Film Studies Librarian
Lucinda M. Hall
Contact:
Evans Map Room, Baker-Berry Library
Dartmouth College
25 N Main ST
Hanover, NH 03755
Dartmouth College
25 N Main ST
Hanover, NH 03755
(603) 646-0962
Website Skype Contact: d1128r8@kiewit.dartmouth.edu
Other library resource(s)
Avant-garde and experimental film from Oxford Bibliographies Online by Call Number: Electronic resourceISBN: 9780199791286Experimental and avant-garde film is cinema made outside of the film industry on an artisanal basis, largely without regard to the structures and demands of traditional narrative film. While experimental film as a separate mode of film practice is international, its most prevalent manifestations were in western Europe before World War II and North America and Britain in the postwar period. Avant-garde film is often produced in the context of the larger art world, particularly in relation to the visual arts and literature.- Screening room DVD seriesCall Number: Jones Media DVD - check catalog for specific numberScreening Room was a 1970s Boston television series that for almost ten years offered independent filmmakers a chance to show and discuss their work on a commercial (ABC-TV) affiliate station. The series was developed and hosted by filmmaker Robert Gardner (Dead Birds, Forest of Bliss), who was Chairman of the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies and Director of the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard for many years.
Unseen cinema: early American avant-garde film, 1894-1941 by Call Number: Streaming videoUnseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941 reveals hitherto unknown accomplishments of American filmmakers working in the United States and abroad from the invention of cinema until World War II, and offers an innovative and often controversial view of experimental film as a product of avant-garde artists, of professional directors, and of amateur movie-makers working collectively and as individuals at all levels of film production. ...
Keeping up with Film Studies journal literature
Want an easy way to keep up with the journal literature for all facets of Film Studies? And you use a mobile device? You can install the BrowZine app and create a custom Bookshelf of your favorite journal titles. Then you will get the Table of Contents (ToCs) of your favorite journals automatically delivered to you when they become available. Once you have the ToC's, you can download and read the articles you want from the journals for which we have subscriptions.
You can get the app from the App Store or Google Play.
Don't own or use a mobile device? You can still use BrowZine! It's also available in a web version. You can get to it here. The web version works the same way as the app version. Find the journals you like, create a custom Bookshelf, get ToCs and read the articles you want.
An introduction to Experimental films
This definition covers experimental films, artists' films and avant-garde films
An international film practice that has explored cinema’s capacity to manipulate light, motion, space, and time, and/or expresses the filmmaker’s personal artistic vision. Usually linked to broader trends and practices in fine art, avant-garde film is particularly closely associated with modernism, tracing its origins to 1920s Europe in the work of artists motivated by a desire to add a temporal dimension to painting and sculpture. Formative early works Rhythmus 21 (Hans Richter, Germany, 1923–25) and Symphonie diagonale (Viking Eggeling, Germany, 1923–24) explore the musical organization of filmic time; while Le ballet mécanique (Fernand Léger, France, 1924) and Anémic cinema (Marcel Duchamp, France, 1926) offer graphic investigations of Cubist space. The influence of Surrealism is apparent in La coquille et le clergyman (Germaine Dulac, France, 1927) and Un chien Andalou (Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel, France, 1928); and that of Futurism and Constructivism in Chelovek s kinoapparatom/Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, USSR, 1929). Elsewhere in pre World War II Europe, the avant-garde impulse informs the work of Len Lye, Norman McLaren and Alberto Cavalcanti in Britain, as well as the poetic documentaries of Joris Ivens in the Netherlands and Henri Storck in Belgium. In 1929, the first international conference on avant-garde film, held in La Sarraz, Switzerland, was attended by Sergei Eisenstein, Cavalcanti, and Richter, among others. ...
Kuhn, A., & Westwell, G. (2020). Avant-garde film. In A Dictionary of Film Studies. Oxford University Press. Retrieved 17 Nov. 2022
In the Library collections
To find books and other resources about experimental films in the Library's collections, use the subject heading experimental films. Use this same search to find actual experimental films located in the Jones Media Center. Other related subject headings are listed below.
- experimental filmsMost works are located on Baker Stack Level 4 in the call number range PN 1995.9 .E96.
- avant-garde filmThis is a keyword search looking specific at titles in the online catalog.
- avant-garde cinemaThis is a keyword search looking specific at titles in the online catalog.
- video artThis is a subject search in the online catalog.
Introductory reading(s)
The avant-garde feature film: a critical history by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .E96 V48 2012ISBN: 9780786459100Here is a critical and historical overview of unconventional and aesthetically challenging films, all of feature length. The author focuses on the particular forms of contemporary avant-garde films, which often rely on characteristics associated with historical films of the same genre. ...
Cinema by other means by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .E96 L48 2012ISBN: 9780199841424Cinema by Other Means explores an extraordinary history, stretching from the 1910s to the present: it is a study of various avant-garde endeavors to practice the cinema by using the tools, the materials, the technology, and the techniques, which either modify or are entirely different from those associated with the standard film apparatus. Using examples from both the historical and the post-war avant-garde - Dada, Surrealism, Letterism, "structural-materialist" film, and more - the book tells the tale of the multiple conditions of cinema; of a range of peculiar and imaginative waysin which filmmakers, artists, and writers have pondered and created, performed and transformed, the "movies"- with or without directly grounding their work in the materials of film. ...
A companion to experimental cinema by Call Number: eBookISBN: 9781119107903A Companion to Experimental Cinema is a collection of original essays organized around both theoretical and historical issues of concern to film scholars, programmers, filmmakers, and viewers. Newly-commissioned essays written by specialists in the field, along with dialogues conducted with a diverse range of practitioners, focus on core subjects to present an international array of overlapping and contrasting perspectives. This unique text not only provides detailed accounts of particular films and filmmakers, but also discusses new approaches of understanding, characterizing, and shaping experimental cinema. ...
A history of experimental film and video: from the canonical avant-garde to contemporary British practice by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .E96 R39 2011ISBN: 9781844574360Avant-garde film is almost indefinable. It is in a constant state of change and redefinition. In his highly-acclaimed history of experimental film, A.L. Rees tracks the movement of the film avant-garde between the cinema and modern art (with its postmodern coda). But he also reconstitutes the film avant-garde as an independent form of art practice with its own internal logic and aesthetic discourse.
Subversion: the definitive history of underground cinema by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .E96 R38 2007ISBN: 9781905674213Subversion: The Definitive History of Underground Cinema is the indispensable history of underground cinema, an untold story that includes the British independent and French avant-garde cinemas of the 1920s, the counterculture film movements of the 1960s, the microcinema resurgence of the 1990s, and beyond. ...
Selected book title(s)
Exile cinema: filmmakers at work beyond Hollywood by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1993.5 .D44 E97 2008ISBN: 9780791473788Offers a cross section of international fringe cinema.
Motion(less) pictures: the cinema of stasis by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .E96 R395 2015ISBN: 9780231169622Conducting the first comprehensive study of films that do not move, Justin Remes challenges the primacy of motion in cinema and tests the theoretical limits of film aesthetics and representation. Reading experimental films such as Andy Warhol's Empire (1964), the Fluxus work 'isappearing Music for Face (1965), Michael Snow's So Is This (1982), and Derek Jarman's Blue (1993), he shows how motionless films defiantly showcase the static while collapsing the boundaries between cinema, photography, painting, and literature.
New punk cinema by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .E96 N49 2005ISBN: 9780748620357New Punk Cinema is the first book to examine a new breed of film that is indebted to the punk spirit of experimentation, do-it-yourself ethos, and an uneasy, often defiant relationship with the mainstream. An array of established and emerging scholars trace and map the contours of new punk cinema, from its roots in neorealism and the French New Wave, to its flowering in the work of Lars von Trier and the Dogma 95 movement.
This is called moving: a critical poetics of film by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .E96 C42 2005ISBN: 9780817351601As the writer, director, producer, and cinematographer of almost all her 30 films, videos, and shorts, Abigail Child has been recognized as a major and influential practitioner of experimental cinema since the early 1970s. Hallmarks of her style are the appropriation and reassembly of found footage and fragments from disparate visual sources, ranging from industrial films and documentaries to home movies, vacation photography, and snippets of old B movies. The resulting collages and montages are cinematic narratives that have been consistently praised for their beauty and sense of wonder and delight in the purely visual. ...
We saw the light: conversations between the new American cinema and poetry by Call Number: Baker-Berry PN 1995.9 .E96 K27 2009ISBN: 9781587297885By the mid-1960s, New American poets and Underground filmmakers had established a vibrant community. Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, and Frank O'Hara joined Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Robert Frank, Alfred Leslie, and Andy Warhol to hang out, make films, read poems, fight censorship, end racism, and shut down the Vietnam War. Their personal, political, and artistic collaborations led them to rethink the moving picture and the lyric, resulting in an extraordinary profusion of poetry/film hybrids. Drawing on unpublished correspondences and personal interviews with key figures in the innovative poetry and film communities, Daniel Kane's stunningly erudite and accessible work not only provides a fresh look at avant-garde poetry and film but also encourages readers to rethink the artistic scenes of the 1960s and today. ...
Finding scholarly articles & journal title(s)
Articles and other writings about experimental films can be found in many publications. Our collection does not include titles which look exclusively at Experimental films. You can use Film & Television Literature Index, or Academic Search Complete to find articles. MLA International Bibliography is another option for articles.
Film & television literature index by Call Number: Electronic resourceUse this index to find articles about this genre.
MLA international bibliography by Call Number: Electronic resourceMLA International Bibliography indexes journal articles, books and dissertations. Coverage includes literature, language and linguistics, folklore, literary theory & criticism, dramatic arts, as well as the historical aspects of printing and publishing.
Web of science citation databases by Call Number: Electronic resourceThe online version of 3 separate ISI indexes: Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index and, Social Sciences Citation Index.
A selected list of experimental films
Find more experimental films in the online catalog.
Alice; Darkness light darkness by Call Number: Jones Media DVD #13899Alice: A little girl follows an elusive White Rabbit and so begins this dream expedition into the landscape of childhood, combining techniques of animation, puppet theatre and live action in Švankmajer's surreal version of Alice's adventures in Wonderland.
Darkness light darkness: A man literally constructs himself within the confines of a very small room--a potent allegory of Švankmajer's life in Eastern Europe.- Avant-garde. 3: experimental cinema, 1922-1954 byCall Number: Jones Media DVD #9705Long before home video there flourished an alternative cinema culture on college campuses and around art theaters, where foreign film fare was often accompanied by a short subject. As reliable 16mm film equipment became available to non-professionals, artists independent of film centers began experimenting with cinema. Serious film societies sprang up in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, holding semi-private screenings of non-commercial artistic films. For years, these pictures have been exhibited only in infrequent museum screenings, if at all. This collection is of mainly American pictures, principally one-man artistic endeavors made from little more than an artist's desire to express feelings with a camera.
Bestiaire by Call Number: Jones Media DVD #15715Fascinating and beguiling, Bestiaire is Denis Côté's mesmerizing meditation on the relationship between man and beast. This strikingly beautiful film about looking -- starts with a group of art students attempting to sketch an animal -- that blurs the line between observer and observed. There may be no traditional narrative, yet there is breathtaking dramatic tension in every exquisitely framed shot: the sight of a lion attacking the doors of its cage or the scurrying striped legs of zebras in a holding pen. ...
Forradalom után = After the revolution by Call Number: Jones Media DVD #13571An author, shut off from the rest of the world in a small suburban apartment, derives his view of post-Communist Hungary through the eyes and ears of his cat. Every morning, he [lets] the cat out into the streets; in the evenings, he reviews the material captured through the cat's eyes, ears, and brain in order to write a novel.
Head by Call Number: Jones Media DVD #14011ISBN: 9781604653618A kaleidoscopic satire that is a movie homage, media send-up, concert movie, and antiwar cry all at once.
Letters from Fontainhas: three films by Pedo Costa by Call Number: Jones Media DVD #9851ISBN: 9781604652369Portuguese director Pedro Costa has been steadily building an impressive body of work since the late eighties, and these are the three films that put him on the map: spare, painterly portraits of battered, largely immigrant lives in the slums of Fontainhas, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Lisbon.
Lost lost lost by Call Number: Jones Media DVD #15908ISBN: 0781514002Jonas Mekas compiles in "Lost lost lost" fourteen years filmed images from his arrival in the United States as a political refugee.- States of unbelonging: a film byCall Number: Jones Media DVD #15403Blending experimental and documentary styles, this film offers a portrait of Israeli filmmaker Revital Ohayon, murdered in a terrorist attack with her two children while on a West Bank kibbutz. Director Lynne Sachs accompanies images and symbols with a running spoken narrative of Sachs' own efforts to capture and understand Ohayon's story.
Trash by Call Number: Jones Media DVD #6005The story of Joe and his lover-protector Holly who try to make a go of things in their Lower East Side basement, from which Holly goes forth from time to time to cruise Fillmore East and scavenge garbage cans, while Joe's journeys are in search of real junk.
Internet resource(s)
- Experimental film societyExperimental Film Society (EFS) is an independent, not-for-profit entity specialising in avant-garde, independent and no/low budget filmmaking.
- Jodie MackDartmouth's own Jodie Mack!
Jodie Mack is an experimental animator. Her films unleash the kinetic energy of material remnants of domestic and institutional knowledge to illuminate the relationship between decoration and utility. Straddling the boundary between rigor and accessibility, her cinema questions how we ascribe value to things. ...
