A Movie is a 1958 experimental collage film by American artist Bruce Conner. It combines pieces of found footage taken from various sources such as newsreels, soft-core pornography, and B movies, all set to a score featuring Ottorino Respighi's Pines of Rome.
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.
Bruce Baillie was an American experimental filmmaker.
Peter Barrington Hutton was an American experimental filmmaker, known primarily for his silent cinematic portraits of cities and landscapes around the world. He also worked as a professional cinematographer, most notably for his former student Ken Burns, as well as cinematography for Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames, Sheila McLaughlin and Lynne Tillman's Committed, assorted films by artist Red Grooms and Albert Maysles' The Gates.
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.
SFFILM, formerly known as The San Francisco Film Society, is a nonprofit arts organization located in San Francisco, California, that presents year-round programs and events in film exhibition, media education, and filmmaker services.
Nathaniel Dorsky is an American experimental filmmaker and film editor. His film career began during the New American Cinema movement of the 1960s, when he met his partner Jerome Hiler. He won an Emmy Award in 1967 for his work on the film Gaugin in Tahiti: Search for Paradise.
Cosmic Ray is a 1962 American experimental short film directed by Bruce Conner. With both found footage and original material, it features images of countdown leader, a nude woman dancing, a Mickey Mouse cartoon, and military exercises. It is soundtracked by a performance of Ray Charles's "What'd I Say" and has been recognized by some critics as one of the first music videos.
Mildred "Chick" Strand was an American experimental filmmaker, "a pioneer in blending avant-garde techniques with documentary". Chick Strand contributed to the movement of women's experimental cinema in the early 1960s–1970's. Strand's film making and directing approach incorporates personal elements from her own life experiences and societal forces and realities. The film Elasticity (1976) is an example of Strand's attempts at autobiographical work that also incorporates Strand's specific standpoint on certain social issues. Feminist issues and anthropological inquiries about the human condition are frequent themes in Strand's films. However, because Strand's films and work were often deeply personal and subjective, they were often rejected from male-dominated academic circles of anthropologists and critiqued for being non-academic works.
Luther Price (pseudonym) was an experimental filmmaker and visual artist.
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.
Janis Crystal Lipzin, is an American artist and educator, working with film, photography, video, audio, multi-media installations, and media performance. Lipzin is known for her work in many media and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute for over three decades. Lipzin's films offer a unique blend of rigorous conceptual structure, formal investigation, and sensual discovery. The Bladderwort Document is a haunting visual fantasia of her life on a farm in the 1970s; Trepanations is a droll meditation on social forces and women's appearance; and Seasonal Forces, Part One creates a fluid and immediate record of the cultural and seasonal changes in the rural landscape where she lives.She has been an active filmmaker since 1974, when she became attracted to using Super-8 cameras, in part because of their easy portability and flexibility to make changes to a film up to the moment of projection. Her more recent work incorporates both digital and analog film methods. wherein light and photo-chemistry collide and conspire to reveal aspects of our world deserving of more careful scrutiny. Her work blends an enduring interest in the volatility of nature and human events with a sympathy for alternative, hand-made methods that she interweaves with digital processes. Lipzin is based in Sonoma County, California.
Invisible Adversaries is a 1977 Austrian experimental drama film directed by Valie Export, her debut feature film.
Freude (Florence) Bartlett also known as Freude Solomon-Bartlett, was an American experimental film director and founder of the Serious Business Company, a San Francisco-based film sales and film distribution company known for its collection of avant-garde, animation and women's films.
Jerome Hiler is an American experimental filmmaker, painter, and stained glass artist. Having started in New York during the New American Cinema movement, Hiler and his partner Nathaniel Dorsky moved in 1971 to San Francisco, where for many years his work was shown in the context of private salon screenings. He began to publicly screen his films in the late 1990s, releasing new films regularly since 2010. Hiler's work makes use of vivid colors, musical rhythms or structures, and layered superimpositions edited in camera.
All My Life is a 1966 American experimental short film directed by Bruce Baillie. It shows a continuous shot of a fence, soundtracked by Ella Fitzgerald's 1936 debut single "All My Life". Film critic P. Adams Sitney identified it as an early example of what he termed structural film.
The Great Blondino is a 1967 American experimental film directed by Robert Nelson and William T. Wiley.
Side/Walk/Shuttle is a 1991 American avant-garde film directed by Ernie Gehr. It shows downtown San Francisco as seen at different angles from a moving elevator.
17 Reasons Why is a 1987 American avant-garde short film directed by Nathaniel Dorsky. Working with a collection of secondhand portable cameras, Dorsky used the unslit 8 mm footage to create a split screen with four quadrants. Normally screened on 16 mm film at 16 frames per second, it is one of his only works to have been shown as a digital transfer.
The Way to Shadow Garden is a 1955 American experimental film directed by Stan Brakhage.
