Movies: Avant garde

Structured in nine tableaux each a study of a simple action or situation involving a lone, naked figure, the blind Eros, searching for fulfilment, for self. The objects he touches - books, paintings - can be seen as icons of the creative spirit; ther...

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...

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....

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....

In his book "1984", George Orwell saw the television of the future as a control instrument in the hands of Big Brother. Right at the start of the much-anticipated Orwellian year, Paik and Co. were keen to demonstrate satellite TV's ability to serve p...

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...

2012: Time For Change is a documentary feature that presents ways to transform our unsustainable society into a regenerative planetary culture. This can be achieved through a personal and global change of consciousness and the systemic implementation...

Made during the height of the Vietnam War, Stan Brakhage has said of this film that he was hoping to bring some clarity to the subject of war. Characteristically for Brakhage there is no direct reference to Vietnam....

A small portrait of the volatility of intimacy and of breaking free from abusive cycles: made in response to a year of collapsing relationships and violent accidents that left me broken, dislocated and stuck in my apartment....

"Twigs" of color in space, and pure white "ghosts" of them in the background interspersed with dark amalgams of these and conglomerate forms. The resolve of these themes is a combination of "amalgams" and "ghosts" at one in interplay, and then dark s...

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 ...

Elaborate petal-like and multicolored flowers rising in white space until the whole field is as if crushed by floral designs in madly-swift mixtures of every conceivable previous shape from the Persian Series. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive i...

OPEN FIELD is in the mind, of course, and exists as a weave of trees, grasses, waters, and bodies poised and fleeting at childhood's end. The scene is lit as by sun and moon alike and haunted by the pursuant adult. - Stan Brakhage...

Shot under extreme conditions and inspired by Mayan creation theory, the film contemplates the illusion of reality and the possibility of capturing for the camera something which is not there. It is about the mirages of nature—and the nature of mirag...

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....

Monteiro moved far away from the visual opulence defined by his earlier films with his inspired adaptation of radical Swiss writer Robert Walser’s anti-fairy tale. Carefully restricting the image track, Monteiro maintains an almost totally black scre...

Documentary on Frank Zappa....

A small girl's nightmare. Untitled No.1 is part of Mike Plante's Lunchfilm series of commissioned shorts (made for the cost of a lunch between Plante and filmmaker Nina Menkes)....

While playing his trombone one Sunday, the enthusiastic Zero sees Beatrix and falls in love. He returns the next week to express his feelings, and it's mutual. Over the next few months, they spoon, kiss, and find happiness. Then, she receives a lette...

A portrait of a recently vacated home, the film evokes both memory and the lingering presence of past inhabitants. Through precise, enigmatic sound–image construction, Beavers crafts an intimate meditation on art, existence, and the search for meanin...