Flicker Alley is proud to present this guest essay by Dr. Sabina Stent on avant-garde directors Germaine Dulac and Maya Deren. La Cigarette and La Souriante Mme. Beudet by Dulac and Meshes of the Afternoon by Deren are featured are Early Women [...]
By Sarah Bastin Film historian and preservationist David Shepard is the founder of Film Preservation Associates, the owner of Blackhawk Films® Collection and the producer of many Flicker Alley titles, including Masterworks of American Avant-garde Experimental Film 1920-1970, Chaplin’s […]
Ballet Mechanique (1923-24) by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy is hailed as a masterpiece of early avant-garde filmmaking. The opening credits features a title card with the phrase "Charlot présente le ballet mécanique" along with a cutout figure all modern movie-goers [...]
French filmmaker Marcel L'Herbier's groundbreaking contributions to cinema helped to define the country's "first" avant-garde or "Impressionist" movement, which began to take shape in 1917. While his futuristic fairy tale L'Inhumaine (1924) is lauded as an Impressionist masterpiece, in a way the [...]
Stan Brakhage had a voracious appetite for visionary experience in all forms. Not only did Brakhage pursue a radical approach to filmmaking between 1953 and 2003, he also lectured widely and wrote on the history of cinema, art, literature and aesthetics, […]
Bruce Baillie is one of the great figures in American avant-garde filmmaking. Since 1960, he has produced a body of films unsurpassed for their lyrical sensuality, expressive honesty and formal inventiveness. His 1966 film, Castro Street (The Coming of Consciousness) transforms a walk down a […]
Experimental filmmaker and artist Lawrence Jordan is known as a maverick spirit in the avant-garde world. A key figure in San Francisco’s avant-garde art scene in the 1950s-60s, Jordan also played a pivotal role in the expansion of the Film Department […]
The National Board of Review’s Committee on Exceptional Motion Pictures reviewed three experimental films by Maya Deren for their March 1946 issue of New Movies magazine, including Meshes of the Afternoon, part of Masterworks of American Avant-garde Experimental Film […]
In this Flicker Alley exclusive, Donald Sosin describes his journey to becoming one of today’s leading silent film composers and his method behind creating new scores for four of the films included in Masterworks of American Avant-garde Experimental Film 1920-1970: Manhatta, The […]
Daughter of acclaimed independent filmmaker Shirley Clarke, Wendy Clarke grew up immersed in the avant-garde art film culture of New York in the 1960s. Her wedding is the focus of the “Wendy’s Wedding” vignette in Jonas Mekas’ Walden: Diaries, Notes and […]
Ballet Mechanique (1923-24) by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy is a Dadaist post-Cubist art film. The film has undergone a 2K digital restoration from 35mm for the Masterworks of American Avant-garde Experimental Film 1920-1970 Blu-ray/DVD collection with music by George Antheil from original [...]
By Fernand Léger Every effort in the line of spectacle or moving picture should be concentrated on bringing out the values of the object—even at the expense of the subject and of every other so called photographic element of […]
