Movies: Avant garde

We watch white shapes dancing on black background, which changes when the white shape fills up the screen completely, and black lines and figures bounce around on the now white background....

A young man desperately seeks out the fleeting image of a female companion, and though he never quite catches her, he discovers much more through the surreal explorations of his own sexuality. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012....

Little Stabs at Happiness is a collection of silent shorts Jacobs shot from the period of 1959-1963. Jaunty tunes (and a somber reflection) accompany the footage....

While playing his trombone one Sunday, the enthusiastic Zero sees Beatrix and falls in love. He returns the next week to express his feelings, and it's mutual. Over the next few months, they spoon, kiss, and find happiness. Then, she receives a lette...

Visionary artist Matthew Barney returns to cinema with this 3-part epic, a radical reinvention of Norman Mailer’s novel Ancient Evenings. In collaboration with composer Jonathan Bepler, Barney combines traditional modes of narrative cinema with filme...

In December, 1941, using music by Stravinsky, this film provides a reaction to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. An egg is smashed by a hammer; red color with white and then blue dominates the frame. Blue paint runs; small bulbs float. The dark co...

In "The Lead Shoes", we can neither thrust in our eyes nor our ears to help us understand how time flows or how space is. Therefore, Peterson forces us to take both space and time as relative experiences. The consistent disorientation in the film and...

Brakhage begins here with Carlsbad Caverns as a stand-in for Plato's Cave and then responds to the philosopher's notion of inaccessible ideal forms by seeking out imagery that evokes worlds we cannot see....

An experimental drama that spins the tale of a woman, her sister, and the man who completes the triangle. Told through such fertile sources as grand opera, classical painting, and Victorian melodrama....

30 year old child enters the new city, riding on a donkey. He says he is the Savior. He has spent no time among men. He is trembling with cold. His clothes are soaked. His mother was overprotective ; his father conspicuously absent. He knows that he ...

The film begins with a series of horizontally running ocean tide waves, sometimes with mountains in the background, hand-painted patterns, sometimes step-printed hand-painting, abstractions composed of distorted (jammed) TV shapes in shades of blue w...

"This project consists a visual fluidity of construction, harmony and thoughts taking colors and length from this body of autonomy. Different images between figuration and abstraction are created by meaning and phenomenon letting the decoupage reveal...

An intimate, affecting portrait of the life and work of ground-breaking performance artist and music pioneer Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV) and his wife and collaborator, Lady Jaye, centered around the daring sexual transfor...

A lucid dream turned nightmarish reality. A ship sinking into a world of fear. A short film that’s mostly puppetry by one of America's most prolific twentieth century artists....

The history and art of ikebana, a centuries old Japanese art of flower arrangement and a look inside the Sogetsu School of Ikebana, where the director's father Sofu Teshigahara worked as the grand master of the school....

Santamaria and Urtigo are two bandits on the run, one is white, the other black. Santamaria is a mystical visionary and believes in the imminent coming of a purifying angel. Urtiga, his inseparable companion, is a simple-minded and ingenious man who ...

A couple stroll through a wintry landscape - Is this a dream? Is this Heaven?...

This episode focuses on Zappa's early 70s albums, Overnight Sensation (1973) and Apostrophy (') (1974). Together they encapsulate Zappa's extraordinary musical diversity and were also the 2 most commercially successful albums that he released in his ...

This short film made by László Moholy-Nagy is based on the shadow patterns created by his Light-Space Modulator, an early kinetic sculpture consisting of a variety of curved objects in a carefully choreographed cycle of movements. Created in 1930, th...

A reworking of the myth of Hippolytus, in which a chaste youth rejects the incestuous advances of his mother and is saved from death by a caring physician....