Movies: Avant garde

Experimental film, white specks and shapes gyrating over a black background, the light-striped torso of Kiki of Montparnasse (Alice Prin), a gyrating eggcrate. One of the first Dadaist films....

Man Ray, the master of experimental and fashion photography was also a painter, a filmmaker, a poet, an essayist, a philosopher, and a leader of American modernism. Known for documenting the cultural elite living in France, Man Ray spent much of his ...

Filmed by Jonas Mekas from the 44th floor of the Time-Life Building, “Empire” explores the passage of time without the use of characters or a traditional narrative. The film, that consists of one stationary shot of the Empire State Building, was made...

This film is from the point of view of a cameraman following a young woman through the streets of a city. He chases her down an alley and knocks her over, in a symbolic form of video assault. No dialogue....

This short experimental film tells the story of a man who comes to Hollywood to become a star, only to fail and be dehumanized. He is identified by the number 9413 written on his forehead....

Drawing inspiration from a poem penned by Castro Alves, this film vividly captures the political, cultural, and intellectual climate of Brazil during the late 1970s. At its core, the story revolves around four distinctive embodiments of Christ's imag...

Adachi's follow-up to Bowl using the figure of a woman suffering from an unusual sexual aliment has often been taken as a controversial allegory for the political stalemate of the Leftist student movement after their impressive wave of massive fiery ...

Monteiro moved far away from the visual opulence defined by his earlier films with his inspired adaptation of radical Swiss writer Robert Walser’s anti-fairy tale. Carefully restricting the image track, Monteiro maintains an almost totally black scre...

Homage to the cult classic “Mondo Hollywood”, a groovy mushrooms dealer and a man from the 5th dimension journey through Hollywood to find the meaning of “Mondo.”...

Obsessed with a general's wife, a clergyman has strange visions of death and lust, struggling against his own eroticism....

A silent film of collaged and painted sequences of lovemaking between Schneemann and her then partner, composer James Tenney; observed by the cat, Kitch....

Pig Chicken Suicide is a veritable assault on the senses, mixing violent images of animal slaughter, racial strife, and surrealism to tell the story of two Koreans living in Japan whose love is destroyed due to overwhelming racial discrimination. In...

A serial killer stalks a woman he befriended after her car broke down....

Serap is a successful theater actress. Although she rejects the traditional roles assigned to women in her personal life, she agrees to play the role of a traditional housewife in a shampoo commercial. However, she is unaware that this commercial wil...

Short documentary directed by Jean Vigo about the French swimmer Jean Taris. The film is notable for the many innovative techniques that Vigo uses, including close ups and freeze frames of the swimmer's body....

Each day after work, Carlos, a language school teacher, frequents the heady surroundings of his local cruising ground. One evening he encounters a teenage boy from his class named Toni, and the two engage in a brief sexual tryst. As the relationship ...

A woman washes up on a beach and embarks on a surreal journey, encountering others and fragmented versions of herself in a quest for identity....

Songs for Drella is a concept album by Lou Reed and John Cale, both formerly of The Velvet Underground, and is dedicated to the memory of Andy Warhol, their mentor, who had died unexpectedly in 1987. Drella was a nickname for Warhol coined by Warhol ...

A creation myth realized in light, patterns, images superimposed, rapid cutting, and silence. A black screen, then streaks of light, then an explosion of color and squiggles and happenstance. Next, images of small circles emerge then of the Sun. Imag...

Experimental short uses Ray Charles' “What'd I Say” as accompaniment to constantly shifting collage of female nude, cartoons, and newsreels of atomic bomb explosions....