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 · Surrealistic · Culture Jamming · Nonobjective · Structural · Silent
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Take Off
Freaky and not a little transcendent, TAKE OFF takes the strip tease well past its usual climax. By sprinkling a little Georges Melies magic over the peep show motif, Gunvor Nelson simultaneously revels in cinema's earliest forms while exploding the medium's customary reliance on (and...Watch Movie
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Meshes of the Afternoon
One of the most important films in the history of American avant-garde cinema, Maya Deren's MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON is captivating and dream-like, filled with tinges of psychodrama, murder mystery, and film noir. In a seemingly ordinary Los Angeles home, the film's...Watch Movie
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Williamsburg
A pocket-sized city symphony, WILLIAMSBURG collects some of the first images Jonas Mekas shot with a film camera in 1950 (along with footage from 1972 when he was returning to his old neighborhood as a visitor). Bygone Brooklyn is richly evoked in the everyday life of the street: the elevated...Watch Movie
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The Place Between Our Bodies
The hedonistic yet spiritually-questing spirit of San Francisco life at the height of the "Gay Liberation" movement is captured in Michael Wallin's poetical, highly personal film. As we watch city denizens cruise each other in the free-for-all atmosphere of a mid-1970s erotic...Watch Movie
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Human Remains
HUMAN REMAINS is a haunting documentary which illustrates the banality of evil by creating intimate portraits of five of the 20th century's most reviled dictators. The film unveils the personal lives of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Francisco Franco and Mao Tse Tung. We learn the...Watch Movie
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The Double Life of Paul Henreid
Paul Henreid, perhaps most famous for his roles in CASABLANCA and NOW, VOYAGER became a star at Warner Brothers during World War II, as the exotic lead with the European accent. After the war, his contract was cancelled and he was left to his own devices. He continued acting...Watch Movie
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Tribulation 99
Upon its release in 1991, TRIBULATION 99 became an instant counter-culture classic. Craig Baldwin’s “pseudo-pseudodocumentary” presents a factual chronicle of U.S. intervention in Latin America in the form of the ultimate far-right conspiracy theory, combining covert action, environmental...Watch Movie
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Fata Morgana
Possibly Werner Herzog's most experimental work, FATA MORGANA defies categorization. Is it a narrative feature? A documentary? A metaphysical essay on film? As the director himself has noted, it regards Earth and its creatures as if from the curious, alienated viewpoint of interplanetary...Watch Movie
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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...Watch Movie
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Report from Millbrook
Jonas Mekas' elegant report on a Poughkeepsie police department's raid of Timothy Leary's base-of-operations amply demonstrates the political potential of his diary filmmaking. The film's protest is lodged in the disjunction between sound and image, with Mekas' intimate,...Watch Movie
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Rock Hudson's Home Movies
“It was all up there,” says Rock Hudson (Eric Farr) at the start of this rule-breaking, dizzying assortment of clips from Rock Hudson’s Hollywood career that make up Mark Rappaport’s feature film, ROCK HUDSON'S HOME MOVIES. Employing a narrative commentary from beyond the...Watch Movie
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Act of Being Polite
After gaining notoriety for their burn-it-down deconstructionist covers of popular hits (including songs by the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and James Brown), the anonymous Residents produced their own insincere iteration of a Top 40 chart. The second of their "One Minute...Watch Movie
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Cornell, 1965
I worked as Joseph Cornell's assistant during the summer and fall of 1965, during which time I shot four rolls of Kodachrome 16mm film in and around Cornell's house. The scenes included a brief biographical glimpse of Cornell and his work, as well as his working environment, which is perhaps the...Watch Movie
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Schmeerguntz
Memorably described by Ernest Callenbach as "one long raucous belch in the face of the American home," Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley's montage remains a bracing analysis of misogyny's governing dialectic of idealization and disgust. With acid wit, the filmmakers link the detritus of popular...Watch Movie
