A look at avant-garde filmmaker Marie Menken.

The Extraordinary Child applies his developing style to broad slapstick. His friends from the previous films and the director himself play out a riotous farce about an overgrown baby who steals his father’s cigars. Everyone mugs hilariously. The movie could be taken as another example of the Romantic notion of the artist as a monstrous child or misfit, or a parody of the same rather than the personal confessional statement seen so often in these film movements.

A brief short of Phil Solomon and Stan Brakhage going to the movies in the spring of 2002.

这部关于魅力十足的电影制作人、诗人和人类学家玛雅·黛伦的权威传记包含她的开创性作品《午后的迷惘》和她未完成的海地纪录片的摘录、对斯坦·布拉哈格和乔纳斯·梅卡斯的采访、以及她的讲座录音。由海伦·米伦讲述，这是一个短暂而非凡的一生的故事，也是一个开创性的电影作品的故事，它影响并形成了美国独立和艺术家电影制作实践的开始和随后的方向。

Several well-known and pioneering abstract filmmakers discuss the history of non-objective cinema, the works of those that came before them and their own experiments in the field of visionary filmmaking.

Stan Brakhage steps out of his usual role as experimental filmmaker to narrate animated visualizations of Venezuelan creation myths.

The sole survivor of an ill-fated mining expedition tells how his taste for gold was replaced by that of human flesh.

A man is supine on a mountain side. Images rush past of nature and a stained glass saint. An infant is born. We see a lactating nipple. Images include a mountain peak, farm buildings, a tree stump, a fire, a crawling baby, and the sun. The man falls and rolls. Then, later, he swings his ax.

Sexual intimacy. Three kinds of images race past, superimposed on each other sometimes: two bodies, a man and a woman's, close up, nude - patches of skin, wisps of hair, glimpses of a face and genitalia; strips of celluloid with lines and squiggles scratched on them; and, close-up shots of what appear to be the insides of living bodies - a heart beating, muscle and sinew and tissue wet with fluids. The exterior and interior of desire.

One hundred and sixty portraits or rather appearances, sketches and glimpses of avant-garde, independent filmmakers and film activists between 1955 and 1996.
Why BIRTH OF A NATION? Because the film independents IS a nation in itself. We are surrounded by commercial cinema Nation same way as the indigenous people of the United States or of any other country are surrounded by Ruling Powers.
We are the invisible, but essential nation of cinema. We are Cinema.

Not a documentary in the strictest sense of the word. Rather, it is a journey through the world of the artist Jonas Mekas - one of the exponents of independent U.S. movies; founder and director of the New York Anthology Film Archive.

"Sexual witchcraft involving two couples and a 'medium' cat." -S.B.

Experimental film following a cycle of seasons as well as the stretch of a single day as a man and his dog slowly ascend a mountain.

A man, accompanied by a dog, struggles through snow on a mountain side. We see film stock blister; drawn square shapes appear. Then, we see an infant's face. The images of struggling climber, baby, blurred film stock, large snow flakes, and what may be microscopic details of matter are superimposed on each other, one dominating the frame briefly to be replaced by another. As the man falls in the snow and tries to regain his feet, the baby continues to appear, first with eyes closed. Alternately, images rush by - montages of paper cutouts and life under a microscope.

"The first months of marriage, with moments of mutual awareness, frightening understandings, lovemaking." -S.B.

一战以前，影院的的艺术家和诗人往往都是激进分子，他们热衷于拍电影并把这种艺术形式向新的方向发展，他们被排除在艺术领域和电影工厂之外，像是被困在一座孤岛上，他们大胆的创造出自己的电影世界并拥有一个自己的工作网络，并作出了不可估量且有力的贡献
This feature-length documentary provides a vivid, eye-opening, and appropriately personal introduction to one of the most important, yet perpetually marginalized, realms of filmmaking: avant-garde cinema.
Achieving the near-impossible task of doing justice in a mere 82 minutes to this incredibly rich, varied, and expansive domain, FREE RADICALS is as expertly constructed an introduction to the topic as one could hope for, thanks in large part to the films privileging of rare interviews with some of the most important filmmakers in the avant-garde tradition (including Jonas Mekas, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, and Hans Richter), and its inclusion of several films in their entirety. The film's sincere admiration for its subject is best reflected by Chodorov's own description: "I wanted to share a few of the films I love and introduce you to some of the free, radical artists who made them."

Documentary about the life of avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren, who led the independent film movement of the 1940s.