Movies: Avant garde

A Frank Zappa show goes way beyond a mere concert – it is an experience…a flight of improvisation, musicianship, and cerebral cynicism. An unparalleled Composer and Guitarist, Zappa redefined rock n roll paradigms by introducing into the mix his favo...

Deep within the mysterious Arboria Institute, a disturbed and beautiful girl is held captive by a doctor in search of inner peace. Her mind controlled by a sinister technology. Silently, she waits for her next session with deranged therapist Dr. Barr...

A multimedia sex-ed video about life and love in a world where humans have corkscrew penises and corkscrew vaginas....

Lost Boundaries is comprised of footage shot by Julien on location, in England in the summer of 1985, during the making of the Sankofa film and video collective's first experimental feature film The Passion of Remembrance (1986), which he co-directed...

Adam is a factory worker. He falls in love with Chris, a slightly older man. Instead of strengthening his own identity, Adam is unable to cope with his sexuality and suffers a nervous breakdown. One of the first representations of gay men in Austral...

A short film following a young woman as she's pursued by a mysterious stranger in the woods....

"Dancing is sculpting in time." Shot around Indy Simin's "Echt in Vorm."...

Although the free jazz movement of the 1960s and '70s was much maligned in some jazz circles, its pioneers - brilliant talents like Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, and John Coltrane - are today acknowledged as central to the evol...

"I only say the sun goodbye"...

Shirley Clarke's frenetic documentary about multi-talented musician Ornette Coleman....

Through abrupt soundtrack shifts, this short film jumps between historical political imagery to explore the cinematic language of propaganda, unpacking complex concepts through sensory explosions — from the Brazilian military dictatorship to the Chin...

Thirty-three shots based on the landscapes of the Isère region near Vienne. A work of observation on light, the dilation of Time, wind, calm and storm....

Images from 2000s music videos are transferred onto the film strip, torn and abstracted until the visuals convulse and shift—a tactile, poetic exploration of materiality, memory, and medium....

A guy named Ray tries to go to sleep and a sasquatch gets into funky business....

Face in Motion depicts Chang Chao-Tang from the shoulders up, dressed in a light tank top, shaking his head and contorting his face. The background is pitch black, and he is lit with an almost otherworldly glow. The artist recorded at two frames per ...

The humble line has a life of its own. As it travels from one point to the next it can take whatever route it fancies. With plenty of ups and downs, it encounters all manner of random items and beings as it endlessly travels towards its destination. ...

Weaving blistering performance footage from Europe, Japan, and the U.S. with a sublimely restrained, intimate glimpse into a world-renowned jazz percussionist’s singular voice and complex cosmology....

A corridor of an apartment is transformed into a claustrophobic and vertiginous vortex that swallows and imprisons you in an infinite fall through a mise en abyme: it’s a pure enclosure inside the image world, it’s the Descent into the Maelstrom....

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Filmed in Chicago & finished in 1959, The Cry of Jazz is filmmaker, composer and arranger Edward O. Bland's polemical essay on the politics of music and race - a forecast of what he called "the death of jazz." A landmark moment in black film, for...