Movies: Avant garde

Set to music by Beethoven, this lyrical portrait moves from a chilled and misty exterior to the crystalline interior of the Swiss chateau that King Ludwig II built for Wagner....

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....

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...

Korea, the now: A young man makes a fateful encounter with a stranger he passionately falls in love with. When Unk rides his scooter through the night he fails to notice a drunk pedestrian, a man called Boaz, and hits him. The accident has unforeseen...

What does the energy harnessed through orgasm have to do with the state of communist Yugoslavia circa 1971? Only counterculture filmmaker extraordinaire Dušan Makavejev has the answers (or the questions). His surreal documentary-fiction collision beg...

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...

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...

During its 85-minute running time, this jarring experimental film takes a no-holds-barred look at the way women have been treated and depicted in Western art....

The Weavers of Nishijin captures the process of traditional textile manufacture in Nishijin....

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....

Through the streets of an unnamed city, a relentless cameraman follows a German woman, which leads to panic and fear arising in her....

Frank Zappa: The Present-Day Composer Refuses To Die is a 2000 documentary about Frank Zappa....

A baby, John, who was abandoned in the church with a horse-headed koto on his side. His grandfather was once a Morin Khuur player and died in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. The brilliantly colored images have an avant-garde charm while hiding the sa...

Markopoulos called Lysis “a study in stream-of-consciousness poetry of a lost, wandering, homosexual soul” and felt that the film foreshadowed The Illiac Passion....

At Stamford Road in Dalston Junction of east London, the camera follows pedestrians, cars and birds while a narrator, who appears to be the director behind the camera, seems to instruct the objects....

A very personal interpretation, to say the least, of the passion of the Christ According to St. John....

In this story set in near future, a group of young rebels, hippies and 1968 protesters want to cede and make an independent Island from the Mainland. A journalist who came to the Island to make a report about political summit that takes place there g...

Persian Series #6 begins with what appears to be dried red and yellow rose petals, suddenly shot-thru with blue which causes a shift to violets and greens. This mash of colors thickens and is scored by white and then black, calligraphic lines, which ...

The quasi-fictional story of transgender sex workers living in Rio de Janeiro's swampy red light district, who are joined by a group of hippies and a runaway stockbroker, "Mangue-Bangue" is the paradigmatic expression of the post-1968 spirit of desbu...

Two friends try to re-unite by going on a road-trip to the forests and mountains. Their attempt to reconcile does not go easy due to the secrets they hold, and a shocking revelation ends their journey....