Amos Vogel's Film as a Subversive Art

BLOW-UP is the story of a successful fashion photographer, Thomas (David Hemmings), who, whilst scouting for fresh subjects in a park one afternoon, photographs a mysterious couple in 'flagrante delicto.' Upon returning to his studio loft later that day, he develops the pictures and discovers that he has inadvertently stumbled upon a murder.

The highly respected and often cited milestone in Science Fiction cinema. Director Stanley Kubrick takes us into the future, into outer space and aboard a spacecraft that’s controlled by a seemingly trustworthy computer named HAL.

One of the few Brakhage films featuring spoken dialogue and a central character, this sly and bitter polemic pits an actor (poet? director?) against an unseen audience. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2007.

“A silent perusal of the Grand Canyon, morning to night, from a single, fixed camera position, by means of constant dissolves spaced a few seconds apart. Man — entirely absent — is no longer the center of the universe; the canyon exists outside of him. Despite the invisible photographer and his technologically-caused dissolves, this is a credita...

Variations on the cultural and intellectual explosion in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district in 1946.

A young woman meets a vital young man, but their love affair is doomed because of the man's materialistic nature.

The Pier / La Jetee is a masterpiece from French director Chris Marker from 1962. A post apocalyptic science fiction short film in the form of a photo collage. The film inspired the film ’12 Monkeys.’

A group of dwarves at a correctional facility revolt and gradually descend into anarchy and chaos.

Goalkeeper Josef Bloch is ejected during a game for foul play. He leaves the field and goes to spend the night with a cinema cashier.

At a weekend gathering, a man tells a woman that they had spent time there together a year prior. But, the woman has no recollection whatsoever and is convinced that he is simply fabricating the encounter. The more he speaks about their activities the previous year however, the more compelling he becomes. The question remains however – did they ...

Fascinating -- and unintentionally funny -- experiments at Austria's famed Institute for Experimental Psychology involve a subject who for several weeks wears special glasses that reverse right and left and up and down. Unexpectedly, these macabre and somehow surrealist experiments reveal that our perception of these aspects of vision is not of ...

Paul, a young idealist trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life, takes a job interviewing people for a marketing research firm. He moves in with aspiring pop singer Madeleine. Paul, however, is disillusioned by the growing commercialism in society, while Madeleine just wants to be successful. The story is told in a series of 15 unr...

Nothing happens and everything happens-- in the simplest of experiences there is a complexity and a vitality unknown and unfelt until the moment when we begin to let its wonder filter into us and flow through our bodies, our minds and our souls. When that happens the ordinary world becomes extraordinary-- the magic of the universe is within each...

In a desolate, destroyed landscape - bearing now irrelevant traces of technological society - a man and a boy try to find their way under a fierce sun.

In ancient Japan a crime take place as told from three different travelers who have experienced the crime: a man being killed and his wife being raped. Which if any of the stories is true? A Akira Kurosawa film about morals, truth, and communication.

Emshwiller made this film on a Ford Foundation grant, and in his original proposal to the Ford Foundation, he outlined the film as "something that deals with subjective reality, the emotional sense of what one's perception of the total environment is -- sexual, physical, social, time, space, life, death."

As the city of Paris and the French people grow in consumer culture, a housewife living in a high-rise apartment with her husband and two children takes to prostitution to help pay the bills.

Zorns Lemma is a 1970 American structuralist film by Hollis Frampton. It is named after Zorn's lemma (also known as the Kuratowski–Zorn lemma), a proposition of set theory formulated by mathematician Max Zorn in 1935. Zorns Lemma is prefaced with a reading from an early grammar textbook. The remainder of the film, largely silent, shows the viewe...

A supposedly idyllic weekend trip to the countryside turns into a never-ending nightmare of traffic jams, revolution, cannibalism and murder as French bourgeois society starts to collapse under the weight of its own consumer preoccupations.

Why Not is hypnotic, compulsive and claustrophobic. It is bathed in a cold, pervasive eroticism, which, oblique and displaced at first, finally becomes explicit in one of the most bizarre masturbation sequences ever filmed. For almost two hours, we observe a young, strikingly pretty girl, nude most of the time and alone in an apartment, engaged ...

After a man kills two members of his Yukon gold prospecting team, the other two surviving members struggle to keep him subdued for the next several months until they can turn him over to the law.

Workers in a factory in pre-revolutionary Russia go on strike and are met by violent suppression.

During the agrarian collectivization process in the Soviet Union, Vasyl, a peasant member of the youth division of the Communist Party, gets a tractor with the help of a local party organization and plows private boundaries on kulak fields. However, this enthusiasm will cost him dearly.

In 1918 a young and simple Mongol herdsman and trapper is cheated out of a valuable fox fur by a European capitalist fur trader. Ostracized from the trading post, he escapes to the hills after brawling with the trader who cheated him. In 1920 he becomes a Soviet partisan, and helps the partisans fight for the Soviets against the occupying Britis...

Set in the bleak aftermath and devastation of the World War I, a recently demobbed soldier, Timosh, returns to his hometown Kiev, after having survived a train wreck. His arrival coincides with a national celebration of Ukrainian freedom, but the festivities are not to last as a disenchanted.

A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.

A peasant comes to St. Petersburg to find work. He unwittingly helps in the arrest of an old friend who is now a labor leader. The unemployed man is arrested and sent to fight in World War I. After three years, he returns to rebel.

Okjabre was supposed to create a film about the tenth anniversary of the Russian October Revolution yet he created a lot more than just that; through historical montages Director Eisenstein created a part documentary part intellectual film.

A series of disjointed mythical tales set in first-century Rome.

Stan and Ollie play door-to-door Christmas tree salesmen in California. They end up getting into an escalating feud with grumpy would-be customer James Finlayson, with his home and their car being destroyed in the melee.

In the Clutches of the Gang is a 1914 movie starring Ford Sterling and George Nichols.

Francis, a young man, recalls in his memory the horrible experiences he and his fiancée Jane recently went through. Francis and his friend Alan visit The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, an exhibit where the mysterious doctor shows the somnambulist Cesare, and awakens him for some moments from his death-like sleep.

A Korean man is sentenced to death in Japan but somehow survives his execution, sending the authorities into a panic about what to do next.

After a fight in their apartment, the story of a writer and a painter are divided. The writer is dedicated with his partner Manon to provoke continuous accidents in a field in which car carcasses abound. The painter is recruited to kill, through a poisoned picture, the old Arden to allow the latter's wife, Alice to live with her lover Mosbie.

Avant Garde piece from Carmelo Bene. A series of vignettes drive a whirl of sounds, images and poetry - is it horror, is it comedy, make your own mind up.

Mathias Pascal, only son of a once-rich family, marries beautiful Romalinda, who has a terrible mother-in-law. She controls her daughter, and soon his home life becomes a nightmare. His only moments of lights are his mother and baby, but both die on the same day. Shocked, he leaves his hometown and goes to Monte Carlo, where he wins a fortune at...

Relatives gather at a haunted mansion for a will reading where the sole heir is threatened by a clause that could disinherit her if she goes mad, all while a homicidal maniac escapes nearby.

In 1930s Prague, a Czech cremator who firmly believes cremation relieves one from earthly suffering is drawn inexorably to Nazism.

A man and his female helper lather a blindfolded woman's naked body with various foodstuffs.

During Spanish Civil War, young Fando navigates parents' clashing ideologies after father's arrest. Explores his imagination, friendships, views on sex and death amid family upheaval. Questions mother, seeks father's fate.

Although best known for his photography, Steven Arnold also wrote, designed, and directed several groundbreaking visionary films, The Liberation of Mannique Mechanique being the first. Stuart Comer of the Tate Modern (London) said of Mannique: “a macabre, decadent work presenting mannequins and models that travel through strange universes toward...

A short film which documents Dutch artist Karel Appel working in his studio.

An abstract animation about people and organs of the body in and out of drawers.

Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí present 16 minutes of bizarre, surreal imagery.

Short experimental film by Swiss filmmaker Robert Schär.

In Luis Buñuel’s deliciously satiric masterpiece, an upper-class sextet sits down to dinner but never eats, their attempts continually thwarted by a vaudevillian mixture of events both actual and imagined.

A short experimental film by (Carl Th. Dreyer's cinematographer) Jørgen Roos and surrealist painter Wilhelm Freddie.

A meditation on eating people and quiet waitresses.

Animated Short

The misfortune of a young man who tries to keep a rendezvous and finds himself a prisoner in a bell.