Avant garde

"Damned If You Don't is a real prize. Beautifully shot in black and white, it blends conventional narrative technique with impressionistic camerawork, symbols and voicovers to create an intimate study of sexual expression and repression. It begins with footage from a stylish old potboiler about an isolated convent, whose tale of passions leashed and unleashed provides the leitmotif for a young lesbian who watches it and the lonely nun she pursues and seduces. As the two women's lives come closer to joining, voiceovers from the biography of a 16th century lesbian nun and the reminiscences of a woman's closeted romances at a Catholic school flesh out the theme. When the two women finally meet and make love, the woman's careful unwrapping of the nun's complicated prison of clothing is both foreplay and liberating metaphor. The film is as hypnotic as a dream."

Rainer's landmark film is a meditation on ambivalence that plays with cliche and the conventions of soap opera while telling the story of a woman whose sexual dissatisfaction masks an enormous anger.

An experimental short film by James Broughton in which his childhood day's are recounted when recalling the influence his mother had on him.

An animated short of passengers on a train with Mt. Fuji visible from the window.

This documentary short film looks at the devastating and costly problems, including seasonal flooding and erosion of precious topsoil, associated with the Mississippi River system and promotes more Federal projects to remedy the situation.

A documentary film about Haitian vodou.

Dancers, shown in photographic negative, perform a series of ballet moves, solos, pas de deux, larger groupings. The dancers glide and rotate untroubled by gravity against a slowly changing starfield background. Their movements are accompanied by music scored for a small ensemble of woodwind and percussion.

Maya Deren's unfinished short film from 1951, "Ensemble for Somnambulists", set to DeVotchKa's "How It Ends".

Silently, a woman wakes on a beach as the tides go in reverse. Her dreamscape unfolds as she tries to locate a chess piece traveling from the beach to a party to a country road and then back.

The surrealist film shows repetitive imagery involving a string fashioned in a bizarre, almost spiderweb-like pattern over the hands of several individuals, most notably an unnamed young woman and an elderly gentleman.

Historical, biblical, and mythical characters gather in the pleasure dome and become part of a visual feast of superimposed images, hallucinations, and decadence.

Pierrot waxes romantic, entranced by the moon. Harlequin appears and bullies him, then uses a magic lantern to project an image of Columbine. Pierrot tries to court the illusory Columbine unsuccessfully, then enters a mystical moon-realm from which he returns dead.

Pictures at an October Gallery, London, exhibition of drawings and objects by and about the occult master Aleister Crowley (1875-1947). Exhibit titled "An Old Master".

A man in tight jeans buffs his car to the strains of "Dream Lover".

A woman dressed in an elegant period dress wanders through the water gardens at the Villa d'Este.

A soundtrack plays folk rock as a woman prepares, at noon, to take her Borzois for a walk. She goes through her dresses, all 1920s style flapper gowns, holding them one at a time, shaking them as if they are dancing. She picks one - in puce. She puts it on, delighted, adds perfume, languishes on a chaise for a few minutes, then goes for her walk. It all has a 20s feel.

Claimed by some to be one of the most unconventional and experimental films ever made, Wavelength is a structural film of a 45-minute long zoom in on a window over a period of a week. Very unconventional and experimental, indeed.

An experimental short film which shows a time-lapse in the basement hallway of a Binghamton University building.

Two people stand on a road, out of focus. Seen distorted through a glass, they retire upstairs to a bedroom where she undresses. He says, "Adieu." Images: the beautiful girl, a starfish in a jar, city scenes, newspapers, tugboats. More images: starfish, the girl. "How beautiful she is." Repeatedly. He advances up the stair, knife in hand, starfish on the step. Three people stand on a road, out of focus. "How beautiful she was." "How beautiful she is." "Beautiful."

Abstract animation drawn directly on Technicolor film, some with underlying real life footage of unrelated subjects. Various colorful shapes and patterns move and interact, set to upbeat music.

In this experimental film, Isidore Isou, the leader of the lettrist movement, lashes out at conventional cinema and offers a revolutionary form of movie-making: through scratching and bleaching the film, through desynchronizing the soundtrack and the visual track, through deconstructing the story, he aims to renew the seventh art the same way he tried to revolutionize the literary world.

A surreal, nightmarish collection of imagery.

Artist-writer-poet-filmmaker Jonas Mekas documents his early years building a life and discovering an arts community in New York.

A fast-paced comedy about a young Belgian car nut and hairdresser's apprentice, his girlfriend, and their legal and illegal attempts to get a Porsche under him for his nearing debut race.

Notes of journey life of Stan Brakhage like a befits of a diary book in a very strong sense of experimentation, romantic, modernist and abstract.