graphic explosions of dark and light and an occasional skyscraper. The stark black lines of the trees against the whiteness create the sensation of a painter's...Watch Movie
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Bobbycrush
Cam Archer caught the attention of such major-league admirers as Gus Van Sant and Scott Rudin (later producers on his 2006 feature WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN) with this freeform debut short. Its teenage blond hero muses upon his boy-crush with a peer in a dreamily romantic mix of grainy,...Watch Movie
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Pink Swine
One of Lawrence Jordan's earliest animated films, PINK SWINE is an energetic and playful mix of various animation styles. Described as "an anti-art dada collage film," this free-form short presents cut-out images animated across old photos (a style picked up by Terry Gilliam a few years later)...Watch Movie
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Trumpit
Lawrence Jordan shot TRUMPIT in the basement of a house on Baker Street in San Francisco that he shared with Stan Brakhage in the mid-1950s. Brakhage himself stars in the film (along with Yvonne Fair). Featuring a card game played on the body of a naked woman, Jordan portrays male sexual...Watch Movie
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Man is in Pain
San Francisco based filmmaker Lawrence Jordan's 1954 short follows his hand, gesturing through a house of mirrors, cards and paintings of women. Shot in black-and-white and playfully incorporating direct animation, enhancing the photographed image by scratching and etching directly on the film. A...Watch Movie
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Pour une jeune Cineaste
Sandra Davis' short film is an ode to a "reverence of moment and passion of place." Overlapping layers of voices (in French and English) accompany Davis' mesmerizing cinematographic technique, emphasizing light-infused qualities of the photographic frame. Reminiscence of her...Watch Movie
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Dr. Hawaii
DR. HAWAII is a film project made by Rock Ross and Michael Rudnick in the early 1970s while both were students at the San Francisco Art Institute. It is a unique sampler of all the various cameras, lenses, film equipment, techniques, filmstocks, editing, lighting, A/B/C/D roll FX, tricks and...Watch Movie
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A Spell to Ward Off the Darkness
A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS follows an unnamed character through three seemingly disparate moments in his life. With little explanation, we join him in the midst of a fifteen-person collective on a small Estonian island; in isolation in the majestic wilderness of Northern...Watch Movie
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Night Hunter
In this handmade film, composed of more than four thousand collages, the actress Lillian Gish is seamlessly appropriated from silent-era cinema and plunged into a new and haunting role. NIGHT HUNTER evokes a disquieting dreamscape, drawn from allegory, myth, and archetype. Music and sound by...Watch Movie
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Big Sur
In describing the process of BIG SUR, artist Lawrence Jordan writes, "As with RODIA-ESTUDIANTINA only one shot, which probably was the result of lapse in concentration, was deleted from the original camera roll. This film was intended to extend my experiments with the 'in-camera' film, and is...Watch Movie
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Portrait of Sharon
A kinetic collage of superimposed warm, soft-colored 16mm film set to percussive jazz, Lawrence Jordan's PORTRAIT OF SHARON features beat poet Kirby Doyle on a motorcycle and Sharon "Didi" Morill, poet and onetime girlfriend of the saxophonist Gerry Mulligan, blinking her big...Watch Movie
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Coda I
Peter Gidal's structuralist short CODA I is composed of three lines of a thousand-word story he wrote (as read by William Bouroughs in a cutup tape collage) amidst an ultra-abstract play-of-light through a camera. Gidal describes his "socalled" imagery as "a complex of barely visible cuts in...Watch Movie
