Movies: Avant garde

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...

Swain is inspired by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Fanshawe, features a dreamlike narrative of a young man’s ritualized rejection of heterosexuality, as a mysterious woman in white gossamer pursues him through a ruined landscape....

Director Lam Can-Zhao leads a small film crew as they shoot a film about a stray dog in the streets of Guangzhou, leading viewers into an unpredictable, peculiar and incredible journey....

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 ...

Flares of color break into streams of light, leaves, wood grain and prism-etched vegetation. A moon lifts out of this dark weave to be replaced by autumn leaves against a grainy sky, a fiery sky. A gray cat licks itself. A black cat sits quickly down...

Obscure signs portend a looming, indecipherable slump. An oracular decoding of the landscape....

The veneer of the story is a tale of chance love: two French expatriates strike up a chance romance when they meet on a ship headed back to South America....

A creation myth realized in light, patterns, images superimposed, rapid cutting, and silence. A black screen, then streaks of light, then an explosion of color and squiggles and happenstance. Next, images of small circles emerge then of the Sun. Imag...

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

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...

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....

Short experimental 16mm film....

Water for Maya is a hand-painted work which came into being during a film interview with Martina Kudlacek about Maya Deren. There was a sudden recognition of Maya’s intrinsic love of water and thus of all Mayan liquidity in magic conjunction, reflect...

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....

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...

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 ...

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...

These two films investigate frustrations in loving, DAYBREAK with a girl as object, WHITEYE with the camera as subject. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2013....

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....