Welcome to my page of Classic avant garde and experimental films. These films helped change cinema forever. This page pays homage to some of my favorite filmmakers, I do not own the rights to these films or claim that I do I simply   put up these films for the purpose of education. I will add more films as time permits so please keep checking back.

 

Pull my Daisy - 1959 Robert Frank Film A short film that typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, Daisy was adapted by Jack Kerouac from the third act of a stage play he never finished entitled Beat Generation. Kerouac also provided improvised narration. It starred Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Larry Rivers, Peter Orlovsky, David Amram, Richard Bellamy, Alice Neel, Sally Gross and Pablo Frank, Robert Frank's then-infant son. Based on an incident in the life of Neal Cassady and his wife Carolyn, Daisy tells the story of a railway brakeman whose painter wife invites a respectable bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman's bohemian friends crash the party, with comic results.  The Beat philosophy emphasized spontaneity, and the film conveyed the quality of having been thrown together or even improvised. Pull My Daisy was accordingly praised for years as an improvisational masterpiece, until Leslie revealed in a November 28, 1968 article in the Village Voice that the film was actually carefully planned, rehearsed, and directed by him and Frank, who shot the film on a professionally lit studio set. Pull My Daisy has been deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.  (From Wikipedia Entry /DOWNLOAD / STREAM

Fly - 1970 Yoko Ono Film Fly was 19 minutes in length and, as with Up your legs filmed during the same New York visit, also took two days to film in a New York attic. Although only one person was filmed, in contrast to the 331 gathered for the Legs film, Fly was a more complicated project. John and Yoko asked New York actress Virginia Lust to lie down naked whilst they filmed a fly exploring her body. Approximately 200 flies were used and each had to be stunned with a special gas. The film showed a fly traversing the girl's body from her toes to her head, exploring every part. It was claimed that Virginia Lust also had to be sedated during the filming. Further filming of the Lennon's also took place during this period in the Bowery, rare footage includes John playing guitar.  DOWNLOAD / STREAM


Happy Birthday to John - 1972 Jonas Mekas Film October 9, 1972 an exhibition of John Lennon/Yoko Ono's art, designed by the Father of Fluxus movement, George Maciunas, opened at the Syracuse Museum of Art (curated by David Ross, presently director of the Whitney Museum). Same day an unusual group of John's and Yoko's friends, including Ringo, Allen Ginsberg and many others gathered to celebrate John's birthday. This film is a visual and audio record of that event. We hear a series of improvised songs, sung by John, Ringo, Yoko Ono, and their friends,--not a clean studio recording, but as a birthday singing, free and happy. This is the only recording of that event. There are other images that are included in the film that develops like a "music video": the John & Yoko party at Klein's /their agent/ June 12, 1971; August 1972 at the Madison Square Garden; the Central Park Vigil on the day John was shot; and some other rare footage that I have taken on different occasions of John and Yoko. The soundtrack, besides the unique recording of the Birthday Party singing, contains John's comments on his own film-making, his "home movies" he did on 8mm. The most catchy song, sung in an improvised manner, in the film, is the Attica Blues. The drummer for the last part of the film is Dalius Naujolaitis. 16 mm film, 24 min  DOWNLOAD / STREAM

Warhols Cinema This posting is meant only for those who have a strong interest in the development of modern filmmaking, and who are capable of maintaining a sustained level of interest (i.e., it's not for snarky-Farkers or dumbed-down Diggers). "Warhol’s Cinema" is a 64-minute 1989 documentary about a number of films made by Andy Warhol in the 1960s. During the five year span of his obsession with films, Warhol made more than 50 films between 1963-1968. He made many of the films in his mid-town studio, known as The Factory, where the young people in his offbeat cortège, alternately beautiful and bizarre, spent most of their time.
 The original Factory was thought of as the Silver Factory by the people who came to derive a sense of attachment from being involved in the air of creative excitement that was evolving there. The shimmering silver was made from fractured mirrors and tin foil; it represented the decadence of the scene, as well as the “proto-glam” of the early sixties. STREAM

 In The Shadow of the Sun - 1980 Derek Jarman Film Derek Jarman used some of his 70s home movie footage to produce this wonderful piece of exploitational avantgarde cinema. Actually the original material has been slowed down to a speed of 3-6 frames, then Jarman added colour effects and the pulsating, menacing score by Industrial supergroup Throbbing Gristle  The result is a piece of art not to dissimilar to Jarman«s painting work in using found footage as elements of memory and mind that resemble ideas reflected in the Cabala and in C.G. Jung`s writings about an archetypical past that is hidden in everyone of us. The first, In the Shadow of the Sun (1974-80), was originally put together by Jarman himself in 1974 from re-shot Super-8 material including footage from The Art of Mirrors and Journey to Avebury, amongst several others. The film was eventually blown-up to 35mm and premiered at the 1981 Berlin Film Festival. The focus on ritual, mysticism and obscure alchemical symbolism links it with the work of Anger. However, Jarman’s preference for the work of Carl Jung and the “white” magician John Dee, is quite distinct from Anger’s invocations of the “black” magician Alistair Crowley. STREAM

Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Enevitable - 1966 Ronald Nameth Film  This is Ronald Nameth's 1966 film of this event, The Exploding Plastic Inevitable, sometimes simply called Plastic Inevitable or EPI, was a series of multimedia events organized by Andy Warhol between 1966 and 1967, featuring musical performances by The Velvet Underground and Nico, screenings of Warhol’s films, and dancing and performances by regulars of Warhol’s Factory, especially Mary Woronov and Gerard Malanga. Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable is also the title of a 18 minute film by Ronald Nameth with recordings from one week of performances of the shows which were filmed in Chicago, Illinois in 1966. In December 1966 Warhol included a one-off underground magazine called The Plastic Exploding Inevitable as part of the Aspen No. 3 package. The Exploding Plastic Inevitable had its roots in an event staged on January 13, 1966 at a dinner for the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. This event, called “Up-Tight”, included performances by The Velvet Underground and Nico, along with Malanga and Edie Sedgwick as dancers. Inaugural shows were held at the Dom in New York City in April 1966, advertised in The Village Voice as follows: “The Silver Dream Factory Presents The Exploding Plastic Inevitable with Andy Warhol/The Velvet Underground/and Nico. Shows were also held in The Gymnasium in New York and in various cities throughout the United States. STREAM

Pink Floyd KQED - 1970 PBS Program When Pink Floyd was on tour in the US in 1970 they took time while in San Francisco  to make this little program called An Hour with Pink Floyd.   This was shown on KQED the Bay Area's PBS affiliate. This is a  classic performance by a classic band, in a PBS studio with no audience. Songs: Atom Heart Mother, Cymbaline, Grantchester Meadows, Green is the Colour, Careful with that Axe Eugene, Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun. Pro shot. STREAM

 

Romance Sentimental - 1930 Sergei M. Eisenstein Film Some accounts claim that Eisenstein only attached his name to this sound short simply because he needed the money. It is, however, closer to the truth to say that this was a collaboration, although the exact extent of the collaboration between him and Grigori Alexandrov remains undetermined. The film itself is a short, experimental, slightly poetic montage of city and abstract images. Eisenstein's contribution seems to have been the soundtrack which demonstrates his theory of "contrapuntal use of sounds" or the attempt to find a common denominator between sound and image. The sound for Romance Sentimentale is drawn directly on the film's optical track and is the first instance of the use of this technique. This was not intended as a materialist film statement; it was rather an experiment towards an integrated film language. While the film's images are cursory, it retains historical importance as an experimental film predecessor and as the first sound film made by Soviets, even if not in the Soviet Union. ~ Brian Whitener, All Movie Guide

 Glimpse of Garden  Marie Menken (1910-1970) is the unsung heroine of the American avant-garde cinema. A mentor, muse and major influence for such key experimental filmmakers as Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Jonas Mekas and Andy Warhol, Menken created an extraordinary body of exuberant and stunningly beautiful films shaped, above all, by her intuitive understanding of handheld cinematography. Beginning with her celebrated first film, Visual Variations on Noguchi (1945), Menken used the hand-cranked Bolex camera favored by avant-garde filmmakers to introduce a new agility, grace and spontaneity into experimental cinema, a lightness of camera and form hitherto unseen in American film. With Noguchi, Menken also began a spirited dialogue between cinema and the plastic and painterly arts that extends across her films in a witty yet deeply insightful exploration of the formal language and methodology specific to those schools and painters with whom Menken was close – from the Abstract Expressionist drip painting humorously critiqued in Drips in Strips (1963), to the factory production of Pop art in the revelatory Andy Warhol (1964) and the Fluxus practice of Robert Watts in Watts with Eggs (1967).  The longtime creative and marital partner of poet-filmmaker Willard Maas, Menken began as an accomplished painter whose eccentrically textured and effulgent canvases incorporate all manner of reflective media – phosphorescent paint, crushed glass, sequins – in a playful challenge to the traditional boundaries of the painted canvas. Light remained a major focus of Menken's films, most notably in major works such as Notebook (1940-62) and Lights (1964-66) which transform her Bolex into an instrument for painting marvelous sculptural forms from neon and city lights. Like the painters-turned-filmmakers Robert Breer and Carmen D'Avino, Menken (who animated the chess sequence in Maya Deren's At Land) embraced various animation techniques – collage, stop-motion cinematography – as a direct extension of her painting. Yet for Menken, animation also became a way of radically transforming the world around her, reimagining postwar New York City, for example, in her masterpiece of single frame cinematography Go! Go! Go! (1962-64), a work that condenses two years of patient documentary filmmaking into a delirious and exhilarating vision of a hyperactive city.

At Land  -1944 Maya Deren Film  is a 15-minute silent experimental film written, directed by and starring Maya Deren. It has a dream-like narrative in which a woman, played by Deren, is washed up on a beach and goes on a strange journey encountering other people and other versions of herself. Deren once said that the film is about the struggle to maintain ones personal identity.^{[citation needed]} The composer John Cage and the poet and film critic Parker Tyler were involved in making the film, and appear in the film, which was shot at Amagansett, Long Island.

 

Meshes of the Afternoon - 1943 Maya Deren Film is a short experimental film directed by wife and husband team, Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid. The film's narrative is circular, and repeats a number of psychologically symbolic images, including a flower on a long driveway, a key falling, a door unlocked, a knife in a loaf of bread, a mysterious Grim Reaper–like cloaked figure with a mirror for a face, a phone off the hook and an ocean.