AVANT-GARDE FILM

By: Grey Daisies

AVANT-GARDE FILM

Every breaking away from the conventional, dead, official cinema is a healthy sign.
   We need less perfect but more free films. If only our younger film makers – I have
   no hopes for the old generation – would really break loose, completely loose, out of
   themselves, wildly, anarchically! There is no other way to break the frozen cinematic
   conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses.

(Jonas Mekas, February 4th, 1959)

In French avant-garde literally means “advance guard”, a military term used for troops leading an attack across the battlefield. In film and art in general it is used to describe a work that breaks new ground in order to define a new way of seeing the world and thus of living in it.

In the 1910s and 1920s many artists associated with Modernism were drawn to film as a product of new technology and a medium unencumbered by tradition. It also offered artists the opportunity to animate their images. The Italian Futurists issued a manifesto about the possibilities of Futurist cinema in 1916. The major Futurist films appear to have been lost, although an essay of 1912 by Bruno Corra (1892–1976) provided a detailed description of animation work. He and Arnaldo Ginna (1890–1982) bypassed the camera by painting directly on celluloid. Their work attracted so little attention that this method of direct film making was reinvented two decades later.

GERMANY: Early Abstract Cinema

Abstract cinema, defined as “absolute” cinema in the 1920s by critic and theorist, Rudolf Kurtz, was initially an island of modest size, a direct expression of the historical Avant-garde. In fact, it was created by painters, members of the avant-garde, using rudimentary handicraft, techniques, and language that refuted the reproduction of the natural world, instead, focusing on light and form in the dimension of time, impossible to represent in static visual arts. And it was at the beginning of the 1920s, that visual artists like Léger and Picabia in France and Eggeling, Richter, Ruttmann and Fischinger in Germany, began to realise their abstract films.
They saw in film the means to free painting from being fettered to the canvas, to set free its motor impulses, and at the same time to free cinema from its ties to literature. In Germany in the 1910s “Autorenfilm” was the name given to films whose scriptwriters tried to give them literary qualities. Ruttmann countered: “Cinematography belongs in the same category as the bildenden Künste [the plastic arts], and its laws are most closely related to those of painting and dance.”

- Exemplary Artists: Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Walter Ruttmann, Oskar Fischinger.

- Exemplary Works:

Rhythmus 21 (Hans Richter, 1921)
Diagonal Symphonie (Viking Eggeling, 1921)
Opus IV (Walter Ruttmann, 1925)
Seelische Konstruktionen (Oskar Fischinger, 1927)

FRANCE: Dada, Surrealism and Cinéma Pur

New images will come to follow the free bent of desire at the same time as they are vigorously repressed. – Salvador Dalí

The spontaneous, the unexpected, the subconscious, the outrageous, the irrational. These were the central concerns of Dada and Surrealism, two closely associated revolutionary artistic movements which flourished between the two world wars in the last century, and continued to have a lasting influence thereafter. Dada began as an anti-art movement or, at least, a movement against the way art was appreciated by what considered itself the civilized world; Surrealism was much more than an art movement and it thrust home Dada’s subversive attack on rational and ‘civilized’ standards. The name Dada was chosen from a dictionary and adopted for its absurdity and arbitrariness; Surrealism, established by André Breton, who rejected Dada’s extreme nihilism, denoted a less anti-intellectual movement.

Cinéma Pur was an avant-garde film movement birthed in Paris in the 1920s and 30s. The term was first coined by Henri Chomette to define a cinema that focused on the pure elements of film like form, motion, visual composition, and rhythm, something he accomplished in his shorts Reflets de lumiere et de vitesse and Cinq minutes de cinema pur. The movement included many Dada artists, such as Man Ray, René Clair, Fernand Léger, Marc Allegret, Jean Gremillon, Dudley Murphy, and Marcel Duchamp.
The movement also encompasses the work of the feminist critic/filmmaker Germaine Dulac, particularly La coquille et le clergyman, La souriante Madame Beudet, Disque 957, and Étude cinégraphique sur une arabesque. In these as well as in her theoretical writing, Dulac’s goal was “pure” cinema, free from any influence from literature, the stage, or even the other visual arts.

- Exemplary Artists: Fernand Léger, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, René Clair, Marcel Duchamp, Dudley Murphy, Germaine Dulac.

- Exemplary Works:

Le retour à la raison (Man Ray, 1923)
Entr’acte (René Clair, 1924)
Le Ballet Mécanique (Fernand Leger, 1924)
Anémic Cinéma (Marcel Duchamp, 1926)
Cinq minutes de cinéma pur (Henri Chomette, 1926)
Vormittagsspuk (Hans Richter, 1927)
La coquille et le clergyman (Germaine Dulac, 1927)
Un chien andalou (Luis Buñuel, 1929)

SOVIET UNION: Montage Technics

The innovative use of montage in film by the Soviet film-makers had its roots in art forms such as painting, literature and music from pre-revolutionary Russia. David Bordwell states in The Idea of Montage in Soviet Art and Film (1972) that by 1910 a group of Russian painters had already experimented extensively with montage: “the Russian futurists declared that conventional art must be destroyed and that a new art, appropriate to the machine age, must be created. Hence the futurists took their subjects from modern life and exploited a technique of shocking juxtapositions.”
While several Soviet filmmakers, such as Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, and Vsevolod Pudovkin put forth explanations of what constitutes the montage effect, Eisenstein’s view that “montage is an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots” wherein “each sequential element is perceived not next to the other, but on top of the other” has become most widely accepted.

- Exemplary Artists: Lev Kuleshov, Dziga Vertov, Esfir Shub, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Aleksandr Dovzhenko.

- Exemplary Works:

Bronenosets Potyomkin (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1925)
Mat (Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1926)
Po zakonu (Lev Kuleshov, 1926)
Padenie dinastii Romanovykh (Esfir Shub, 1927)
Arsenal (Aleksandr Dovzhenko, 1928)
Chelovek s kino-apparatom (Dziga Vertov, 1929)

USA: Part I – Brakhage, Deren and Anger

If you want to know what cinema is, it’s Brakhage. – P. Adams Sitney

In a fifty-year career of unparalleled productivity, Stan Brakhage is one of the most influential filmmakers in American avant-garde cinema, noted for his unflinching social commentaries and technical innovations. Over his nearly 40-year career, he has made over 200 films of varying length. Shunning the traditional use of film as a narrative medium, he made hundreds of movies that are akin to abstract paintings that move like musical compositions. Brakhages pioneering film techniques of the 1960s, including scratching on film, painting and gluing objects onto blank frames, rapid editing, swirling camera work and deliberately out-of-focus images, put him at the forefront of the experimental film movement.

The filmmaker, film organizer and avant-garde polemicist Maya Deren was one of the first in America to position experimental film as an “amateur” alternative to Hollywood, with its cumbersome technology and labour practices. She argued that only by circumventing the professional world of trained specialists, careful divisions of labour and financial motivations could a filmmaker fully realize the medium’s potential. Her work also served as an aesthetic bridge between European Surrealism and American avat-garde cinema. Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), co-directed with her husband, the Czech documentary filmmaker Alexander Hammid ((Hackenschmied), set the form for early films by Sidney Peterson, Curtis Harrington, Ian Hugo, Kenneth Anger and Stan Brakhage.

Kenneth Anger has been making films since 1947 and is considered internationally as a pioneering and influential force in avantgarde cinema, inspiring the likes of Martin Scorsese, David Lynch, and Guy Maddin. Kenneth Anger’s work is a radical critique of Hollywood and often evokes and references pop icons within occult settings and depicting youth counterculture surrounded by violence and eroticism. He lyrically explores themes of ritualistic transformation and transfiguration, rather than following a narrative-based style. His films are infused with a baroque splendor stemming from the heightened sensuality of his opulent colors and imagery, most often accompanied by a haunting soundtrack, composed by renowned musicians such as Mick Jagger and Bobby Beausoleil.

- Exemplary Works:

Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943)
A Study in Choreography for Camera (Maya Deren, 1945)
Fireworks (Kenneth Anger, 1947)
Eaux d’artifice (Kenneth Anger, 1953)
Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage, 1961-64)
Window Water Baby Moving (Stan Brakhage, 1962)

FRANCE: Lettrism and Situationism

I believe firstly that the cinema is too rich. It is obese. It has reached its limits, its maximum. With the first move-
   ment of widening which it will outline, the cinema will burst! Under the blow of a congestion, this greased pig will
   tear into a thousand pieces. I announce the destruction of the cinema, the first apocalyptic sign of disjunction,
   of rupture, of this corpulent and bloated organization which calls itself film. – Isidore Isou

Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the mid-1940s by Romanian immigrant Isidore Isou. In a body of work totaling hundreds of volumes, Isou and the Lettrists have applied their theories to all areas of art and culture, most notably in poetry, film, painting and political theory. The movement has its theoretical roots in Dada and Surrealism.
The two central innovations of Letterist film were: 1. The carving of the image (‘la ciselure d’image’), where the film-maker would deliberately scratch or paint onto the actual film stock itself. Similar techniques are also employed in Letterist still photography; 2. Discrepant cinema (‘le cinéma discrépant’), where the soundtrack and the image-track would be separated, each one telling a different story or pursuing its own more abstract path. The most radical of the Letterist films, Gil J. Wolman’s L’Anticoncept and Guy Debord’s Hurlements en faveur de Sade, went even further, and abandoned images altogether.

The Situationist International (SI) was a small group of international political and artistic agitators with roots in Marxism, Lettrism and the early 20th century European artistic and political avant-gardes. Formed in 1957, the SI was active in Europe through the 1960s and aspired to major social and political transformations. They condemned consumer culture and supported a more direct unification of life and art, seeking to release life from the cycle of buying and selling and fill it with human investments. The Situationist outgrowth of Lettrism sought a society and an urban environment that would create “situations” – that is, opportunities for artistic and social exchange that could not be predicted beforehand but would arise spontaneously in an integrated and egalitarian society free from capitalist and authoritarian restraints.
The most prominent French member of the group, Guy Debord, has tended to polarise opinion. Guy Debord’s best known works are his theoretical books, La Société du spectacle (Society of the Spectacle), 1967 and Commentaires sur la société du spectacle (Comments on the Society of the Spectacle), 1988.

- Exemplary Artists: Isidore Isou, Maurice Lemaître, Guy Debord, Gil J. Wolman, François Dufrêne, René Viénet.

- Exemplary Works:

Traité de bave et d’éternité (Isidore Isou, 1951)
Le film est déjà commencé? (Maurice Lemaître, 1951)
L’Anticoncept (Gil J. Wolman, 1951)
Hurlements en faveur de Sade (Guy Debord, 1952)
La société du spectacle (Guy Debord, 1973)
La dialectique peut-elle casser des briques? (René Viénet, 1973)
Les filles de Kamare (René Viénet, 1974)

AUSTRIA: Avant-garde and Wiener Aktionismus

Independent filmmaking emerged in Austria in the early 1950s. The first appearance of Austria’s avant-garde cinema had actually come on the heels of Italian neorealism and before the French New Wave. Mosaik im Vertrauen (1955) by Peter Kubelka is widely acknowledged as the first truly avant-garde film to be made in Austria. As the decade ended, Kubelka established his theory of “metric film” with Adebar, Schwechater and Arnulf Rainer. These three works explore rhythm and formal composition from a fundamental position that cinematic articulation occurs in the space between two adjacent frames.

During the 1960s, Vienna’s most active group of artists were the Wiener Aktionisten, whose unprecedented, provocative actions shocked contemporary society by engaging with the “politics of experience”. Using nudity, ritual and violence (and quantities of raw meat, blood and other seminal fluids) they confronted modern taboos and challenged conventional attitudes toward the human body. After 1970, the importance of the Wiener Aktionismus faded. Some of the key protagonists moved on using different media. Others, such as Hermann Nitsch (who works on religion and religious symbolism using gutted bulls and alike) or Otto Mühl (who was later sentenced for child abuse) continued to do art performances individually.

- Exemplary Artists: Peter Kubelka, Kurt Steinwendner, Marc Adrian, Ferry Radax, Kurt Kren, Günter Brus, Otto Mühl, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Hans Scheugl, Ernst Schmidt Jr., Otmar Bauer, Hermann Nitsch, Peter Weibel.

- Exemplary Works:

Adebar (Peter Kubelka, 1957)
Sonne Halt! (Ferry Radax, 1959-62)
Leda mit dem Schwan (Kurt Kren, 1964)
Wien 17, Schumanngasse (Hans Scheugl, 1967)
Filmreste (Ernst Schmidt Jr., 1967)
Vienna Actionist Films (Various, 1967-1970)

USA: Part II – Mekas, Warhol and Menken

Jonas Mekas became an emerging representative figure of the East Coast avant-garde film community. In addition to pioneering a unique style of longer-form diary filmmaking, he founded and co-edited Film Culture, the first American journal dedicated solely to the coverage of independent cinema; spearheaded the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque and Anthology Film Archives in New York; wrote a regular column, “Movie Journal” for the New York arts weekly, The Village Voice; and likely co-authored the term “New American Cinema” in 1960. An auxiliary development of the American avant-garde cinema, the New American Cinema Group included twenty-three independent filmmakers brought together by Mekas and Lewis Allen. Their manifesto emphasized personal expression, the rejection of censorship and “the abolishment of ‘the Budget myth’”.

Previously, experimental films had been shown by Amos Vogel’s Cinema 16, but whereas Cinema 16 was for members only (to avoid censorship) and Vogel personally selected the films he showed, anyone could show during the open screenings at Mekas’ equalitarian Cinematheque. One of the filmmakers who brought his films along to be screened at the Cinematheque was Andy Warhol. Mekas ended up as his distributor and when The Chelsea Girls brought the underground over ground, it was Mekas who distributed it.

The films Andy Warhol made in the 1960s are among the most significant works in the career of this prolific and mercurial American artist. In the short span of five years, from 1963 through 1968, Warhol produced nearly 650 films, including hundreds of silent ‘Screen Tests’, or portrait films, and dozens of full-length movies, in styles ranging from minimalist avant-garde to commercial “sexploitation.” Warhol’s films have been highly regarded for their radical explorations beyond the frontiers of conventional cinema.

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 camerafavored 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.

- Exemplary Works:

The Brig (Jonas Mekas, 1964)
Diaries Notes and Sketches (Jonas Mekas, 1969)
Mario Banana I & II (Andy Warhol, 1964)
Chelsea Girls (Andy Warhol, 1966)
Visual Variations on Noguchi (Marie Menken, 1945)
Glimpse of the Garden (Marie Menken, 1962)

Structuralist Film

Beginning in the 1960s artists working in traditional disciplines such as painting, photography, sculpture and dance started to make their first audio-visual works. Between 1966 and 1971, many of the most vital and innovative works of the New American Cinema – called structural films as Tony Conrad’s The Flicker, Michael Snow’s Wavelength, Ken Jacobs’s Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, as well as those of younger men like Paul Sharits and Ernie Gehr – were austere explorations of film’s specific qualities as a medium, closer to art-world minimalism than underground movies.

The “structuralist” filmmakers were aware that film was until then used as a representation of the reality and they chose to make this the subject of their films. Their films could only be watched in a state of hyper-awareness, where the viewer was constantly reminded that the content of the image was no more than an illusion. In 1971, Ernie Gehr, arguably the most important filmmaker who made structural films, wrote: “In representational films sometimes the image affirms its own presence as image, graphic entity, but most often it serves as vehicle to a photo-recorded event. Traditional and established avant-garde film teaches film to be an image, a representation. But film is a real thing and as a real thing it is not imitation. It does not reflect on life, it embodies the life of the mind. It is not a vehicle for ideas or portrayals of emotion outside of its own existence as emoted idea. Film is a variable intensity of light, an internal balance of time, a movement within a given space.”

- Exemplary Artists: Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, George Landow (aka Owen Land), Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad, Joyce Wieland, Ernie Gehr, Birgit and Wilhelm Hein, Standish Lawder, Kurt Kren, Peter Kubelka.

- Exemplary Works:

Arnulf Rainer (Peter Kubelka, 1958-60)
The Flicker (Tony Conrad, 1965)
Film in Which There Appear Edge Lettering, Sprocket Holes, Dirt Particles, Etc. (Owen Land, 1966)
Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967)
Serene Velocity (Ernie Gehr, 1970)
Corridor (Standish Lawder, 1970)
Zorn’s Lemma (Hollis Frampton, 1970)

Found Footage Film

One need not look for new, as yet unseen images, but one must work with existing ones in such a way that they become new.
– Harun Farocki

For nearly a century, found footage has provided both inspiration and raw material for experimental filmmakers. For some filmmakers, found footage has provided access to a vast archive of cultural production, often providing the means to comment on the status of the image in society or to deconstruct cinematic language. For others, it has served as a vehicle for exploring the material qualities of the film stock itself, shifting attention from the photographic content of the footage to the formal effects of the artist’s manipulation.
Found footage is different from archival footage: the archive is an official institution that separates historical record from the outtake; much of the material used in experimental found footage films is not archived but from private collections, commercial stock shot agencies, junk stores, and garbage bins, or has literally been found in the street.

- Exemplary Artists: Bruce Conner, Ken Jacobs, Martin Arnold, Arthur Lipsett, Anne McGuire, Craig Baldwin, Saul Levine, Abigail Child, Peter Tscherkassky, Thomas Draschan, Bill Morrison, Matthias Müller, Jürgen Reble, Dietmar Brehm, Phil Solomon, Gustav Deutsch, Norbert Pfaffenbichler, Harun Farocki, Lisl Ponger.

- Exemplary Works:

Rose Hobart (Joseph Cornell, 1936)
A Movie (Bruce Conner, 1958)
Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges (Harun Farocki, 1989)
Pièce Touchée (Martin Arnold, 1989)
Happy End (Peter Tscherkassky, 1996)
Decasia (Bill Morrison, 2002)
Welt Spiegel Kino (Gustav Deutsch, 2005)

Fluxus Film

Fluxus emerged in the early 1960s as a loose, collaborative effort—centered around Lithuanian-born American artist George Maciunas (1931-1978) — to dethrone “serious” culture by creating unassuming, simply-structured, and often humorous objects and performances demonstrating that “anything can be art and anyone can do it.” Film played an important role in this self-described “rear-guard” from its earliest days, both as a medium in itself and as a means to document a wide range of otherwise ephemeral performance activities that often blurred the line between art and life. Beginning in 1964, Maciunas published a series of forty-one “Fluxfilms” by a wide range of artists. These films (and others) were projected as part of Fluxus festivals and distributed in a variety of formats including stand-alone 16mm prints, compilation reels, and short 8mm loops.

- Exemplary Artists: George Maciunas, John Cale, Yoko Ono, Wolf Vostell, Paul Sharits, Robert Watts, Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins, Chieko Shiomi, John Cavanaugh, James Riddle, George Brecht, Pieter Vanderbiek, Joe Jones, Eric Anderson, Jeff Perkins, Albert Fine, George Landow, Peter Kennedy, Mike Parr, Ben Vautier.

- Exemplary Works:

37 Short Fluxus Films (Various, 1962-1970)

Also, be sure to check out La Schiff’s Fluxus Films List.

Feminism and Film

The birth of the women’s movement across Europe, the UK and North America during the 1960s had an impact on the New York art scene in which Carolee Schneemann played a major part. Alongside her contemporaries Meredith Monk, Rachel Rosenthal, Yvonne Rainer and Yoko Ono, Schneemann’s films and performance work became a catalyst for the emergence of feminist consciousness in this sphere. Schneemann was a forerunner of performance art and new media installations before there were terms in place to describe such work. However, up to 1968, women artists working in performance were marginalized in both the realms of production and exhibition, thus little critical attention was paid to such works. It was not until art works by this group of female artists shifted the “collective thinking about art” that the imbalance in the New York art world began to change.

Valie Export is one of the most important pioneers of on conceptual media art, performance, and film. In the early 1960’s Export was exposed to a group of Viennese Aktionists and poets that would influence her work and theories. Through these groups she got interested in Constructivism, which inspired her to work in new media. She started to experiment with photography and what she called “expanded cinema”. She would experiment by pouring different colored waters and liquids into a mirror and project them onto a screen. To Export, these live projections were reality, as opposed to celluloid images mediated by the camera. She began to label much of her work Anti-Art or No-Art. Her art became a political tool to react against society or the “Establishment”.

- Exemplary Artists: Carolee Schneemann, Meredith Monk, Rachel Rosenthal, Yvonne Rainer, Yoko Ono, Valie Export, Mara Mattuschka, Su Friedrich, Gunvor Nelson, Helen Levitt, Joyce Wieland, Barbara Hammer, Chick Strand, Marjorie Keller, Leslie Thornton, Abigail Child, Peggy Ahwesh, Beth B, Barbara Rubin, Amy Greenfield, Mary Ellen Bute, Pipilotti Rist, Kathy High, Michelle Citron, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Sanja Ivekovic, Hannah Wilke, Lourdes Portillo, Safi Faye, Ayoka Chenzira, Julie Dash, Jennifer Reeves, Tracey Moffatt, Joan Jonas, Lisa Hayes, Dawn Wilkinson, Sara Halprin, Kay Armatage, Helen Lee, Lisa Morse, Melissa Levin.

- Exemplary Works:

Christmas on Earth (Barbara Rubin, 1963)
Fuses (Carolee Schneemann, 1967)
Take Off (Gunvor Nelson, 1972)
…Remote… Remote… (Valie Export, 1973)
Film About a Woman Who… (Yvonne Rainer, 1974)
Daughter Rite (Michelle Citron, 1978)
Gently Down the Stream (Su Friedrich, 1981)

Queer, LGBT & Queercore Film

Barbara Hammer is considered a pioneer of lesbian/feminist experimental cinema. She has made 80 films and videos and received the Frameline Award in 2000 for making a significant contribution to lesbian cinema. Hammer is responsible for some of the first lesbian-made films in history, including such landmarks experimental shots as Dyketactics (1974) and Women I Love (1976). She chooses film/video as a visual art form to make the invisible, visible. Her work reveals and celebrates marginalized peoples whose stories have not been told. Her cinema is multi-leveled and engages an audience viscerally and intellectually with the goal of activating them to make social change.

MIX NYC, New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival, is a not-for-profit organization based in New York City and dedicated to queer experimental film. It is also known as the “MIX festival,” for its most visible program, the annual New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film Festival. MIX was founded in 1987 by Sarah Schulman and Jim Hubbard. The festival was created because newly emerging Gay Film Festivals were not including formally inventive work, and the then vibrant experimental film venues marginalized gay and lesbian work.

- Exemplary Artists: Su Friedrich, Barbara Hammer, Cheryl Dunye, Michelle Citron, Sadie Benning, Jenni Olson, Michelle Parkerson, Hans Scheirl, Jean Genet, Kenneth Anger, Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, John Waters, Vivienne Dick, Derek Jarman, Bruce LaBruce, Jonathan Caouette, Jerry Tartaglia, Curt McDowell, Michael Wallin, Joel Singer, Tom Chomont, James Broughton, Abigail Child, Isaac Julien, James Watson & Melville Webber, G.B. Jones, Scott Treleaven, Lawrence Brose, Jim Hubbard, Dawn Suggs, Shari Frilot, Jocelyn Taylor, Thomas Allen Harris, Warren Sonbert, Eric Stanley, Chris Vargas, Coni (Constance) Beeson, Ulrike Ottinger.

- Exemplary Works:

Un chant d’amour (Jean Genet, 1950)
Flaming Creatures (Jack Smith, 1963)
Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, 1964)
Dyketactics (Barbara Hammer, 1974)
Jollies (Sadie Benning, 1990)
The Joy of Life (Jenni Olson, 2005)

Around the World (work in progress, additions welcome!)

- UK: Stephen Dwoskin, Malcolm Le Grice, Peter Gidal, Peter Whitehead, Anthony Balch, Sally Potter, Guy Sherwin, Ben Rivers, Margaret Tait, Emily Richardson, Mike Leggett, Jeff Keen, William Raban, Chris Welsby, Annabel Nicolson, David Crosswaite, Lis Rhodes, Marilyn Halford, John Smith, Charles Ridley.

- Finnland: Seppo Renvall, Sami van Ingen, Juha van Ingen, Denise Ziegler, Ilppo Pohjola, Alli Savolainen, Marjatta Oja, Mikko Maasalo, Mika Taanila, Eino Ruutsalo, Pasi Myllymäki, Timo Aarniala, Pirjo Honkasalo, Anki Lindqvist, Timo Linnasalo, Inger Nylund, Erkki Seiro, Erkki Kurenniemi.

- The Netherlands: Joris Ivens, Emiel van Moerkerken, Shinkichi Tajiri, Frans Zwartjes, Paul de Nooijer, Borge Ring, Frederieke Jochems, Barbara Meter, Edward Luyken, Mattijn Seip, Jacques Verbeek, Karin Wiertz, Jan Ketelaar, Wim van der Linden, Louis van Gasteren, Jan Vrijman, Johan van der Keuken, Ruud Monster, Ben van Lieshout, Willem Bon, Joost Rekveld, Wim T. Schippers, Willem de Ridder, Ger van Elk, Wim Verstappen, Sanne Sannes, Adriaan van Ditvoorst, Pim de la Parra, Nikolai van der Heyde, Jan Ketelaars, Andras Hamelberg, Mathtijs Blonk, Bert Haanstra, Gijs Schneemann, Henri Plaat, Bart Vegter, George Schouten, Jan Dibbets, Bas Jan Ader, Peter Struycken, Marinus van Boezem, Michel Cardena, Frank Scheffer, Noud Heerkens, Gerard Holthuis, Frederieke Jochems, Pieter Moleveld, Joost Rekveld, Aryan Kaganof, Jeroen Eisinga, Karel Doing, Francien van Everdingen, Lonnie van Brummelen, Jan Willem van Dam, Martha Colburn, Anna Abrahams, Peter Van Hoof, Cyrus Frisch, Paul & Menno de Nooijer, Stanley Brouwn, Paul de Mol, Raul Marroquin, Christine Koenigs.

- Sweden: Peter Weiss, Rune Hagberg, Gösta Werner, Carl Gyllenberg.

- Germany: Heinrich Brocksieper, Kurt Kranz, Robert Bramkamp, Michael Brynntrup, Bastian Clevé, Hellmuth Costard, Heiko Daxl, Thomas Feldmann, Rüdiger Neumann, Karl Kels, Christoph Janetzko, Lothar Lambert, Lutz Mommartz, Matthias Müller, Werner Nekes, Dore O., Ralf Palandt, Ingo Petzke, Thomas Struck, Klaus Wyborny, Steffen Ramlow, Adolf Winkelmann, Christoph Girardet, Katja Eydel, Klaus Weber, Rolf Wiest, Lutz Mommartz, Brigitta Kuster, Moise Merlin Mabouna, Bärbel Neubauer, Karola Schlegelmilch, Bärbel Freund, Cynthia Beatt, Knut Hoffmeister, Karl Heil, Franz Schömbs, Ute Aurand, Wolfgang Ramsbott, Rotraut Pape, Helmut Herbst, Michael Busch, Heike Ollertz, Isabell Spengler, Katrin Rothe, Said Sharifi, Bode Müller, Jörg Langkau, Heinz Emigholz, Claudia Schillinger, Uli Sappok Schmelzdahin, Lutz Dammbeck, Bastian Clevé, Milena Gierke.

- France: Jean Painlevé, Patrick Bokanowski, Philippe Garrel, Pierre Clémenti, Christian Boltanski, Jacques Monory, Gisèle and Luc Meichler, Patrice Kirchhofer, Martine Rousset, Cécile Fontaine, Frédérique Devaux, Marcelle Thirache, Emmanuel Lefrant, Yann Beauvais, Olivier Fouchard, Jean-Michel Bouhours, Pierre Lajournade, Rose Lowder.

- Italy: Paolo Gioli, Luigi Veronesi, Cioni Carpi, Silvio and Vittorio Loffredo, Nato Frascà, Alfredo Leonardi, Massimo Bacigalupo, Paolo Brunatto, Antonio De Bernardi, Giorgio Turi, Roberto Capanna, Alberto Grifi, Anna Lojolo, Guido Lombardi, Gianfranco Baruchello, Mario Schifano, Luca Patella, Ugo Nespolo, Piero Bargellini, Pia Epremian, Andrea Granchi, Sirio Luginbuhl, Luigi Ontani, Anna Miscuglio, Yervant Gianikian, Angela Ricci Lucchi, Carmelo Bene, Leo de Berardinis, Perla Peragallo, Vincenzo Neri, Roberto Omegna, Camillo Negro, Ubaldo Magnaghi, Gianni Hoepli, Aldo Tambellini, Roberto Nanni, Marcel Fabre, Società Anonima Ambrosio, Torino, Pippo Oriani, Tina Cordero,Francesco di Cocco, Silvio & Victor Loffrédo, Piero Heliczer, Michele Sambin, Saul Saguatti, Danilo Torre, Ursula Ferrara, Claudia Muratori, Elio Piccon, Mario Verdone, Giovanni Martedì, Giorgio Simonelli, Fiorella Mariani, Adamo Vergine, Giuseppe Baresi, Giovanna Puggioni, Luca Comerio, Gaetano Carrer, Mirco Santi, Magdalo Mussio, Gianni Castagnoli, Carloni e Franceschetti, Susanna Scarpa.

- Switzerland: Peter Fischli, David Weiss, Pipilotti Rist, Ursula Palla, Klaus Fromherz, Yuri A, Laurent Schmid.

- Spain: Albert Alcoz, José Val del Omar, Joaquim Puigvert, Ton Sirera, Carles Santos, Carles Durán, Antoni Padrós, Javier Aguirre, Luis Rivera, José Ángel Rebolledo, Marcel Pey, Eugeni Bonet, Iván Zulueta, Jordi Artigas, Manuel Huerga, Eugènia Balcells, Juan Bufill, David Reznak, José Antonio Sistiaga, David Domingo, Antoni Pinent, Velasco Broca, Laida Lertxundi, Oriol Sánchez.

- Greece: Costas Sfikas, Antouanetta Angelidi, Andreas Velissaropoulos, Maria Gavala, Alice Throumoulopoulou, George Kalogiannis, Agis Kelpekis, Vassilis Mazomenos, Tasos Boulmetis, Makis Moraitis, Thanassis Rentzis, Nora Savoulidou.

- Hungary: Lenke Szilagyi, András Szirtes, István Antal, Andras Baranyai, Jozsef Gujdar, Miklós Erdély, Putyi Horvath, Laszlo Vidoszky, Sebestyen Kodolany.

- Poland: Zbigniew Rybczynski, Franciszka and Stefan Themerson, Mieczyslaw Waskowski, Andrzej Pawlowski, Walerian Borowczyk, Jan Lenica, Zofia Kulik, Ewa Partum, Natalia LL, Anna Kutera, Katarzyna Hierowska, Jadwiga Singer, Jolanta Marcolla, Teresa Tyszkiewicz, Ewa Zarzycka, Barbara Konopka, Irena Nawrot, Iwona Lemke-Konart.

- Czech Republic: Svatopluk Innemann, Irena and Karel Dodal, Elmar Klos, Jiri Lehovec, Cenek Zahradnicek, Alexander Hackenschmied.

- Slovakia: Martin Slivka, Dusan Hanak, Vladimir Havrilla, Samo Ivaska, Vladimír Havrilla, Lubomír Durcek.

- Norway: Bodil Furu, Marte Aas, Unn Fahlstrøm, Knut Åsdam, Marius Mørch, Jumana Manna, Ignas Krunglevicius.

- India: Pramod Pati, Vijay B. Chandra, Ashish Avikunthak, SNS Sastry, Biren Das.

- Lithuania: Jonas Mekas, Adolfas Mekas, Artūras Barysas-Baras. For more on Lithuanian Cinema in general please visit Somnambulist’s excellent lists Lithuanian Cinema in 1960-1990 & Contemporary Lithuanian cinema.

- South Korea: Lee Hangjun.

- Scottland: Sam Spreckley.

- Denmark: Albert Mertz, Jørgen Roos, Søren Melson, Richard Winther, Wilhelm Freddie, Henning Bendtsen, Keld Helmer-Petersen, Robert Jacobsen, Helge Ernst, Axel Brüel.

- (Former) Yugoslavia: Vlado Kristl, Ivan Martinac, Marina Abramovic, Antonio Gotovac Lauer, Ivan Faktor, Dragoslav Lazic, Vladimir Momcilovic, Vjekoslav Nakic, Nikola Djuric, Ivan Rakidzic, Dimitrije Basicevic Mangelos, Crveni Peristil, Attila Csernik, Radomir Damnjanovic Damnjan, Braco Dimitrijevic, Nusa & Sreco Dragan, Ivan Ladislav Galeta, Gorgona Group, Milenko Jovanovic, Bojan Jovanovic, Slobodan Micic, Ivko Sesic, Dragisa Krstic, Miodrag Milosevic, Radoslav Vladic, Ljupche Jankovic, Ivan Obrenov, Ivan Kaljevic, Miroslav Bata Petrovic, Tomislav Gotovac, Group of Six Artists, Zlatko Hajdler, Sanja Ivekovic, Julije Knifer, Ivan Kozaric, Dusan Makavejev, Dalibor Martinis, Slavko Matkovic, Slobodan Era Milivojevic, OHO, Mihovil Pansini, Nesa Paripovic, Zivojin Pavlovic, Vladimir Petek, Ivan Picelj, Bogdanka Poznanovic, Vojislav Rakonjac, Vjenceslav Richter, Milan Samec, Aleksandar Srnec, Mladen Stilinovic, Laszlo Szalma, Balint Szombathy, Rasa Todosijevic, Goran Trbuljak, Sava Trifkovic, Josip Vanista, Ante Verzotti.

- China: Zhang Peili, Cao Fei, Yang Fudong, Yang Zhenzhong, Wang Gongxin, Wang Jianwei, Feng Mengbo, Chen Shaoxiong, Hu Jieming, Li Yongbing, Liang Juhui, Song Dong, Qiu Zhijie, Wu Wenguang, Xu Tan, Yan Lei, Zhu Jia.

- USA: Harry Smith, Robert Breer, James Broughton, Christopher Maclaine, Willard Maas, Shirley Clarke, Robert Nelson, George and Mike Kuchar, Bruce Baillie, Bob Cowan, Jordan Belson, John Whitney, Will Hindle, Morgan Fisher, Anne Severson, Nancy Holt, Alfred Leslie, Frank Paine, Robert Frank, William S. Burroughs, Elias Merhige, Fred Worden, Richard Serra, Ron Rice, Wallace Berman, Phil Solomon, Phil Niblock, Nathaniel Dorsky, Lawrence (Larry) Jordan, Pat O’Neill, Deborah Stratman, Nina Menkes, Storm de Hirsch, Larry Gottheim, Gregory J. Markopoulos, Robert Beavers, Jim Davis, Peter Hutton, Eve Heller, Jennifer Reeder, Naomi Uman, Sandy Ding, Madison Brookshire, Mary Beth Reed, Jem Cohen, Andrew Noren, Courtney Egan, Leighton Pierce, Jon Jost, Scott Bartlett, Richard Serra, Gary Beydler, Stan VanDerBeek, Hy Hirsch, Tom Palazzolo, Richard Myers, Lawrence Janiak, Barry Gerson, Andrew Lampert, James Benning, Sharon Lockhart, Paul Bartel, Lenny Lipton, Deco Dawson, Brian Frye, David Gatten, Janie Geiser, Jeanne Liotta, Luther Price, Luis Recoder.

- Canada: Norman McLaren, Jack Chambers, Vincent Grenier, David Rimmer, Ellie Epp, Peter Mettler, Barbara Sternberg, Barbara Sternberg, Chris Gallagher, Richard Kerr, Mike Hoolboom, Rick Hancox, Philip Hoffman, Al Razutis, Bruce Elder, Carl E. Brown.

- Australia: Albie Thoms, Peter Mudie, Corinne and Arthur Cantrill, Paul Winkler, James Clayden, Marcus Bergner, John Dunkley-Smith, David Perry.

- New Zealand: Len Lye, Lissa Mitchell, Campbell Farquhar, Joanna Margaret Pau, Philip Dadson, Douglas Bagnall, Lisa Reihana, Rachel Rakena, Peter Wareing, Martin Rumsby, Jed Town, Elga Hinton, John King, Nova Paul, Richard von Sturmer, Emit Snakebeings, David Blyth, George Rose, Kathryn Dudding, Peter Wells, Shereen Maloney, Merata Mita, Brent Hayward, Leon Narbey, Darcy Lange, Chris Kraus, Michael Nicholson, Jed Town, Janine Randerson, Janine Randerson, Parasitic Fantasy Band (Eve Gordon and Sam Hamilton).

- Japan: Takashi Ito, Mako Idemitsu, Toshio Matsumoto, Takashi Nakajima, Jun’ichi Okuyama, Keiichi Tanaami, Akio Okamoto, Shuntaro Tanikawa, Toru Takemitsu, Eiko Hosoe, Nobuhiro Kawanaka, Hiroshi Yamazaki, Takahiko Iimura, Shigeko Kubota, Eiko Hosoe, Nobuhiro Kawanaka, Tadasu Takamine, Terayama Shu-ji.