Avant Garde Movies

An abstract experimental short film from Jordan Belson.

An unseen character observes the cold, harsh world around them while listening to The Beach Boys, hidden away in the safety of their bedroom.

This audio-visual tone poem uses the language of filmmaking to offer a first-hand evocation of the turbulent psychological effects one can experience...

The creative processes of avant-garde composer Philip Glass and progressive director/designer Robert Wilson are examined in this film. It documents th...

In 1952, Haanstra made Panta Rhei , another view of Holland through the eyes of a painter and filmmaker. Its poetic images of water, skies and clouds...

A hand-painted film photographically step-printed so that the thicket-like lines of paint are “played-off” against some centered pale-hued areas of pa...

“For my film portrait of Sasha Grey, I wanted to focus on her expressive and psychological transformation into a cinematic actor, separate from the cu...

We watch white shapes dancing on black background, which changes when the white shape fills up the screen completely, and black lines and figures boun...

A montage of the skyscrapers of Manhattan opens with a succession of stationary views of the upper portions of numerous buildings. This is followed by...

Tom is a young guy from Zagreb, completely without money, trying to make films in Belgrade. He somehow manages to survive with a help of women. He doe...

Halloween, New York City, 1981 Live at The Palladium with Ray White, Steve Vai, Bobby Martin, Tommy Mars, Ed Mann, Scott Thunes, Chad Wackerman

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 physi...

Bert Deling's surreal, button-pushing and hallucinogenic paean to the emerging possibilities of avant-garde and homemade filmmaking. Telling the tale...

A free flow from photography to geometric abstraction hand-painted by Breer. - Harvard Film Archive

Zdenek Pešánek created the first public kinetic sculpture, for the power station in Prague. This short experimental film focuses on a kinetic sculptur...

A short, avant-garde movie, starring twelve-year-old ballet student Gwen Thomas, Nymphlight is a lovely blend of fact and fiction, using Bryant Park a...

A collaboration between Apichatpong and Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto from his album “async”. The people falling asleep in this film are all his...

Avant-garde short focused on the pure elements of film like form, visual composition, and rhythm.

An immersion into the surreal and dreamlike world of painter, photographer and filmmaker Man Ray (1890-1976),one of the most prolific American visual...

One of Paik’s most overtly political and poignant statements, Guadalcanal Requiem is a performance/documentary collage that confronts history, time, c...