A film festival is an organized, extended presentation of films in one or more cinemas or screening venues, usually in a single city or region. Increasingly, film festivals show some films outdoors. Films may be of recent date and, depending upon the festival's focus, can include international and domestic releases. Some film festivals focus on a specific filmmaker, genre of film, or on a subject matter. Several film festivals focus solely on presenting short films of a defined maximum length. Film festivals are typically annual events. Some film historians, including Jerry Beck, do not consider film festivals as official releases of the film.
Madeline Charlotte Moorman was an American cellist, performance artist, and advocate for avant-garde music. Referred to as the "Jeanne d'Arc of new music", she was the founder of the Annual Avant Garde Festival of New York and a frequent collaborator with Korean American artist Nam June Paik.
An underground film is a film that is out of the mainstream either in its style, genre or financing.
Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many experimental films, particularly early ones, relate to arts in other disciplines: painting, dance, literature and poetry, or arise from research and development of new technical resources.
Paracinema is an academic term to refer to a wide variety of film genres out of the mainstream, bearing the same relationship to 'legitimate' film as paraliterature like comic books and pulp fiction bears to literature.
The Denver Underground Film Festival (DUFF) premiered November 21–23, 1997 at The Bug Theater in Denver, Colorado. Since then the visions of hundreds of independent filmmakers from around the world have been showcased, including films by classic experimental and avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage, Luis Buñuel, Fassbinder, and Man Ray.
Canyon Cinema is an American nonprofit organization for distributing independent, avant-garde, and artist-made films. After starting in the 1960s as an exhibition program, it grew to include a nationwide newsletter and a distribution cooperative. Its exhibition activities were split off to form the San Francisco Cinematheque.
P. Adams Sitney, is a historian of American avant-garde cinema. He is known as the author of Visionary Film, one of the first books on the history of experimental film in the United States.
Su Friedrich is an American avant-garde film director, producer, writer, and cinematographer.
Storm de Hirsch (1912–2000) was an American poet and filmmaker. She was a key figure in the New York avant-garde film scene of the 1960s, and one of the founding members of the Film-Makers' Cooperative. Although often overlooked by historians, in recent years she has been recognized as a pioneer of underground cinema.
Philip Stewart Solomon was an American experimental filmmaker noted for his work with both film and video. In recent years, Solomon had earned acclaim for a series of films that incorporate machinima made using games from the Grand Theft Auto series. His films are often described as haunting and lyrical.
Christabel is a 2001 avant-garde experimental film directed by James Fotopoulos and based on the unfinished poem of the same name by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Rouzbeh Rashidi is an Iranian-Irish avant-garde filmmaker and founder of Experimental Film Society. Since 2000, Rashidi produced experimental feature films and numerous volumes of instalments for the Homo Sapiens Project. His films have been associated with the Remodernist Film Movement.
Stephen Dwoskin was a major avant-garde filmmaker whose work was closely connected to the 'gaze theory' associated with Laura Mulvey; a significant disabled filmmaker – though he rejected being framed as such – and an activist for an alternative film culture, through such organizations as the London Film-Makers' Co-op and The Other Cinema. His films are held by the BFI and distributed by LUX. His archive is held at The University of Reading.
The Cinematheque, founded in 1972, is a Canadian charity and non-profit film institute, media education centre, and film exhibitor based in Vancouver, British Columbia.
The Film-Makers' Cooperative a.k.a. legal name The New American Cinema Group, Inc. is an artist-run, non-profit organization incorporated in July 1961 in New York City by Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Stan Brakhage, Lionel Rogosin, Gregory Markopoulos, Lloyd Michael Williams and other filmmakers for the distribution, education and exhibition of avant-garde films and alternative media.
Bill Brand is an experimental film and video artist, educator, activist and film preservationist.
Sally Foy Dixon was an American arts administrator, curator, and advocate of American experimental film and filmmakers. She was a Film Curator at Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from 1970 to 1975 and interim director of Film in the Cities in Minneapolis, Minnesota, from 1978 to 1979. She also served as Director of the Bush Foundation for Artist Fellowships from 1980 to 1996 and was a consultant for the Pew Charitable Trusts, The MacArthur Foundation, the Herb Foundation, and the Leeway Foundation.
Jim Sikora is a Chicago based American film director, writer, and producer and is considered a pioneer in DV filmmaking. Sikora is best known for his independent micro-budgeted feature films Walls in the City, starring Paula Killen, Bill Cusack, Tony Fitzpatrick, and David Yow of the rock band The Jesus Lizard, with a soundtrack by The Denison/Kimball Trio; Bullet on a Wire starring Jeff Strong, Paula Killen, Lara Phillips, David Yow, and Cinema of Transgression legend Richard Kern; Rock & Roll Punk which features members of Hüsker Dü, The Descendents, Big Black, Tortoise, and Slint; My Charbroiled Burger with Brewer starring Mike Watt of Minutemen and The Stooges and Jack Brewer of Saccharine Trust.
