Movies: Avant garde

Surreal film melding documentary footage of Chicago and its residents, featuring fast paced montage sequences set against a rollicking 1960s musical backdrop. The film aptly deconstructs the absurdities of contemporary American life, particularly the...

Hymn to nature, song to the cosmos, Mâyâ builds a world where the camera generates a new type of representation in which the depth of field is reduced to the essential. Everything happens, in a way, on the same surface....

Superman's pal Jimmy Olsen gets his own story. Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy meets boy!...

This film is entirely hand-painted and is composed of such an evolution of variably colored shapes that their inter-action with each other should constitute a purely visual "self-evident" (as prompted by the title). Each frame is printed twice, so th...

Captures the avant-garde artist Yayoi Kusamas creative process as she diligently works to complete her series of 50 large monochrome drawings. As her work comes to life, one can witness the essence of her art as it wells up in the conflict between li...

After encountering Lensface at the 2019 Unnamed Footage Festival, Filmmaker Travis Z. (Cabin Fever 2016, The Midnight Man) became obsessed with the voyeuristic cryptic, and spiraled into madness, leaving only this bizarre collection of surreal and ho...

A Japanese fairy tale meets commedia dell'Arte. All in white, the naïf Pierrot lies in a wood. Doo-wop music plays as he rises, stares about, and reaches for the moon. Although music abounds and the children of the wood are there at play, Pierrot is ...

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....

A couple, Vlad and Sophy, navigate their relationship as well as their own struggles with mental health in the context of a highly connected, politically uncertain modern world while on a trip to a remote Canadian island in this avant-garde feature f...

Five lonesome cowboys get all hot and bothered at home on the range after confronting Ramona Alvarez and her nurse....

Presenting a woman, a female statue, a breathing tree, and a fish out of water, an unorthodox love story unfolds with the growth of limbs and expressive gestures. Accompanied by desire discovered and lost, erotic femininity disfigured in a domestic s...

Prelude 10 is a double-printed film with an extreme mixture of darks shot thru with jewel-like bursts of color, and very white bursts of light and fleeting colored forms....

Speaking upon the release of ‘Bodyguard’, Black Dahlia said: “Bodyguard is a theatrical exploration of gaining a new body but your soul remains. It is a sonnet to your past physical body in this realm and the new union that will inevitably be formed....

Frank Zappa: New York & Elsewhere is an Austrian released TV documentary directed in 1980 by Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher, aka DoRo productions, who are most popular for their work with Queen....

Over the course of more than fifteen years, Clémenti films a series of intimate diaries, starting from daily encounters. In La deuxième femme, we see Bulle Ogier and Viva, Nico and Tina Aumont, Philippe Garrel and Udo Kier, a performance by Béjart, ...

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....

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...

Dementia draws a woman into a world of memory loops, losing her love her spirit, her present her past....

Initially commissioned to accompany a Danish production of Alban Berg’s LULU, Lewis Klahr’s cut-out animation refigures the opera's themes in a torrent of images. With an ever-inventive approach to color and symbol, Klahr distills the title character...

This audio-visual tone poem uses the language of filmmaking to offer a first-hand evocation of the turbulent psychological effects one can experience due to prolonged lack of sunlight....