The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra is a 1928 American silent experimental short film co-written and co-directed by Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapić. Considered a landmark of American avant-garde cinema, it tells the story of a man who comes to Hollywood with dreams of becoming a star; he fails and becomes dehumanized, with studio executives reducing him to the role of an extra and writing the number "9413" on his forehead.
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.
Italian futurist cinema was the oldest movement of European avant-garde cinema. Italian futurism, an artistic and social movement, impacted the Italian film industry from 1916 to 1919. It influenced Russian Futurist cinema and German Expressionist cinema. Its cultural importance was considerable and influenced all subsequent avant-gardes, as well as some authors of narrative cinema; its echo expands to the dreamlike visions of some films by Alfred Hitchcock.
Ralph Steiner was an American photographer, pioneer documentarian and a key figure among avant-garde filmmakers in the 1930s.
Walter Ruttmann was a German cinematographer and film director, an important German abstract experimental film maker, along with Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling and Oskar Fischinger. He is best known for directing the semi-documentary 'city symphony' silent film, with orchestral score by Edmund Meisel, in 1927, Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis. His audio montage Wochenende (Weekend) (1930) is considered a major contribution in the development of audio plays.
William Moritz, film historian, specialized in visual music and experimental animation. His principal published works concerned abstract filmmaker and painter Oskar Fischinger. He also wrote extensively on other visual music artists who worked with motion pictures, including James and John Whitney and Jordan Belson; Moritz also published on German cinema, Visual Music, color organs, experimental animation, avant-garde film and the California School of Color Music.
The Hebrides is a concert overture that was composed by Felix Mendelssohn in 1830, revised in 1832, and published the next year as Mendelssohn's Op. 26. Some consider it an early tone poem.
Wavelength is a 1967 Canadian-American short subject by experimental filmmaker and artist Michael Snow. Considered a landmark of avant-garde cinema, it was filmed over one week in December 1966 and edited in 1967, and is an example of what film theorist P. Adams Sitney describes as "structural film", calling Snow "the dean of structural filmmakers."
Slavoljub "Slavko" Vorkapić, known in English as Slavko Vorkapich, was a Serbian-born Hollywood montagist, an independent cinematic artist, chair of USC School of Cinematic Arts, chair of the Belgrade Film and Theatre Academy, painter, and illustrator. He was a prominent figure of modern cinematography and motion picture film art during the early and mid-20th century and was a cinema theorist and lecturer.
Su Friedrich is an American avant-garde film director, producer, writer, and cinematographer. She has been a leading figure in avant-garde filmmaking and a pivotal force in the establishment of Queer Cinema.
John Hoffman, was an American editor of montage sequences for several Hollywood studio features. He also directed a number of films, including The Wreck of the Hesperus and Strange Confession.
Native Land is a 1942 docudrama film directed by Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand.
Manhattan Cocktail (1928) was a part-talkie film, directed by Dorothy Arzner, and starring Nancy Carroll, Richard Arlen, and Lilyan Tashman. At the time this movie was made, Hollywood was already making the transition of silent to sound, either making all talking movies, part talking movies, or silent movies with their own soundtrack and sound effects.
Betzy Bromberg is an American director, editor, and experimental filmmaker. She was the Director of the Program in Film and Video at California Institute of the Arts, and remains in the position of full time Faculty. Her work has been shown at the Rotterdam, London, Edinburgh, Sundance and Vancouver Film Festivals as well as the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the San Francisco Cinematheque, the Harvard Film Archive (Cambridge), Anthology Film Archives, the National Film Theater (London), The Vootrum Centrum (Belgium) and the Centre Georges Pompidou (France).
Bill Brand is an experimental film and video artist, educator, activist and film preservationist.
Passing Through is a 1977 American film directed by Larry Clark and co-written by Clark and Ted Lange.
