Avante-garde Cinema

Avante-garde Cinema 

• In opposition to mainstream cinema
• Non Linear/Non figurative / Non narrative
• Open rather than closed
• Requires a different kind of spectatorship. 

We watched - Un Chien Andalou (1929) Dir. Luis Bunuel 

 Un Chien Andalouis a 1929 silent surrealist short film by the Spanish director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí. It was Buñuel's first film and was initially released in 1929 with a limited showing at Studio des Ursulines in Paris, but became popular and ran for eight months.The film has no plot in the conventional sense of the word. The chronology of the film is disjointed, jumping from the initial "once upon a time" to "eight years later" without the events or characters changing very much. It uses dream logic in narrative flow that can be described in terms of then-popularFreudian free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes.

-Theres still people making films in this style.

Matthew Barney - Cremaster 3 (2002) part 1

The Cremaster Cycle is an art project consisting of five feature length films, together with related sculptures, photographs, drawings, and artist's books; it is the best-known work of American visual artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney.

The Cremaster Cycle was made over a period of eight years (1994–2002) and culminated in a major museum exhibition organized by Nancy Spector of theSolomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, which traveled to the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the Musée d'art Moderne in Paris from 2002-03. Barney's longtime collaborator Jonathan Bepler composed and arranged the soundtracks for the films.
Spirals - Oskar Fishchinger - Fragments of Experiments.

Lapis - Janes Whitney (1966) - James Whitney (December 27, 1921 – April 8, 1982), younger brother of John, was a filmmaker regarded as one of the great masters of abstract cinema. Several of his films are classics in the genre of visual music. Lapis (1963–1966) 10 min, 16mm

Stan Brakhage - Black Ice (1944)  - important abstract writers. A lateral descent through the midnight blues and blacks of ice and the refracted colors from absorbed oils.