Amos Vogel's Film as a Subversive Art

Assisted by a nun, a man gorges on a large amount of food and then vomits it back.

Firewalkers records a traditional Greek rite which, now Christianized, goes back to the ancient Orphic Mysteries of Thrace: walking barefoot on burning charcoal without pain or burning.

Two boys beg their parents for a television set, nagging them until all patience is lost. The parents order the boys to be quiet and the boys do exactly that--refusing to utter a word. The boys' silence ultimately puts the whole neighborhood into turmoil.

A group of men hire some prostitutes and go to a villa in the countryside. There, they engage in group sex and resolve to eat themselves to death.

At the Esalen Institute in California, group therapy sessions are held in the seventies, led by doctor William Schutz, who was also founder of the institute and author of the books Joy and Here Comes Everybody. The idea - then more revolutionary than now - was that people in group therapy could lose their stress and anxieties by confronting them...

Set in a leper colony in the north of Iran, The House is Black juxtaposes "ugliness," of which there is much in the world as stated in the opening scenes, with religion and gratitude.

Although the critics in 1922 didn’t find the film to be anything special, a few years after it’s release it was called innovative and a landmark in cinema history. German director Murnau’s vampire film holds claim to one of the most, if not the most important German expressionist film and a foundation for horror films.

In a small English village everyone suddenly falls unconscious. When they awake every woman of child bearing age is pregnant. The resulting children have the same strange blond hair, eyes and a strong connection to each other.

While her son, Kichi, is away at war, a woman and her daughter-in-law survive by killing samurai who stray into their swamp, then selling whatever valuables they find. Both are devastated when they learn that Kichi has died, but his wife soon begins an affair with a neighbor who survived the war, Hachi. The mother disapproves and, when she can't...

Carol is a young beauty parlor worker who falls into violent paranoia (including terrifying hallucinations) over a weekend. This classic psychological thriller by Roman Polanski still holds up today.

A documentary portrait shot in Positano, Italy in 1965 about Australian artist and occultist Vali Myers.

Filmed over five weeks at the Warrendale residential treatment center near Toronto, "Warrendale" observes twelve emotionally disturbed children and the staff who care for them. Working without narration, interviews, or direction, Allan King records daily life as it unfolds, establishing what he later described as “actuality drama.”

Lord Shiva wakes. A convocation of magicians in the guise of figures from mythology; a masquerade party at which Pan is the prize. The wine of Hecate is poured: Pan's cup is poisoned by Shiva. Kali blesses the assembly as a bacchic rite ensues.

Les Vampires is a 10-part silent film serial. It was written and directed by Louis Feuillade and stars Musidora as "Irma Vep" a femme fatale whose name is a suspicious anagram of "vampire." The serial is set in Paris, France and follows the exploits of a gang of master criminals who call themselves "Les Vampires."

A small-town doctor learns that the population of his community is being replaced by emotionless alien duplicates.

A circus' beautiful trapeze artist agrees to marry the leader of side-show performers, but his deformed friends discover she is only marrying him for his inheritance.

Vomit-filled short film by British filmmaker Nicholas Gosling.

An apocalyptic vision of man after a cosmic catastrophe, this film is a terrifying metaphor of a dehumanized future. The Brazilian Cinema Novo, German expressionism of the twenties, and the ideologically motivated ‘cruelty’ of a Buñuel come together in this ferocious work of a French theatre collective – an ambitious, almost completely successfu...

Saturday Morning by Kent Mackenzie

Haxan is a study about how superstition and the misunderstanding of diseases and mental illness could lead to the hysteria of the witch-hunts. The film was made as a documentary but contains dramatized sequences that are comparable to horror films.

Documentary on a religious practice in the Puglia region of Italy whereby women assert that they have been bitten by a tarantula and dance until they are exorcised of the poison.

One of the most shocking documentary films ever made. A young anti-war American, to avoid the draft, calmly aims a rifle at his foot and shoots. For several endless minutes, he thrases about the floor in unbearable pain, in his own blood. Preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2012.

Allures is a spectacular sequence of moving figures and points, a film which reaches out to the cosmic and the spiritual, where the spatial dimension becomes transcendental.

This short follows Lennon and Ono as they take a hot-air balloon ride over snow-covered countryside.

Harry Munter, a sensitive, kind, appealing man in his twenties, lives with his parents. He's an inventor, a bit of a mystic, maybe a genius, and a good son and grandson. He's offered work in the U.S. But a friend has cancer and the world is changing in ways that provoke profound sadness. Written by Eileen Berdon

St. Francis of Assisi sends his followers into the world to spread God's word.

Life changes for a Moscow couple after they allow an old friend of the husband’s to move in.

The title of this Canadian documentary may have some relation to Canadian Marshall McLuhan's theories. It combines interview with famous U.S. militants of the '60s, such as Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, with reenactments of their Chicago trials (i.e., the "Chicago Eight," etc.). Other figures of cultural interest from the time, including Alan G...

Documentary of a jazz drummer giving a lesson to one of his female students.

Boscavia is a very rugged region. It is peopled by nit-witted soldiers, of moronic officers and of common people who try hard to go straight - to their tombs.

Three actors in Hollywood live and love together. A director comes from New York to make a movie about actors and Hollywood.

After adopting a hippie lifestyle, a man finds his home life enhanced while becoming isolated at work.

Footage shot in and around the Sahara Desert, accompanied only by a spoken creation myth and the songs of Leonard Cohen.

The human eye, the human form, the human face: these are the three central images of this avant-garde collage and kaleidoscope of shifting and fractured images, changing colors, and pulsing rhythms. Near the end, a tree appears briefly, and birds fly - first white, then red and blue. Celtic knots morph from one to another. The images become Rors...

In this powerful abstract film with a soundtrack of African drum music, Lye scratched "white ziggle-zag-splutter scratches" on to black leather, using a variety of tools from saw teeth to arrow heads. The first version of the film won a major award at the International Experimental Film Festival Held in Brussels in 1958 in association with the W...

Teenagers Glen and Randa are members of a tribe that lives in a rural area, several decades after nuclear war has devastated the planet. They know nothing of the outside world, except that Glen has read about and seen pictures of a great city in some old comic books. He and Randa set out to find this city.

A Hard Day’s Night is named after the successful Beatles album of the same name. The film tells in a mocking style the life of the modern pop stars. The film shows the Beatles at the height of their career as they move between hotel rooms, trains, and concerts.

James Whitney’s Lapis (1966) is a classic work of abstract cinema, a 10-minute animation that took three years to create using primitive computer equipment. In this piece smaller circles oscillate in and out in an array of colors resembling a kaleidoscope while being accompanied with Indian sitar music. The patterns become hypnotic and trance in...

Short experimental film by Shelby Kennedy

At least forty films have been made about the Living Theatre; it remained to the American underground filmmaker Sheldon Rochlin (previously responsible for the marvellous Vali) to make the 'definitive' film about one of the most famous of their works, Paradise Now, shot in Brussels and at the Berlin Sportpalast. Made on videotape, with expressio...

Short experimental film by Robert Frerck.

Samadhi is both mystical and mysterious, an incredible fusion of movement, sound and colour. Belson notes the influence of his study and practice of Yoga and Tibetan Buddhism on the creation of Samadhi. The film is inspired by the principles of yogic meditation: the movement of consciousness towards samadhi (union of subject and object), the fus...

Based on an incident in the life of Beat icon Neal Cassady and his wife, the painter Carolyn, the film tells the story of a railway brakeman whose wife invites a respected bishop over for dinner. However, the brakeman's Bohemian friends crash the party, with comic results. Pull My Daisy is a film that typifies the Beat Generation. Directed by Ro...

James Broughton's creation myth, THIS IS IT, places a 2-year-old Adam and a bright apple-red balloon in a backyard garden of Eden, and works a small miracle of the ordinary. And since that miracle is what his film is about, he achieves a kind of casual perfection in matching means and ends.

A film exploration of the work and aesthetic concepts of Yayoi Kusama, painter, sculptor, and environmentalist, conceived in terms of an intense emotional experience with metaphysical overtones, an extension of my ultimate interest in a total fusion of the arts in a spirit of mutual collaboration. —Jud Yalkut

Woodstock is a 1970 documentary on the Woodstock Festival that took place in August 1969 at Bethel in New York. Entertainment Weekly called this film the benchmark of concert movies and one of the most entertaining documentaries ever made.

People quietly or mischievously pass the time in an overgrown garden full of statues, while a puritanical, funereal gentleman posts bills prohibiting all leisure activities.

Straw Dogs is an American thriller from director Sam Peckinpah from 1971. Dustin Hoffman stars as a mathematician who faces a ruthless revenge of pressing power.

Stop-motion photography blends with extreme slow-motion in Clair's first and most 'dada' film, composed of a series of zany, interconnected scenes. We witness a rooftop chess match between Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, a hearse pulled by a camel (and chased by its pallbearers) and a dizzying roller coaster finale. A film of contradictions and agre...