A true masterpiece of 70s cinema, more remarkable today than ever before. A conceptual bicentennial film dealing with spatial and temporal relationships between two travelers, their car, and the geographic, political, and social changes from New York to Los Angeles. The space within each frame is at the same time continuous and elliptical.

Intercourse between two people who never appear on the screen at the same time. An exploration of sex and male/female identities.

One of the most widely praised American avant-garde films in recent years, James Benning's 1977 feature is a laconic mosaic of single-shot sequences, each offering some sort of image/sound pun or paradox. At once a crypto-narrative with an abstract, peekaboo storyline and a fractured, painterly study of the American midwestern landscape, 11x14 points toward the creation of a new, non-literary but populist cinema. (James Hoberman, who chose 11 x 14 as one of the top ten films of the seventies (Film Comment, January 1980) and later wrote the above text in The Village Voice)

New York in the late 70s: the arch, anti-establishment energy of CBGBs punk spreads like a virus through the East Village art scene, with hipsters as likely to pick up a cheap Super-8 camera as a guitar or saxophone. A number of eager collaborations between filmmakers, musicians and performance artists are spawned, and a scene tagged No Wave evolves, with the likes of Jim Jarmusch, Lizzie Borden and Susan Seidelman emerging from it. On into the 80s, and contempt for Reaganite conservatism inspires Nick Zedd's Cinema of Transgression Manifesto, proposing, among other things, 'to go beyond all limits set or prescribed by taste, morality or any other traditional value system shackling the minds of men'. The likes of Richard Kern, Lydia Lunch and Casandra Stark enthusiastically sign up. Celine Danhier's authoritative, thorough account of post-punk underground filmmaking in NYC celebrates a time and place where there were no rules, and where artists were encouraged and supported by their peers, those peers being, essentially, their audience. Contributions from key players are numerous and fascinating, as are the clips from the seminal, hugely influential work they produced. Michael Hayden