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20 Essential Films For An Introduction To Avant-Garde Cinema

22 December 2014 | Features, Film Lists | by Emiliano Serrano Lara

Avant-garde is a term used to refer a series of manifestations that openlydepart from the canons of the Status Quo. Though the eagerness to innovatecan be traced through different stages of history, the emergence ofAvant-garde manifestations occurred at the final stage of 19th century.

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Those manifestations met a golden age of development as well as periods ofdecadence and invigorating refreshment through 20th century. As theychanged the standard ways of approaching different phenomena, theirinfluence can be traced in our days.

Avant-garde manifestations gravitate under the tense relationship betweenart and ideology; a space that not always leaves them in a good position. Asa consequence, since their development, Avant-garde manifestations havefaced the risk of falling in a snobbish discourse about creativity or in amanifest ideology with a lot to say but nothing to produce.

The avant-garde interest in Cinema can be traced in the modernismobsession with photography. If the depiction of reality was Art’s main role, Artwas falling short in front of a camera. Though the positions of Avant-gardemanifestations at this issue vary, most of them found in photography andespecially in Cinema a suitable media to divorce Art from its institutionalcanons.

The amount of films regarded as Avant-garde is huge. Today, as a termapplied to films, Avant-garde is used in a more open sense to refer all movieexperimentally produced. Moving through the limits of narrative, time andtechnique, those movies are a matter of great interest to Cinema studentsand dilettantes.

The next is a list of twenty Avant-garde films. It doesn’t cover all the bignames of Avant-garde Cinema, nor does it take account of all its essentialtitles. Its intention is merely to work as brief introduction to the richness ofAvant-garde Cinema.

20. Quick Billy (Bruce Baillie, 1971)


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Arguably an allegory about the power of change between life and death,Quick Billy is perhaps Bruce Baillie’s most personal work. Filmed in themiddle of Baillie’s struggle with the hepatitis that whipped Lou Gottlieb’sMorningstar Ranch, Quick Billy depicts The Tibetan Book of the Death, amortuary text about the stages crossed by the soul until its renaissance.

Quick Billy is structured in four reels marked by the complex but tastefulsupplement relation between visual impoverishment and technical virtuosity;the recourse that made Baillie a groundbreaking figure of the 60’sAvant-garde cinema.

The first three reels constitute an exploration to the stages of death andafterlife. The fourth one, in which Baille’s synthesize not only the film but thevision he pursued from his early works by mocking such exploration, is akitsch silent Western.

19. Blue (Derek Jarman, 1993)


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Derek Jarman’s testament, Blue, is an intimate autobiographical experimentcomposed by a single shot of a saturated blue screen interwoven by asoundtrack.

Though Blue focuses on its soundtrack, which presents Jarman’simpressions of his life, the film’s hardly elusive blue screen actually works asa symbolic counterpart of Jarman’s melancholic retrospective.

18. Anemic Cinema (Marcel Duchamp, 1926)


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An ambiguous but playful exercise from the overall acclaimed genius ofMarcel Duchamp, who upon his time escaped from every defining canonincluding the Avant-garde manifestations themselves, Anemic Cinema is anexperimental succession of animated drawings, rotoreliefs as Duchampfondly called them, alternated with alliterations held by nine revolving disks.

Perhaps there is no better way to describe Anemic Cinema than appealing toits title. Duchamp deliberately weakened the mainstream recourse of theCinema of his time to arise the viewers’ imagination in order to fulfill theirneurotic and widely criticized necessity of unity and completeness.

17. Orpheus (Jean Cocteau, 1950)


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Part of Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy, Orpheus is a surrealist update aboutOrpheus, the musician that, according to a Greek widespread myth,descended to the underworld in an attempt of bringing his loved one backfrom the death.

Orpheus is widely respected due to Cocteau’s poetic taste but especially dueto the simplicity of the technical means by which he represents the film’smythical world. For instance, he approaches his shots to show his characterspass into the underworld through mirrors and, running those shot backwards,he carries on their return to life.

The Orphic trilogy is an exploration upon the complexity arisen between artistand his work. Orpheus is the central part of it.

16. Seren Velocity (Ernie Gehr, 1970)


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Preserved by The Museum of Modern Art in 2006, Seren Velocity is an algidpoint in the development of structuralist cinema. The film consists of nothingmore than two shots of an office hallway, meticulously carried to explore thespectatorship experience as few films have done.

Seren Velocity entirely lacks of plot, its success lies on its virtuous treatmentof movement; a treatment in which some have found a major one aboutcinematographic ontology.

15. La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962)


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Based upon the film’s narrative context, entirely dependent of a series of stilloptically printed photographs, Chris Marker referred to La Jetée, an obligatedtitle for sci-fi lovers, as a photo novel.

Departing from a post-apocalyptic plotline, La Jetée follows a few World WarThree survivors’ attempts to send a traumatized man back in time to thepre-war world for supplies.

The legacy of La Jetée can be traced from musical video clips to majorblockbusters. Its detriment of movement sequences got it a Prix Jean Vigofor short film.

14. Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (Shuji Terayama, 1971)

Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets is one of Japan’s most valuablecontributions to cinematography. Shuji Terayama consciously experimentedwith non linear sequences, color filters and psychedelic scenarios in anaggressive attempt to deliver the audiences a different filmic experience thatsome had regarded as anarchical.

A gem from the counterculture, Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streetsis an acid depiction of staggering actuality about alienation and otherconsequences of social conformism.

Its plotline follows a young man’s desire to achieve something different for


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him instead of hugging the life his family members are happy with in a widematerialist Japan.

13. Daisies (Vera Chytilová, 1966)

Paradigm of the Czech New Wave Cinema and regarded as a Prague Springherald, Daisies is Vera Chytilová’s most well known work.

The film is a politically incorrect Dadaist absurd exercise that, unlike manyrelated titles, easily traps the spectator in its game due to its relatively easyaccessibility and the playfulness of its anarchism.

Daises follows Marie I and Marie II, two nervy women carrying a series ofunorthodox pranks as an attempt to understand a world they don’t belong in.

12. Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage, 1961-1964)


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Dog Star Man is a series of short lyrical films directed by Stan Brakhage whois perhaps America’s most hailed Avant-garde film maker in the early 60s.

Dominated by a varying superposition of sequences, Dog Star Man tastefullyplays with the canons of the standard linear narrative. The result is anexperience that few films set upon standard narratives have been able tooffer.

Highly dynamical, Dog Star Man’s proposal is mainly dominated by anunorthodox but unitary exploitation of colors and textures surrounding itsstories.

11. Ballet mécanique (Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, 1924)


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Ballet mécanique, Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy’s short art film, hasbeen described as the Avant-garde cinematographic quintessence. ThoughtCubism, especially in its ulterior developments, can be postulated as thefilm’s main guideline, it is true that, from the dream-like narrative to thefascination with mechanisms, guidelines from Avant-garde manifestations’other than Cubism can be traceable in Ballet mécanique.

Projected as a kaleidoscopic collage, Ballet mecánique is a cheerfulsuccession of seven self-sufficient sequences that broke with everyconventional canon set upon its time by defying continuity, celebrating thespontaneous game of imagination and mocking the civilized man’s obsessionwith order.

Today, Ballet mecánique is an obligated reference for the celebrators of theAvant-garde’s invigorating innovation.

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1 Comment

• •

Penelope •

There are some of these list that are not Avant-Garde Cinema,Intolerance, Eraserhead and Pierrot le fou are some examples! I wishthat someone with a better knowledge have done this list!

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20 essential films for an introduction to avant-garde cinema « taste of cinema – movie reviews...

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