Movies: Avant garde

Rock musical adaptation of William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream"....

A sequence of 10 images presented in 10 groups of 400 alternating frames. The primary image of a bird is gradually disfigured by the successive introduction of competing imagery, yet the overall field seems to have its own life....

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....

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

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 ...

Documentary tribute to what VH1 called “the single greatest rock omnibus program ever aired” and Brooklyn Vegan named “the most consistently weird and awesome thing on cable television in the ’80s.” This ‘Best Of’ episode features some of the most m...

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....

With input from actor and writer Jan Hlobil, director and cinematographer Rene Smaal presents a film in the true surrealist tradition, in the sense that only 'found' elements were used, and that it defies interpretation based on ordinary cause-and-ef...

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...

An anthology of one-minute films created by 51 international filmmakers on the theme of the death of cinema. Intended as an ode to 35mm, the film was screened one time only on a purpose-built 20x12 meter public cinema screen in the Port of Tallinn, E...

In a surreal meeting filled with countless individuals from a variety of backgrounds, nine people recount how sex and sexuality have been used to exert control over their lives. Regardless of race, sexual orientation, nationality, social class, relig...

What starts off as a conventional travelogue turns into a satirical portrait of the town of Nice on the French Côte d'Azur, especially its wealthy inhabitants....

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

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

CREMASTER 3 (2002) is set in New York City and narrates the construction of the Chrysler Building, which is in itself a character - host to inner, antagonistic forces at play for access to the process of (spiritual) transcendence. These factions find...

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...

"We Go Past Future" is an experimental paper collage film by Anna Malina. The film reimagines a series of Soviet films from 1919 to 1953, blending them into a unique visual narrative....

In this short film Bert Haanstra gives his vision - from the water – of a tranquil Holland. During filming he held the camera upside down and afterwards put the images ‘up right’ again in the film. By doing this, we see the ‘usual’ waterfront, but tr...

This programme tells the story behind the conception, recording and release of this groundbreaking album. By use of interviews, musical demonstration, performance, archive footage and returning to the multi tracks with Ahmet Zappa and Joe Travers we ...