Movies: Avant garde

Originally edited in two versions. Version I, 70 minutes; version II, 90 minutes. (The only known existing version is not Markopoulos’s edit and contains additional titles, music and voice-over added later than 1961. 65 minutes.) Filmed in Mytilene a...

Frank Zappa: A Token of his Extreme is the 1974 television special recorded at Kcet in Hollywood that was produced by Zappa and aired only in France and Switzerland. The program, as thoroughly tweezed and produced by Zappa for his own Honker Home Vi...

A satirical take on President Salvador Allende's Popular Unity process prior to the 1973 Chilean coup d'état. The film is made up of a series of short stories, in which different worlds cross paths....

A whirlwind of improvisation combines the images of animator Pierre Hébert with the avant-garde sound of techno whiz Bob Ostertag in this singular multimedia experience, a hybrid of live animation and performance art....

One11 is a 1993 monochrome art film by John Cage and Henning Lohner. It is the only feature-length film production Cage was ever involved in....

The Alchemist assembles together a group of people from all walks of life to represent the planets in the solar system. The occult adept's intention is to put his recruits through strange mystical rites and divest them of their worldly baggage before...

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 hypnotic and slow-burning journey through the austere landscapes of the island of South Georgia and the Antarctic Peninsula. Shot on black and white super 8 film as a series of mostly static tableaux over a period of 20 days during the waning days ...

Avant-garde composer John Cage is famous for his experimental pieces and "chance music" but temporarily branched into video in 1992 with this art film about meaningless activity. The work is composed of two segments that are supposed to be played sim...

Mockumentary experimental film, which shows one day in the life of a young man. The action takes place on the Day of Soviet Cosmonautics, April 12, one of the last years of the USSR. Outside the window, it is gradually getting warmer, the onset of sp...

Director of this movie gave an advertisement in many Yugoslav papers calling everybody who wants to act in movie regardless of age, look or profession to reply. From 7000 arrived letters, about 30 heroes were picked up for the movie and its story was...

An experimental, psychedelic odyssey through Japanese subculture experienced via the eyes of a disillusioned young man, who must contend with intense familial dysfunction, psychosexual alienation, and existentialist malaise....

Set halfway through the 17th century, a church play is performed for the benefit of the young aristocrat Cosimo. In the play, a grotesque old woman gives birth to a beautiful baby boy. The child's older sister is quick to exploit the situation, selli...

Knokke, Belgium. A small mundane coastal town, home to the beau-monde. To compete with Venice and Cannes, the posh casino hosts the second ‘World Festival of Film and the Arts’ in 1949, organised in part by the Royal Cinematheque of Belgium. To celeb...

A film in which the one 60-story skyscraper that soars in the spaces between roofs spins with incredible speed. I centered the circumference with its 400 or 500 meter radius on the skyscraper and divided it into 48 sections, then took photographs fro...

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....

A depiction of a girl’s uneasy state of mind as it wavers between life and death....

A former circus artist escapes from a mental hospital to rejoin his mother – the leader of a strange religious cult – and is forced to enact brutal murders in her name....

A group of French students are drawn into the psychological and sexual games of a mysterious man called Duchemin. Once they sample his "fear powder" the students experience a series of hallucinations....

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...