Silent
see all genres ›Avant-garde cinema began in the silent era (particularly in Europe) while a fair amount of subsequent experimental work in the United States and elsewhere has remained an entirely sound-free zone. Even today, they often still do (and every film herein is absent of any sound whatsoever).
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Genres / Avant-garde / Silent
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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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Horizons
One of the greatest if all-too-often overlooked landscape films in American cinema, Larry Gottheim’s HORIZONS displays a sensitivity to the seasons that seems more in keeping with Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” than the typical nature documentary. HORIZONS was not only Gottheim’s first...Watch Movie
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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...Watch Movie
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Barn Rushes
The long way around the barn never looked so good. Larry Gottheim composed BARN RUSHES from eight tracking shots tracing the same arc around a barn in different conditions. The fact that nothing changes makes it all the much more apparent that everything does: a meditative approach that Tony...Watch Movie
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Meditation on Violence
Haunting Chinese flute and Haitian drums accompany a graceful, elegant dance performance by Chao-Li Chi in Maya Deren's MEDITATION ON VIOLENCE. The film was released following the publication of her book, "An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form and Film", and her winning the Grand...Watch Movie
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Black and White Trypps #2
J.T. Rogstad, author of The International Exposition, "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....Watch Movie
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Ritual in Transfigured Time
Elusive and enigmatic, RITUAL IN TRANSFIGURED TIME begins with its director, the avant-garde pioneer filmmaker Maya Deren, winding a seemingly endless skein of yarn. She is joined by a young woman (the Trinidadian dancer Rita Christiani, one of Deren’s closest friends) who is...Watch Movie
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Our Lady of the Sphere
Of all my films, this is the most popular to date. Unfortunately, it is also the most cartoon-like and has an almost visible storyline: the young boy's travels through terror, death and the Underworld. My own conception of the circus sequence in the film connotes the world's...Watch Movie
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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...Watch Movie
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Orange
ORANGE is inspired by the direct film (cameraless) tradition. This tradition includes works in which the filmstrip is directly manipulated by painting, scratching, or otherwise placing objects on it. This tradition was probably originated by Len Lye in his hand painted A COLOUR BOX from 1935. To...Watch Movie
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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...Watch Movie
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Rhythmus 21
Hans Richter's position in the art world was unique. As one of the earliest exponents of Dada, he was also one of the first to recognize the new possibilities cinematography offered the artist. He participated in the first avant-garde film movement alongside Fernand Leger, Marcel Duchamp, Man...Watch Movie
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A Study in Choreography for Camera
"If I did not live in a time when film was accessible to me as a medium, I would have been a dancer, perhaps, or a singer," the filmmaker Maya Deren once said. "But this is a much more marvelous dance. In film, I can make the world dance!" After college, Deren landed her first...Watch Movie
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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...Watch Movie
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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...Watch Movie
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Blushes
BLUSHES is an exploration of the body. It contrasts gentle imagery of the female form with stark geometrics and powerful rushes of color. Self-depiction and tangible manipulation of the filmstrip establish a new agency for the filmmaker. Through its confrontational nature it subverts the gaze...Watch Movie
