experimental films list

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The 30+ Best Experimental Movies

Welcome to the captivating realm of films that challenge conventions, play with form and substance, and provoke discussion. Our expertly-curated Ranker list serves as your guide to the best controversial experimental films that captivated the audience and redefined cinematic storytelling. Wielded by visionary directors, these films push the boundaries, disrupt common tropes, and invoke powerful reactions.

Rooted in an experimental and provocative ethos, these films are loaded with unique narrative styles, expressive visual language, and characters that defy the mainstream cinema. From surreal dreamscapes to disquieting realities, the chosen films encapsulate a wide range of topics and themes, making this a versatile list that caters to diverse tastes.

Compare films and dive into the nuances by leveraging our user-friendly interface. Learn about each film's vivid descriptions, key cast members, and notable facts. Enrich your movie watching experience and engage in enlightening conversations as you explore the world of controversial experimental cinema.

Gain instant access to your preferred films with our integrated streaming service buttons. Whether you are a subscriber of Netflix, Disney+, Max, Hulu, Paramount+, or Amazon Prime, our website offers seamless navigation to your streaming platform of choice. Each film entry harbors clickable buttons redirecting to the movie on the above-mentioned platforms, ready to be streamed at your convenience.

Revel in the rich diversity this list offers, from psychological dramas to outlandish horror, each film's distinct style and daring narrative brings something new to the table. Connect with the Ranker community, gather insights, and join the ongoing debate on these ground-breaking films.

Our Ranker list stands as a testament to cinema's transformative power. Unveiling stories that stay with the audience, these controversial experimental films beckon to the curious and the adventurous. Join others in discovering unexplored cinematic territory and find your next watching experience here on Ranker. Delve deeper, explore further, and embrace the power of experimental films.

Seven Servants

Released : 1996
Directed by : Daryush Shokof

Seven Servants is a masterclass in experimental cinema that effortlessly melds together unconventional storytelling techniques with striking visual aesthetics to create an unparalleled viewing experience. The film's intricate story structure challenges traditional notions of linear storytelling, taking viewers on an immersive journey filled with unexpected twists and turns. Its breathtaking cinematography further accentuates the captivating atmosphere created by this remarkable piece of artistry. Combining these elements with thought-provoking themes exploring power dynamics and human relationships, Seven Servants truly transcends cinematic norms to stand as an extraordinary example of innovative filmmaking.

Released : 2013

Flushers is an avant-garde masterpiece that skillfully pushes the boundaries of conventional storytelling and filmmaking techniques. This experimental gem showcases a bold vision, utilizing daring themes and innovative visual styles to challenge viewers' perception of cinema. With its striking imagery and unconventional story structure, Flushers takes audiences on a surreal journey through uncharted territories, constantly defying expectations while leaving an indelible mark on the world of film. The groundbreaking directorial approach ensures that this enigmatic work stands as a testament to the limitless potential for artistic expression within the medium.

Released : 2006

Asudem presents an intriguing amalgamation of visceral horror elements and provocative thematic underpinnings. This visionary piece redefines genre conventions by employing cutting-edge visual styles and story devices to create an immersive experience like no other. Through its evocative blend of nightmarish imagery, disturbing symbolism, and thoughtfully constructed plotlines, Asudem offers a startling exploration into the darkest recesses of human nature. With its unrelenting intensity and masterful filmmaking prowess, this standout work leaves a lasting impact on viewers long after the credits have rolled.

Released : 2007

Breathful is an enthralling tour de force in experimental cinema that successfully marries exceptional visual innovation with audacious thematic explorations. The film's distinct style lends itself to a hypnotic viewing experience, as viewers are drawn into the labyrinthine story that defies traditional expectations. The daring directorial choices and sublime cinematography create an unparalleled atmosphere of intrigue, ensuring that Breathful remains a fascinating example of boundary-pushing cinema. This artistic triumph is sure to captivate film aficionados and casual viewers alike with its unyielding ambition and visionary execution.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Released : 1972
Directed by : Luis Buñuel

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie stands tall as a groundbreaking entry in experimental cinema, thanks to its inventive blend of biting social commentary and surreal storytelling techniques. This acclaimed work showcases masterful craftsmanship in both its screenplay and visual presentation, resulting in an unforgettable cinematic journey that keeps viewers riveted from start to finish. With its subversive exploration of bourgeois society's hypocrisies and contradictions, this scathing satire delves deep into the human psyche while challenging long-held societal norms. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie undoubtedly serves as a shining example of experimental filmmaking at its finest.

# 350 of 675 on The Best Movies Roger Ebert Gave Four Stars
# 172 of 426 on The Greatest Movies in World Cinema History
# 24 of 74 on The Best Oscar-Winning Foreign Language Films

An Andalusian Dog

Released : 1929

An Andalusian Dog remains an undisputed classic within the realm of experimental cinema, boasting an impressive legacy that continues to inspire filmmakers today. As one of the earliest examples of surrealist film, this groundbreaking masterpiece effortlessly blurs the lines between reality and fantasy through its dreamlike imagery and unconventional story structure. Its provocative themes exploring human desire, fear, and obsession are expertly woven throughout each frame, sustaining a palpable tension that leaves viewers enthralled long after their initial viewing experience has ended. Timeless in its avant-garde vision, An Andalusian Dog undeniably remains an essential piece within any cinephile's collection.

# 17 of 86 on The Best Silent Movies of All Time
# 61 of 97 on The Best French Movies That Are Absolute Masterpieces
# 272 of 426 on The Greatest Movies in World Cinema History

The 50 Greatest Experimental Films

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Top 10 Experimental Films to Watch Right Now

The experimental film genre goes back as far as film history takes us. One of the first experimental films was done by Thomas Edison’s assistant, William Dickson, on the kinetoscope called “Monkeyshines No. 1” around 1889 or 1890. In fact, you could say all early silent cinema was experimental as the filmmakers were literally figuring out how to use the camera and editing to tell a story or use it to express or explore dreamlike visual art.

Out of experimental film came many new offshoots of the genre. One of the more prominent ones was avant-garde, which usually has no conventional point to them and focuses on exploring innovative and creative issues such as time, fantasy, dreams, or perception. The German silent film classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is one of the more famous early examples of dreams or perception.

Today, the genre has given birth to other offshoots, such as cinematic poetry and the cinematic diary, akin to the works of the late great Jonas Mekas. Even the experimental documentary has been around longer than viewers realize; the city symphony films are an early example or, more recently, Guy Maddin’s “My Winnipeg.”

Pulling from experimental film history and more recent works, here are ten experimental films you should watch.

Related: 10 Sci-Fi Short Films That Will Give You The Creeps

10 “Un Chien Andileu” (1929)

This is many film students’ introduction to experimental film. The French title translates to “An Andalusian Dog” and has nothing to do with the film itself. Crafted by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, this silent surrealist journey uses dream logic to construct a non-narrative that is very Freudian in its design and meant to be shocking.

The film’s concept is actually a mix of two dreams that both the creators had—Dali’s hand covered in ants and Bunuel cutting an eye with a blade. When watched, the film invokes unease in that you are trying to make sense of a dream and can’t. Our brains try to find something relatable in the film and sometimes can’t. When we do feel some sort of connection, it’s a completely different interpretation, which is what the filmmakers wanted. They wanted to leave you thinking and trying to make sense of it. They know you can’t exactly be just like a piece of surreal art; it’s always up for debate without any true solution.

This is what makes “Un Chien Andileu” a must see for anyone interested in experimental film. [1]

9 “The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra” (1928)

This film is a silent-film hidden gem. The film was made for $97 in 1928, and in American avant-garde cinema is considered one of the early pillars in the genre.

It centers on an actor who makes his way to Hollywood hoping to hit the big time, only to be dehumanized by studios, landing the role of a simple extra. They even write 9413 on his head, making him just a number in their system.

What makes the film so unique is how they leaned into their budget with a lack of resources and visually gave Hollywood this surreal emptiness, something that people from the outside had not seen before depicted. The use of German expressionist lighting, superimposition, twisting shapes, and disorienting angles really makes the film memorable as it visually shows the actor’s descent into madness and death caused by the demeaning dark side of Hollywood. [2]

8 “Manhatta” (1921)

This film is considered to be the true first American avant-garde film by many. “Manhatta” was a collaboration between painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand. The non-narrative documentary is a visual poem that is simply exploring two things. First, it provided an abstract view of the city through carefully set up visual compositions. The second one is actually how the camera is used. This is done by experimenting with photography, film, minimalistic camera movement, and incidental motion in each film frame by exploring their relationships with each other.

Being a silent-era film, it does use intertitles, but unlike most films, it uses a Walt Whitman poem instead of dialogue or scene explanations. [3]

7 “From Afar” (2020)

An absolutely beautiful short film that will only take two minutes of your time. This is part of the cinematic poetry genre I mentioned earlier. Its simplicity and use of editing make it an experience that lingers.

Much like “The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra,” filmmaker and poet Andrei Purcarea uses what he has to his advantage to visually push the poem along. Many of the shots don’t have anything to do with what’s being said exactly when you watch, but at the same time, you get this feeling of understanding.

However, unlike “The Life and Death of 9413,” this film doesn’t have fast cuts or superimpositions. In fact, the editing and pacing are more akin to “Manhatta,” visually telling us a story to go along with the poem. Is this whole film really about a ship, or is it more about something in life that represents a ship we missed and can’t see anymore? What did the characters miss? Who did they miss? The use of the lone red chair and the mirror on this beach looking out at sea…very existential. Very experimental. Very moving. [4]

6 “Catharsis” (2018)

Catharsis (Experimental Short Film) | Sony FS7

This short film beautifully uses the experimental style to invoke emotion as we journey into the subject’s mind. It is a surreal reminder that we may not know what someone is going through, even if they seem calm on the outside. This film by Naleeka Dennis follows Marsha as she struggles to cope with the loss of her beloved by attempting to live in a fantasy world. But she must eventually deal with her grief.

The ending shot especially hammers this home as the world seems very eerie around her now. It was the same before we dove into her mind, but knowing what she is dealing with really changes your perspective. [5]

5 “Until There Was Nothing” (2020)

Sci-Fi Experimental Short Film: "Until There Was Nothing" | DUST

This wonderful short was released last year and really takes on a fantastic premise—standing on Earth in its final moments as it enters a black hole. Created by Paul Trillo, the images at first seem beautiful but suddenly change as they stretch toward the sky. While it may seem like a bleak film at first, Trillo notes, “Someday this will pass and there will be nothing left… That’s not something to fear ‘because we come from nothing’ as Alan Watts puts it… and from nothing comes something new.”

The surreal visuals caused by intense gravitational forces with the use of philosopher Alan Watt’s talking about the meaning of nothingness really gives the film a much deeper feel. [6]

4 “Stellar” (1993)

Stan Brakhage is the perfect mix of artist and filmmaker. With 380 films to his credit, it’s hard to choose which one to even pick. Brakhage’s work is unique and can be best described as live paintings. Meaning that he would paint or scratch or do something on each frame and then project it. The results were really mind-blowing. “Stellar” stands out to me as it feels like something that could’ve been used in early sci-fi films like 2001: A Space Odyssey or TV shows like the original Star Trek .

The last few frames are particularly surprising as a strange picture appears amongst the starry images. Like all art, “Stellar” is whatever you perceive it to be. For me, its a journey through space and the birth of the universes, with the first creature in the universe coming into being at the end. See how you interpret it. [7]

3 “Night Mayor” (2009)

A fantastic gem of a film. Guy Maddin’s visuals harken back to early silent film while giving a touch of modernity by filming on newer formats that even include VHS. Yet it’s his use of lighting, old-school tricks, and editing that really helps give this film its surreal aspect. Like we are watching a dream.

“Night Mayor” is a visual journey into the mind of a Bosnian immigrant, Nihad Ademi, who thinks he has discovered a way to harness the power of the Aurora Borealis in order to broadcast imagery from coast to coast. [8]

An absolute must-see short film!

2 “Light Is Calling” (2004)

Bill Morrison is an amazing filmmaker. He is unique in that he helps bring forgotten or close to decaying films back to life as experimental cinema. I highly suggest his film Decasia (2002) and Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016).

“Light Is Calling” is a short he did in 2004 in which he takes decaying nitrate film from 1926 titled “The Bells” and gives it new life.

After having the film optically reprinted, it is edited into a new format to go along with a 7-minute composition by Michael Gordon. IMDb describes the film best as a “meditation on the fleeting nature of life and love, as seen through the roiling emulsion of film.” [9]

A magnificent decaying dream.

1 “Meshes of the Afternoon” (1943)

Meshes of the Afternoon, Maya Deren, 1943. Soundtrack by Seaming (Commissioned by Birds Eye View)

Maya Deren was a jack of all trades. She was a dancer, choreographer, film theorist, poet, photographer, avant-garde promoter, and experimental filmmaker.

Deren believed that film should be an experience. “Meshes of the Afternoon” is definitely that—and a very important experimental piece. The film is considered one of the most influential experimental films in the history of American cinema.

The film is essentially a dream. Using dreamlike logic to create a unique experience for the viewer, it follows a female character who falls asleep after returning home. Her vivid dreams draw us in as her darker inner desires play out before our eyes. It’s actually hard to distinguish reality from the dream, but that is the point. She involves you mentally. [10]

A very influential piece on many filmmakers, including the works of David Lynch.

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Make Lists, Not War

The meta-lists website, best experimental and avant-garde films of all time.

I collected over 15 lists of best experimental films and best avant-garde films and compiled them into a single meta-list. The results are below: every film that is on at least three of the original source lists, organized by rank (that is, with the films on the most lists at the top). I have accepted the listmakers’ definitions of what is an experimental or avant-garde film, even though I may not always agree with them. For example, some of the films on this list appear to be mainstream films with experimental or avant-garde elements. I am surprised by the absence of Matthew Barney’s Cremaster cycle (1995-2002) and Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010) and disappointed that two of my favorite short films – Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray (1962) and Arthur Lipsett’s 21-87 (1963) – did not make the meta-list.

NOTE: Some of the films are available online. I have added links where available. Please note that not all of the soundtracks are original.

On 15 lists Meshes of the Afternoon (US, 1943) Dir: Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid

On 12 lists Un Chien Andalou (France, 1929) Dir: Luis Buñuel

On 10 lists Dog Star Man (US, 1961-1964) Dir: Stan Brakhage

On 9 lists La Jetée (France, 1962) Dir: Chris Marker

On 7 lists Man With a Movie Camera (USSR, 1929) Dir: Dziga Vertov

Eraserhead (US, 1977) Dir: David Lynch

On 6 lists Ballet Mécanique (France, 1924) Dir: Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy

Wavelength (Canada/US, 1967) Dir: Michael Snow

Koyaanisqatsi (US, 1982) Dir: Godfrey Reggio

On 5 lists The Seashell and the Clergyman (France, 1928) Dir: Germaine Dulac

L’Age d’Or (France, 1930) Dir: Luis Buñuel Rose Hobart (US, 1936) Dir: Joseph Cornell

Window Water Baby Moving (US, 1959) Dir: Stan Brakhage

Chelsea Girls (US, 1966) Dir: Andy Warhol & Paul Morrissey The Color of Pomegranates (USSR, 1969) Dir: Sergei Parajanov Blue (UK, 1993) Dir: Derek Jarman

On 4 lists Anémic Cinéma (France, 1926) Dir: Marcel Duchamp

Fireworks (US, 1947) Dir: Kenneth Anger

Scorpio Rising (US, 1963) Dir: Kenneth Anger

Pierrot le Fou (France, 1965) Dir: Jean-Luc Godard F for Fake (France/Iran/West Germany/US, 1973) Dir: Orson Welles Jeanne Dielman 23, Quai Du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (Belgium/France, 1975) Dir: Chantal Akerman Sans Soleil (France, 1983) Dir: Chris Marker Gummo (US, 1997) Dir: Harmony Korine As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (US, 2000) Dir: Jonas Mekas Waking Life (US, 2001) Dir: Richard Linklater Decasia: The State of Decay (US, 2002) Dir: Bill Morrison Inland Empire (France/Poland/US, 2006) Dir: David Lynch

On 3 lists Entr’acte (France, 1924) Dir: René Clair

A Page of Madness (Japan, 1926) Dir: Teinosuke Kinugasa

Ménilmontant (France, 1926) Dir: Dimitri Kirsanoff

The Blood of a Poet (France, 1930) Dir: Jean Cocteau At Land (US, 1944) Dir: Maya Deren

Anticipation of the Night (US, 1958) Dir: Stan Brakhage A Movie (US, 1958) Dir: Bruce Conner

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x248brc Flaming Creatures (US, 1963) Dir: Jack Smith Empire (US, 1964) Dir: Andy Warhol Daisies (Czechoslovakia, 1966) Dir: Věra Chytilová Report (US, 1967) Dir: Bruce Conner

Serene Velocity (US, 1970) Dir: Ernie Gehr The Hart of London (Canada, 1970) Dir: Jack Chambers

(Nostalgia) (US, 1971) Dir: Hollis Frampton

La Région Centrale (Canada, 1971) Dir: Michael Snow The Act of Seeing with One’s Own Eyes (US, 1971) Dir: Stan Brakhage The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (France/Italy/Spain, 1972) Dir: Luis Buñuel The Mirror (USSR, 1975) Dir: Andrei Tarkovsky The Last of England (UK/West Germany, 1987) Dir: Derek Jarman Begotten (US, 1989) Dir: E. Elias Merhige Tetsuo: The Iron Man (Japan, 1989) Dir: Shin’ya Tsukamoto Pi: Faith in Chaos (US, 1998) Dir: Darren Aronofsky Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (US, 1998) Dir: Terry Gilliam Histoire(s) du cinéma (France, 1989-1999) Dir: Jean-Luc Godard Outer Space (Austria, 1999) Dir: Peter Tscherkassky Russian Ark (Russia, 2002) Dir: Alexander Sokurov At Sea (US, 2007) Dir: Peter Hutton Enter the Void (France/Germany/Italy/Canada/Japan, 2009) Dir: Gaspar Noé Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Thailand, 2010) Dir: Apichatpong Weerasethakul Goodbye to Language (France, 2014) Dir: Jean-Luc Godard

What is Experimental Film — History, Examples & Movements

W hat is an experimental film? This elusive and niche genre can be difficult to define, and there are many common misconceptions about experimental filmmaking, but we’ll be sorting through the fact and the fiction to provide a comprehensive overview of what it means for a film to be “experimental”. We’ll get started with a definition, then dig deeper into experimental filmmaking as a genre, and finally close things out by taking a look at some notable examples.

Avant garde film definition

First, let’s define experimental film.

There are many film terms and phrases that could use simple definitions, and we’ve compiled them all in our ultimate guide to filmmaking terminology . You can also look up definitions for every genre of film in our ultimate guide to movie genres .

EXPERIMENTAL FILM DEFINITION

What is an experimental film.

An experimental film is a project bucks the trends of conventional cinema and pushes the medium of film in unexplored ways. The spectrum of experimental films is extremely broad; this genre encompasses a great many types of projects of varying lengths, styles, and goals.

There are experimental feature films, though more experimental projects have shorter runtimes. This is due in part to many experimental films being made for low budgets and/or the fact that the majority of experimental films are never intended for mainstream appeal or traditional distribution.

AVANT GARDE FILM CHARACTERISTICS

Can be any length
Niche and often artsy
Pushes boundaries and tries new things

Experimental filmmakers

Digging deeper into experimental film.

Let’s dig a little deeper into what it means for a project to be classified as an experimental film. There is a modicum of debate over what exactly constitutes an experimental film, and some projects blur the line between traditional cinema and experimental filmmaking by including elements of each. Experimentation can be found in the editing, in the filming, in the subject matter, or in the manipulation of the camera and celluloid’s chemical and mechanical processes.

A beginner’s guide to experimental cinema

There are many misconceptions about what experimental filmmaking is, so let’s dispel a couple. One common belief is that experimental films have no story. While some experimental films certainly lack anything that could be considered a traditional narrative, that does not hold true for all experimental films.

Another commonly held notion is that experimental films are weird for the sake of being weird or that they are simply filmed nonsense. This is quite a reductive stance to take on the entire genre, but it is an opinion shared by many. The audience for experimental films can be extremely niche, and experimental filmmakers are aware of this. They are not made for everyone.

Surreal = experimental is another common misconception. Containing an element of surrealism does not automatically make a project experimental in nature. However, there is an intrinsic linkage between surrealism and experimental cinema, so the misconception is understandable. Let’s clarify this point with an example.

Sexy Beast • dream sequence

This dream sequence from the gangster flick Sexy Beast is undoubtedly surreal yet there is nothing experimental at play. The surrealism is conjured through traditional filmmaking means only. So, while surrealism and experimental cinema often go hand-in-hand, surrealism alone is not enough to constitute a film being labeled as experimental; the filmmaking methods and the pushing or warping of boundaries play important roles as well.

Read More: What is Surrealism →
Read More: How to Design a Surreal Film Score →
FREE: Break Down Scripts Using StudioBinder Software →

The history of experimental cinema

Experimental filmmaking over the years.

Since the first camera was invented , artists have been experimenting with the tool. At the dawn of cinema, everything was an experiment. It was only through the intervention of time that certain techniques and methods became standard.

While many of the techniques used in Voyage dans la Lune seem antiquated by modern filmmaking standards, they were absolutely boundary shattering way back in 1902. Radical experimentation was necessary to pull off so many things that had never before been seen or created in the medium of film.

A Trip to the Moon

As cinematic techniques improved and became seen as standards, there were still filmmakers willing to experiment and push the envelope. 1929’s Un Chien Andalou was an early masterpiece of both surrealism and experimental filmmaking. Many of the techniques used in Un Chien Andalou were experimental at the time but have since been integrated into more standard filmmaking techniques as the decades have passed. Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel were two master surrealists and played an important role in the common linkage between surrealism and experimentation through their boundary pushing methods.

Un Chien Andalou

By the 1940s, surrealism and experimental filmmaking were further linked through the work of Maya Deren. Over time, she has proven to be one of the most influential experimental filmmakers of all time. She created a number of experimental short films, the first of which, Meshes of the Afternoon , is often credited as a turning point for experimental and avant garde cinema. The short remains a highlight of the genre more than 70 years after it was first released.

If you are interested in making your own short films, check out our how to make a short film guide first.

Meshes of the Afternoon • Maya Deren

Andy Warhol is a name well known in the pop art world, but he made numerous contributions to the experimental film world as well. Warhol made nearly 150 experimental short films throughout his lifetime, and a number of them made throughout the 1960s were considered important contributions to the form. Below is a compilation of six of Warhol’s shorts made between 1964 and 1966.

Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests

David Lynch is perhaps the most well-known filmmaker to consistently experiment in his films. He earned a spot on our list of the best directors of all time . Some Lynch projects explore a blend between experimental cinema and traditional filmmaking, while other Lynch projects comfortably fall into the “wholly experimental” category. Since his debut feature in 1977 with Eraserhead , Lynch has continued to employ experimental techniques in his feature films to this day. A significant degree of Eraserhead’s experimentation can be found in the atmospheric sound design . Listen closely to the trailer below.

Eraserhead • trailer

Now that we’ve explored a brief history of experimental filmmaking, let’s see if we can sort experimental films into a few distinct categories.

Experimental film examples

Types of experimental films.

Though experimental films in general can be a bit difficult to categorize as they defy convention by their very nature, there are a few common types we can examine from a bird’s eye view . The first type is: experimental films that challenge the form of filmmaking . This includes projects that defy the expectation of what a film is and manipulate the creation process, like Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man .

Dog Star Man • complete

This piece of experimental filmmaking was originally produced as four shorts before being compiled as a singular project. Dog Star Man is often hailed as an experimental masterpiece and was made through various manipulations to the film stock, experimenting with different exposure types, and radical editing techniques.

Another film that lands in the “challenges the form” category is Derek Jarman’s Blue . This one-hour-19-minute experimental film features just a single, unchanging visual for the entire duration: a solid blue screen. An intricately orchestrated audio track underscores the static visual, and the two combine to form a highly emotional experience.

Blue • Derek Jarman

Our next type of experimental film is the experimental documentary . Check out our list of the best documentaries to set a baseline for traditional documentary filmmaking before we jump into the experimental side of the genre. This experimental category encompasses projects like the nearly century old Soviet-produced Man With a Movie Camera . The full documentary is available to watch below.

Man With a Movie Camera

Another experimental documentary found in this category comes from none other than Orson Welles with For for Fake . This documentary, essay-film hybrid blurs the lines between fact and fiction in a fascinating way.

F for Fake Video Essay

Experimental Animation is a tried and true category of experimental filmmaking with many worthwhile and envelope pushing entries. Again, you can set a baseline for the non-experimental side of this genre by checking out our list of the best animated films ever made . As for the experimental side of the medium, first, we can return to David Lynch for his contribution to the category.

Six Men Getting Sick

The above short film, Six Men Getting Sick , was David Lynch’s very first foray into filmmaking. He began his journey into the arts as a painter, and you can see him bridging the gap with this painted filmmaking experiment.

For further examples of experimental animation, we can look to the Quay Brothers. Their shorts utilize a dreamy blend of stop-motion animation and puppetry. A number of their shorts are in the criterion collection; here is a highlight reel for four of their shorts.

Criterion teaser for the Quay Brothers

And for one last example of experimental animation found in a recent film, we can look to 2018’s German-Chilean production La Casa Lobo . Sculpture, stop-motion, traditional animation, and other artistic techniques were blended together in jaw dropping fashion that utilized life-size sets and dizzying camerawork. This experimental production pushes the boundaries of animation and accomplishes things never before seen in the medium. It gives the absolute best stop-motion films a run for their money.

The Wolf House • trailer

Experimental filmmaking remains alive and well in the modern filmmaking age. As long as there are boundaries left to push, filmmakers will continue to experiment.

What Was Dogme 95?

If you’re interested in experimental filmmaking, the Dogme 95 cinematic vow of chastity makes a fascinating case study into a radical filmmaking experiment. Learn about the movement, why and how it was created, the films that comprise it, and more, up next.

Up Next: What was Dogme 95? →

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Top 100 Experimental Films - SCFZ Poll

The second in our series of genre polls at the SCFZ film forum covered experimental film. As in our other polls, voters were free to decide for themselves which films qualified as "experimental". The list extends to 102 films because of ties.

note - some films (e.g. Dog Star Man ) received votes as one film, but are broken into parts in the letterboxd db. I just chose a representative part to list below.

Top Ten: 1. Outer Space (Peter Tscherkassky, 1999) 2. Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943) 3. Fire in Castilla (Jose Val del Omar, 1961) 4. At Sea (Peter Hutton, 2007) 5. Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967) 6. Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) 7. Thunder (Takashi Ito, 1982) 8. Window Water Baby Moving (Stan Brakhage, 1959) 9. Un Chien Andalou (Luis Bunuel, 1929) 10. Entr’acte (Rene Clair, 1924)

More polls coming soon - everyone is welcome to join us:

w11.zetaboards.com/The_Auteurs/index/

Our previous Genre Polls:

Westerns: letterboxd.com/fliptrotsky/list/top-100-westerns-scfz-poll/

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Ten Masterpieces of Experimental Cinema

The following list by Justin Remes, author of Motion(less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis and the forthcoming Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing Nothing , considers ten canonical experimental films. You can also watch the films below.

• • • • • •

“I don’t like experimental films.”

“What experimental films have you seen?”

“Well, I’m not sure I’ve ever really seen one, but…”

I’ve had this conversation more times than I can count.

While almost everyone has seen avant-garde paintings by Picasso and Pollock, few have ever had the opportunity to see an avant-garde film by Buñuel or Brakhage. Those who are interested in exploring this cinematic terrain might want to check out one or more of the following films, listed in chronological order. Since experimental films are often difficult to find, I have only included works that can currently be seen in high-quality versions online.

Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, Un Chien Andalou ( An Andalusian Dog ) (1929) (16 minutes) (NSFW)

In his autobiography, My Last Sigh , the great Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel wrote, “I’ve tried my whole life to simply accept the images that present themselves to me without trying to analyze them.” This is precisely how one should approach the bizarre and irrational images of Un Chien Andalou : an eyeball being sliced open by a razor, ants swarming out of a hole in a man’s hand, two corpses buried in sand on a beach. Buñuel and Dalí pair these bewildering images with a soundtrack that includes a couple of sensual tangos, as well as the magisterial “Liebestod” (or “love death”) from Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde . Un Chien Andalou is disturbing, disorienting, and startlingly original. Those who see it never forget it.

Walter Ruttmann, Wochenende ( Weekend ) (1930) (11 minutes)

To create this odd intermedia experiment, the German filmmaker Walter Ruttmann wandered through the streets of Berlin and recorded his surroundings with a camera without ever removing the lens cap. In other words, Wochenende features a complex sound collage of voices, marching bands, and sirens, but it is completely devoid of images. Instead, spectators are free to imagine whatever content they like on the blank cinema screen before them. In the words of the Dada artist Hans Richter, Wochenende is “a symphony of sound, speech-fragments, and silence woven into a poem.”

Joseph Cornell, Jack’s Dream (c. 1938) (4 minutes)

American artist Joseph Cornell was a pioneer of found footage filmmaking (that is, creating films by reworking content from preexisting films), and Jack’s Dream is one of his most compelling cinematic remixes. As one listens to the gorgeous strains of Debussy’s Clair de Lune , one sees a number of apparently disconnected images: a puppet show, seahorses, a sinking ship. Like many actual dreams, Jack’s Dream is ephemeral and enigmatic.

Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) (13 minutes)

Albert Einstein once wrote, “The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” It is hard to think of a more mysterious film than Meshes of the Afternoon , a dreamscape that is replete with haunting and cryptic images: a flower that transforms into a knife, a woman who pulls a key out of her mouth, a hooded figure with a mirror for a face. Deren influenced just about every American experimental filmmaker who came after her, prompting Stan Brakhage to call her “the mother of us all.”

Note: When Meshes of the Afternoon was originally released, it was completely silent, but in 1959 a musical score by Deren’s third husband, Teiji Ito, was added. The silent version of the film is more compelling than the sound version, however, so if the version you are watching has sound, I would encourage you to mute it.

Stan Brakhage, Window Water Baby Moving (1959) (12 minutes) (NSFW)

The filmmaker Marjorie Keller once mused, “I don’t know that there could be an avant-garde filmmaker in America that is not in some way indebted to Stan Brakhage, has not studied his films, has not thought about them and taken them seriously.” While Brakhage made over 350 films, one of his most memorable and influential is Window Water Baby Moving , a work that documents the birth of Stan and Jane Brakhage’s first child, Myrrena. Brakhage uses rapid nonlinear editing, out-of-focus shots, reverse motion, and jump cuts to capture just how frenetic and disorienting childbirth can be.

Kenneth Anger, Scorpio Rising (1963) (28 minutes) (NSFW)

In the early 1960s, pop artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol were revolutionizing the art world by appropriating images from popular culture: comic book characters, Hollywood celebrities, cans of Campbell’s soup. Kenneth Anger brought a similar sensibility to his film Scorpio Rising , a heady brew of religion, drugs, motorcycles, Nazis, and homoerotic sadomasochism. At a time when most filmmakers used classical music for their soundtracks, Anger used only contemporary pop songs, like Elvis Presley’s “You’re the Devil in Disguise” and Bobby Vinton’s “Blue Velvet.” Scorpio Rising is also populated with images drawn for popular culture: comic strip panels, gay pornography, and appropriated images of James Dean, Marlon Brando, Jesus, Dracula, and Hitler. One of Anger’s many acolytes, Martin Scorsese, confessed that when he first saw Scorpio Rising , he was “astonished”: “Every cut, every camera movement, every color, and every texture seemed, somehow, inevitable.”

Joyce Wieland, Cat Food (1967) (14 minutes)

Spectators of Cat Food hear crashing waves while watching Wieland’s insatiable cat, Dwight, voraciously eat fish. Whenever one fish starts to be consumed, another seems to miraculously appear. The film has a mythic quality, bringing to mind the New Testament story of Jesus feeding a crowd with only five loaves of bread and two fish, as well as the ancient Greek story of Prometheus, whose liver was eaten out by an eagle every day, only to regenerate and be eaten again. Films like Cat Food prompted Hollis Frampton to opine, “The thought of some Purgatory wherein I might be deprived of seeing Joyce Wieland’s films makes me regret my every sin and dereliction.”

Hollis Frampton, Carrots and Peas (1969) (5 minutes)

Carrots and Peas is a cinematic still life in which images of the titular vegetables are paired with the voice from an exercise film played in reverse. Early in the film, Frampton manipulates the imagery by flipping it upside down, adding a color filter, and painting the filmstrip itself. As the film continues, however, the interventions cease, and the viewer ends up staring at a single static image of carrots and peas for a prolonged period of time. Once this happens, one begins to notice details of the shot had originally escaped one’s attention: the indentations on individual peas, for example—or the way one carrot slice seems to be hiding from the others. Carrots and Peas is so odd and inexplicable, it makes me giggle with glee.

Norman McLaren, Synchromy (1971) (7 minutes)

To create this exuberant abstract film, McLaren photographed striated cards with colorful lines on them and placed them onto the film’s soundtrack to produce a series of specific pitches. McLaren then placed these same cards onto the film’s visual track, thus creating a precise synchronization of sound and image. The result is an orgy of color and sound, an exhilarating experiment in cinematic synesthesia.

Naomi Uman, removed (1999) (7 minutes) (NSFW)

Uman erases the women from an old pornographic film using nail polish and bleach, and the result is a provocative and playful deconstruction of cinema’s representational codes. Uman invites viewers to do whatever they want with these “holes.” One can attempt to “peek” at the women who are being erased (since they occasionally become visible, in whole or in part, for a split second). One can enjoy the absences as absences, taking pleasure in the film’s shimmering voids. Or one can fill in the blanks with one’s own desiderata. In the words of Claire Stewart, “The hole in the film becomes an erotic zone, a blank on which a fantasy body is projected.”

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The Best Avant-garde / Experimental Movies of the 2020s

Rank This Chart

Mad God https://www.flickchart.com/movie/3410841AB8 2021 , 83 min.

Phil Tippett • Starring: Alex Cox , Niketa Roman , Satish Ratakonda

Animation • Avant-garde / Experimental • Dystopian Film

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Skinamarink https://www.flickchart.com/movie/507CE67265 2022 , 100 min.

Kyle Edward Ball • Starring: Lucas Paul , Dali Rose Tetreault , Ross Paul

Avant-garde / Experimental • Found Footage Film • Horror

Fire (PoZar) https://www.flickchart.com/movie/88EEC34803 2020 , 11 min.

David Lynch

Animation • Avant-garde / Experimental • Short Film

Genius Loci https://www.flickchart.com/movie/47864566BA 2020 , 16 min.

Adrien Merigeau • Starring: Nadia Moussa , Georgia Cusack , Jina Djemba

Animation • Avant-garde / Experimental • Drama

Between the World and Me https://www.flickchart.com/movie/7DE575820B 2020 , 85 min.

Kamilah Forbes • Starring: Joe Morton , Angela Bassett , Angela Davis

Avant-garde / Experimental • Based-on-21st-Century-Literature • Based-on-Theatre

The Timekeepers of Eternity https://www.flickchart.com/movie/626AC7E866 2021 , 64 min.

Aristotelis Maragkos • Starring: Bronson Pinchot , David Morse , Kate Maberly

Animation • Avant-garde / Experimental • Horror

Her Socialist Smile https://www.flickchart.com/movie/8A138839D1 2020 , 93 min.

John Gianvito • Starring: Carolyn Forché , Noam Chomsky

Avant-garde / Experimental • Culture and Society • Documentary

Hold Me Tight https://www.flickchart.com/movie/18CCC0CE8F 2021 , 97 min.

Mathieu Amalric • Starring: Vicky Krieps , Arieh Worthalter , Anne-Sophie Bowen-Chatet

Avant-garde / Experimental • Drama • Family Drama

Homecoming - Marina Abramovic and Her Children https://www.flickchart.com/movie/FD5DB906F8 2020 , 83 min.

Boris Miljkovic • Starring: Marina Abramovic

Avant-garde / Experimental • Biography • Documentary

Cold Meridian https://www.flickchart.com/movie/481F92A217 2020 , 6 min.

Peter Strickland • Starring: Juli Jakab , Márton Kristóf , Máté Váth

Avant-garde / Experimental • Short Film

Rules of the Game https://www.flickchart.com/movie/0F3D0F2B95 2020 , 9 min.

Francesca Pazniokas • Starring: Jonina Thorsteinsdottir , Dante Jeanfelix , Rae Boyadjis

Avant-garde / Experimental • Female-Directed Film • Gay and Lesbian Film

April 2020 Paris https://www.flickchart.com/movie/8E978912B1 2020 , 9 min.

Lucca Dahan-Fletcher • Starring: Charlotte Gainsbourg , Pauline Chalamet , Camélia Jordana

Avant-garde / Experimental • Comedy Drama • Comedy

The Nose or Conspiracy of Mavericks https://www.flickchart.com/movie/7EF4B64C68 2020 , 89 min.

Andrey Khrzhanovskiy

Animation • Avant-garde / Experimental • Based-on-19th-Century-Literature

Oceano Mare https://www.flickchart.com/movie/4B0B45E521 2020 , 6 min.

Antoinette Zwirchmayr

Avant-garde / Experimental • Female-Directed Film • Short Film

Absent Now the Dead https://www.flickchart.com/movie/090F9043F6 2021 , 56 min.

Hamilton Sterling • Starring: Kieran Bew , John Hopkins , Charlie Hewson

Avant-garde / Experimental • Drama • Ghost Film

Intimate_Distances https://www.flickchart.com/movie/E1838D27CA 2020 , 61 min.

Phillip Warnell • Starring: Martha Wollner

Avant-garde / Experimental • Documentary

Circumstantial Pleasures https://www.flickchart.com/movie/0C7C8032AD 2020 , 65 min.

Lewis Klahr

Animation • Avant-garde / Experimental • Direct-to-Stream

6ft. https://www.flickchart.com/movie/096F06DB30 2021 , 9 min.

Francesca Pazniokas • Starring: Rae Boyadjis

Accidental Luxuriance of the Translucent Watery Rebus https://www.flickchart.com/movie/BABF10CFAE 2020 , 81 min.

Dalibor Baric • Starring: Rakan Rushaidat , Ana Vilenica , Frano Maskovic

Animation • Avant-garde / Experimental • Foreign Language Film

Ear for Eye https://www.flickchart.com/movie/6E97B72608 2021 , 88 min.

Debbie Tucker Green • Starring: Tosin Cole , Lashana Lynch , Danny Sapani

Avant-garde / Experimental • Based-on-Theatre • Drama

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What Is Experimental Film: The Essential Guide

What is an experimental film? It’s a question that deserves an answer. It may also be the phrase most likely used to describe films in the most pretentious and least helpful manner possible. But what does it actually mean?

Etymologically speaking, there’s nothing particularly experimental about “experimental film.” The word comes from the Latin word experimentum or “test,” and was initially used in chemistry in reference to scientific experiments.

However, it soon found its way into other scientific fields, as well as philosophy and mathematics. The concept of a “test” soon became associated with pushing boundaries, trying new things, and generally not taking the easy road.

This isn’t too far off from how we use it today. Experimental films are typically more concerned with form than content. They can eschew traditional narrative structure or display techniques that aren’t commonly seen in mainstream cinema.

What Is experimental film

What is experimental film.

Experimental film, also known as avant-garde film or underground film, describes a category of films that are often made outside of the mainstream commercial filmmaking industry.

The primary characteristic of experimental films is to focus on the exploration of new cinematic techniques and visual expression.

Experimental films are often either manipulated photographic images, collage films, short films , or a combination of all three.

Some feature abstract film techniques, sound manipulation, rapid changes in image size and style, or alternate frame rates. Some rely on mechanical devices that use optical effects such as mirrors.

Experimental film is a realm where filmmakers break free from conventional storytelling, exploring new narrative techniques and visual styles.

It’s where the norm is defied and creativity knows no bounds.

In our deep jump into the world of experimental cinema, we’ll uncover the essence of what makes a film ‘experimental’ and why these films are vital to the evolution of the cinematic arts.

We’ll explore the pioneers of this genre and their groundbreaking works that continue to inspire filmmakers and audiences alike.

Join us as we unravel the captivating elements of experimental film that challenge our perceptions and push the boundaries of what film can be.

Definition Of Experimental Film

When we jump into the essence of experimental film, we encounter a realm that transcends traditional storytelling.

These films are often characterized by their non-linear narratives and avant-garde aesthetic.

The very nature of experimental film defies easy categorization.

But, it’s essential to pinpoint certain elements that are hallmarks of this innovative genre:

A focus on the visual and auditory experience over conventional narrative structure,
The use of abstract or symbolic content to convey themes and emotions,
An emphasis on the filmmaker’s personal artistic vision.

Filmmakers in this space are liberated from the constraints of commercial filmmaking.

Their works are personal and can be seen as an extension of the artist’s thoughts and feelings.

One might argue that experimental film is akin to poetry in motion.

Like a poem, these films invite multiple interpretations and affect viewers on a deeply subjective level.

Groundbreaking experimental works like Meshes of the Afternoon challenge audiences to engage with the medium in a radically different way.

These films often require an active viewer – one who’s ready to piece together the story from a disjointed narrative or to find meaning in a seemingly unrelated sequence of images.

The landscape of experimental film is ever-changing and hard to pin down.

It’s a genre that’s constantly evolving as artists push the boundaries of what’s possible within the medium of film.

Breaking Free From Conventional Storytelling

In the vibrant world of experimental film, we find a refreshing liberation from traditional cinematic narratives.

Conventional plots, predictable character arcs, and the familiar three-act structure are eschewed in favor of a form that’s boundless and unconfined.

Filmmakers venturing into this domain aren’t just telling stories – they’re exploring the medium itself.

Every shot, cut, and sound in experimental cinema is an opportunity to innovate and communicate ideas and emotions beyond the scope of words.

Drawn to the possibilities of the canvas that is the screen, artists behind experimental films use their visual lexicon to create unique experiences.

Consider the powerful aesthetics in Meshes of the Afternoon , where the visual language speaks volumes, rendering dialogue almost unnecessary.

The hallmarks of experimental film often include –

Non-linear narratives – Innovative use of camera techniques and editing,
Emphasis on mood and tone over plot,
Abstract imagery to evoke a range of interpretations.

As filmmakers, our goal isn’t to simply entertain but to evoke, provoke, and question.

We aim to challenge the viewer’s perception and provide a cinematic experience that resonates on a deeper, often more personal level.

By deliberately stepping away from mainstream storytelling, experimental film opens up new horizons for cinematic expression.

The intersection of film and viewer in this arena is a space ripe for exploration, where the act of viewing becomes a participatory experience.

In embracing the experimental, we provide a counterpoint to the familiar, a contrast that often highlights the potential and elasticity of the film medium.

Audiences who step into the world of experimental film become part of a conversation – a dialogue between creator and consumer where the rules are rewritten with every frame.

Exploring New Narrative Techniques

In the world of experimental film, narrative takes on a form as malleable as clay.

We encounter stories that twist time, space, and reality to create something wholly unique.

Through various means – fragmented storylines , dream sequences , or unreliable narrator s – these films push the boundaries of how a story can be told.

One noteworthy approach to narrative is the use of hyperlink cinema .

Flicks like Babel or Syriana create a tapestry of interwoven story threads, connecting characters and events across different narratives.

This style mimics the interconnected nature of our digital world and offers a rich ground for exploration.

Experimental filmmakers often employ visual symbolism to convey meaning, sidelining traditional dialogue-driven plot development.

Consider The Tree of Life ; its visual sequences speak volumes without a single line of dialogue.

The essence of experimental narrative is to ask fundamental questions about cinema itself.

What are the limits of film?

How can we transcend them?

Such questions lead to techniques including:

Non-linear storytelling,
The use of montage to suggest rather than narrate,
Mixed media formats that combine film with animation, still photography, or digital effects.

In our quest to understand experimental cinema, we look to pieces like Enter the Void .

It’s a film that shatters conventional narrative structures, offering a sensory overload that defies easy description.

The narrative unfolds not as a straight line but as a spiral, looping and re-looping through a character’s life.

We examine how Dogville stretches the concept of a set to its limits.

The film unfolds on a nearly bare stage, challenging audiences to enrich the sparse visuals with their own imagination.

The journey into the heart of experimental narrative techniques is an ever-evolving adventure.

As we jump into more films, we unlock new ways to mold and understand the stories we tell.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZiqBTZMJ-b0

Pushing The Boundaries Of Visual Styles

We see experimental films as audacious art forms that dare to challenge and redefine the aesthetic norms of mainstream cinema.

They plunge into uncharted visual territories, often achieving a unique cinematic language that can be both perplexing and fascinating.

These artistic ventures frequently embrace a variety of unconventional visual styles.

We’ve observed a range of groundbreaking approaches in films like Enter the Void where neon-drenched visuals complement a narrative that defies linearity.

One significant trend within these films is the manipulation of color and light to create an emotional impact.

We consider The Fall a prime example, with its kaleidoscope of vibrant hues painting each frame to not just tell a story but evoke a visceral response.

Experimental filmmakers also experiment with:

Aspect ratios – altering the viewer’s perspective,
Camera techniques – embracing handheld or drone footage,
Post-production effects – using CGI to generate new realities.

By pushing these boundaries, film becomes more than storytelling; it becomes an immersive experience.

Under the Skin utilizes minimal dialogue paired with stark, haunting imagery to invite us deeper into the alien perspective of its protagonist.

Textures and patterns play an essential role as well.

They can transform the mundane into the extraordinary, like the intricate shadow play in The Cabinet of Dr.

Caligari, which still inspires filmmakers today.

Our exploration of experimental film reminds us that the medium is a canvas for innovation.

Each frame, with its meticulous composition and thoughtful design, can redefine what we consider possible in the art of filmmaking.

Pioneers Of Experimental Cinema

When we explore the origins of experimental film, it’s impossible to overlook the groundbreaking work of Maya Deren.

With her film Meshes of the Afternoon , she catapulted herself into the spotlight, setting a precedent for personal and avant-garde narrative structures in cinema.

She blazed a trail for filmmakers seeking to express complex subjects outside the confines of traditional storytelling.

Another luminary in the field was Luis Buñuel , whose collaboration with Salvador Dalí on Un Chien Andalou remains a quintessential work.

This film challenged viewers with its dreamlike sequences and stark, surreal imagery.

It demonstrated the power of cinema to tap into the subconscious, liberating film from the shackles of linear narratives.

Stan Brakhage, an icon of the American avant-garde scene, pushed the boundaries of what film could be.

His body of work, most notably Dog Star Man , exemplified the use of hand-held cameras and rapid editing.

Brakhage’s emphasis on visual perception as a personal, almost tactile experience redefined the role of the viewer.

The impact of these pioneers can be seen across various aspects of modern and classic cinema –

Reinforcement of personal narrative,
Exploration of dreamlike and surreal imagery,
Challenge to traditional story structures.

Their contributions are not merely historical footnotes; they continue to influence filmmakers who strive to forge unique visual narratives.

These trailblazers showed us that experimentation isn’t just about breaking rules – it’s about creating a new language for storytelling that’s only bound by the limits of our imagination.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=wcr98xQ39-k

Groundbreaking Works And Their Influence

We can’t talk about experimental film without acknowledging Meshes of the Afternoon by Maya Deren.

This film set the stage for narrative flexibility in cinema.

With its circular story and symbolic imagery, it inspired filmmakers to jump into the subconscious of their audiences.

L’Âge d’Or , created by Luis Buñuel, disrupted the film industry with its bold critique of bourgeois society.

It used surrealism to unlock new forms of expression.

Buñuel’s work left a permanent mark on the film landscape by breaking down narratives steeped in reality and reimagining them through a dream-like lens.

Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man exemplified the power of editing to create meaning.

His splicing technique questioned the very essence of moving images.

Brakhage’s contribution lies in his ability to evoke raw emotions, encouraging filmmakers to explore the visceral potential of their medium.

These experimental films sparked movements which continue to influence today’s cinema:

Meshes of the Afternoon paved the way for films that challenge linear storytelling,
L’Âge d’Or served as a blueprint for satirical narratives in contemporary film,
Dog Star Man remains a master class in editing, inspiring innovative ways to manipulate time and space on screen.

Their nonconformist methods were revolutionary.

They urged filmmakers to view the camera as an extension of the human eye.

Not just to capture reality but to create a tapestry of perception that defies it.

Each one of these works embodies experimentation beyond just form and narrative structure.

They embed complex themes and emotions into the visual language.

Our understanding of film as an art form is richer for their daring explorations.

Captivating Elements Of Experimental Film

Experimental film thrives on the fringe of conventional cinema, challenging viewers with its unique characteristics and aesthetics.

What Is Experimental Film – Wrap Up

We’ve delved into the essence of experimental film, uncovering its power to transcend traditional storytelling and engage us on a profound level.

These films challenge our perceptions, inviting us to experience cinema through a fresh, often avant-garde lens.

As we embrace the unconventional rhythms and narratives of experimental cinema, we’re reminded that film is not just entertainment but a dynamic art form capable of endless evolution.

Let’s continue to celebrate the bold creators who dare to express their visions without boundaries, forever changing how we perceive the art of filmmaking.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the structure of experimental films.

Experimental films often feature a nonlinear structure that manipulates time, crafts fragmented storylines, and fosters unique connections with the audience.

How Do Visual Effects Enhance Experimental Cinema?

In experimental cinema, visual effects and editing techniques are used more for expressive purposes rather than simply for aesthetic appeal.

What Role Does Sound Play In Experimental Films?

Soundtracks in experimental films aim to defy conventional expectations and help create immersive and often unexpected auditory experiences.

Are Experimental Films Limited To Specific Genres?

No, experimental films are not confined to specific genres.

They often explore a wide range of philosophical and psychological issues.

How Do Experimental Films Utilize The Camera?

Experimental films push the boundaries of traditional camera usage, redefining it as a creative tool rather than a passive recording device.

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Daniel m. selznick dies: director, producer, executive with ties to early hollywood was 88, 50 avant garde and experimental films gallery: from ‘meshes of the afternoon’, ‘the holy mountain’, ‘scorpio rising’ to ‘the lighthouse’ & more.

By Robert Lang

Robert Lang

Photo Editor

THE LIGHTHOUSE, 2019

Dir. Robert Eggers, starring Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson.

THE WOLF HOUSE, (aka LA CASA LOBO), 2018

Dir. Joaquín Cociña and Cristóbal León, featuring Amalia Kassai(voice), Rainer Krause(voice) and Karina Hyland.

THE LOBSTER, 2015

Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos, starring Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz.

THE TURIN HORSE, (aka A TORINOI LO), 2011

Dir. Béla Tarr Ágnes Hranitzky(co-director), starring Erika Bok, János Derzsi and Mihály Kormos.

ENTER THE VOID, (aka SOUDAIN LE VIDE), 2009

Dir. Gaspar Noé, starring Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta and Cyril Roy.

RUSSIAN ARK, 2002

Dir. Aleksandr Sokurov, starring Sergey Dreyden, Mariya Kuznetsova and Leonid Mozgovoy.

GUMMO, 1997

Dir. Harmony Korine, starring Jacob Sewell, Nick Sutton, Lara Tosh and Chloë Sevigny.

THE WATERMELON WOMAN, 1996

Dir. starring Cheryl Dunye, Valarie Walker and Guinevere Turner.

CHRONOS, 1985

Dir. Ron Fricke

KOYAANISQATSI, 1983

Dir. Godfrey Reggio

STALKER, 1979

Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, starring Anatoliy Solonitsyn, Aleksandr Kaydanovskiy and Nikolay Grinko.

WATER RITUAL #1: AN URBAN RITE OF PURIFICATION, 1979

Dir. Barbara McCullough

KILLER OF SHEEP, 1978

Dir. Charles Burnett starring Henry G. Sanders amd Kaycee Moore.

HOUSE, (aka HAUSU), 1977

Dir. Nobuhiko Ôbayashi, starring Miki Jinbo, Kimiko Ikegami and Kumiko Ôba.

ERASERHEAD, 1976

Dir. David Lynch, starring Jack Nance.

THE MIRROR, (aka ZERKALO), 1975

Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky, starring Margarita Terekhova, Filipp Yankovskiy and Ignat Daniltsev.

JEANNE DIELMAN, 23 QUAI DU COMMERCE, 1080 BRUXELLES, 1975

Dir. Chantal Akerman, starring Delphine Seyrig, Jan Decorte and Henri Storck.

THE HOLY MOUNTAIN, (aka LA MONTANA SAGRADA), 1973

Dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky, starring Alejandro Jodorowsky, Horacio Salinas and Zamira Saunders.

THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE, (aka LE CHARME DISCRET DE LA BOURGEOISIE), 1972

Dir. Luis Buñuel, starring Delphine Seyrig, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Bulle Ogier, Milena Vukotic, Paul Frankeur, Stephane Audran and Fernando Rey.

PINK NARCISSUS, 1971

Dir. James Bidgood, starring Bobby Kendall and Don Brooks.

LUMINOUS PROCURESS, 1971

Dir. Steven Arnold, starring Pandora, Steve Solberg and Ronald Farrell.

EL TOPO, 1970

Dir. Alejandro Jodorowsky, starring Alejandro Jodorowsky, Brontis Jodorowsky and José Legarreta.

VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS (aka VALERIE A TYDEN DIVU), 1970

Dir. Jaromil Jires, starring Jaroslava Schallerova, Helena Anýzová and Petr Kopriva.

THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES (SAYAT NOVA), 1969

Dir. Sergei Parajanov, starring Sofiko Chiaureli, Melkon Alekyan and Vilen Galstyan.

2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, 1968

Dir. Stanley Kubrick, starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood and William Sylvester.

WAVELENGTH, 1967

Dir. Michael Snow, features Hollis Frampton, Lyne Grossman and Naoto Nakazawa.

PERSONA, 1966

Dir. Ingmar Bergman, starring Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson.

PRIVATE IMAGINGS AND NARRATIVE FACTS, 1966

Dir. Edward Owens

THE CHELSEA GIRLS, 1966

Dir. Andy Warhol, starring Brigid Berlin, Randy Borscheidt and Christian Päffgen.

DAISIES, (aka SEDMIKRASKY), 1966

Dir. Vera Chytilová, starring Jitka Cerhova and Ivana Karbonova.

I AM CUBA (aka SOY CUBA/YA KUBA), 1964

dir. Mikhail Kalatozov, starring Luz Maria Collazo, Sergio Corrieri, Salvador Wood and José Gallardo.

SCORPIO RISING, 1963

Dir. Kenneth Anger, starring Ernie Allo, Bruce Byron and Frank Carifi.

8 1/2, 1963

Dir. Federico Fellini, starring Marcello Mastroianni, Anouk Aimée and Claudia Cardinale.

LA JETEE, 1962

Dir. Chris Marker, starring Jacques Ledoux, Étienne Becker, Jean Négroni(voice) and Hélène Chatelain.

LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, (aka L’ANNEE DERNIERE A MARIENBAD), Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, 1961

Dir. Alain Resnais, starring Delphine Seyrig and Giorgio Albertazzi.

GUNS OF THE TREES, 1961

Dir. Jonas Mekas starring Ben Carruthers, Argus Speare Julliard, Adolfas Mekas, Frances Stillman and Ben Carruthers.

BREATHLESS, 1960

Dir. Jean-Luc Godard, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg and Daniel Boulanger.

THE SEVENTH SEAL, 1957

Dir. Ingmar Bergman, starring Bengt Ekerot, Max von Sydow and Gunnar Björnstrand.

RASHOMON, 1950

Dir. Akira Kurosawa, starring Toshiro Mifune and Machiko Kyo.

INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME, 1954

Di. Kenneth Anger, starring Samson De Brier, Marjorie Cameron and Joan Whitney.

MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON, 1943

Dir. Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, starring Maya Deren.

RAINBOW DANCE, 1936

Dir. Len Lye starring Rupert Doone.

THE BLOOD OF A POET, (aka LE SANG D’UN POETE), 1930

Dir. Jean Cocteau, starring, Enrique Rivero, Elizabeth Lee Miller and Pauline Carton.

THE MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA, 1929

Dir. Dziga Vertov, starring Mikhail Kaufman and Elizaveta Svilova.

UN CHIEN ANDALOU, (ANDALUSIAN DOG), 1929

Dir. Luis Buñuel, written by Salvador Dalí and starring Pierre Batcheff, Simone Mareuil and Luis Buñuel.

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF 9413 — A HOLLYWOOD EXTRA, 1928

Dir. Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapich, starring Jules Raucourt, Voya George and Robert Florey.

ENTR’ACTE, 1924

Dir. René Clair, starring Jean Börlin, Inge Frïss and Francis Picabi.

RETURN TO REASON (Le Retour à la raison), 1923

Dir. Man Ray, starring Kiki of Montparnasse

SUSPENSE, 1913

Dir. Lois Weber, starring Lois Weber, Val Paul and Douglas Gerrard.

A TRIP TO THE MOON, 1902

Dir. Georges Méliès featuring Georges Méliès, Victor André and Bleuette Bernon.

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The 17 Best Sci-Fi Movies Based on Actual Science, Ranked by Accuracy

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In most cases, science fiction films err on the side of fiction rather than reality. Sometimes a film, such as Star Wars , is a fantasy film disguised as a sci-fi spectacle, or a film will deviate so far from genuine science that it is pure imagination. Occasionally, science movies will accurately incorporate genre tropes with elements of real-life physics, biology, quantum mechanics, etc. Science-related movies are often more enjoyable when they're based on real science – not every sci-fi flick can pull it off.

Some artistic license is always necessary because strict scientific rigor and peer-reviewed research would undoubtedly make for a very boring movie. As a result, while these films may not be 100% scientifically accurate, they get part or most of their science correct. In many cases of the most scientifically accurate movies, experts have weighed in or outright advised those on the set of some of the best and most creative science-fiction films ever made .

17 'Woman in the Moon' (1929)

Directed by fritz lang.

An almost 100-year-old film , Woman in the Moon was one of the oldest serious science fiction pictures from almost a century ago, when the industry was still in its infancy. Greedy capitalists believe there are vast riches hidden beneath the moon’s surface and dispatch a team of astronauts to find them. The team discovers a breathable environment on the lunar surface, but after various clashes, they realize they must leave one person behind on their return voyage to Earth.

Of course, there will be a lot of factual inaccuracies in a movie set decades before NASA was even established. However, director Fritz Lang meticulously incorporated much of the contemporary understanding of engineering and astronomy . The biggest moment it gets right is the use of a giant rocket to blast off from Earth and reach the moon.

Watch on Kanopy

16 'Ant-Man' (2015)

Directed by peyton reed.

Ant-Man is one of the MCU's most underrated films and stars funnyman Paul Rudd as Scott Lang who burglarizes scientist Hank Pym’s ( Michael Douglas ) home and steals an incredible shrinking suit. Pym had secretly planned the entire operation to fool Lang into becoming Ant-Man, a superhero with the ability to grow or shrink in size. Hank then gets Scott to recover another prototype suit known as Yellowjacket from the devious Darren Cross ( Corey Stoll ).

Spyridon Michalakis , a quantum scientist at the California Institute of Technology, was a science advisor for Ant-Man . His most significant contributions were to the Quantum Realm, where the superhero shrinks so small that almost all known laws of physics are void . This is because of Quantum Entanglement, which occurs when a set of generated particles are so close together that they cannot be described separately. It's a shaky concept on film, but the level of accuracy can be conveniently ignored or forgotten once the action starts.

Not available

15 'Alien' (1979)

Directed by ridley scott.

“In space, no one can hear you scream,” is the famous tagline to Ridley Scott’ s Alien , one of the best sci-fi horror films of all time . The sentiment holds true as Ripley ( Sigourney Weaver ) and the rest of the crew of the Nostromo come into contact with a hostile alien species. It becomes a race against time, as Ripley must try to avoid or fight the alien while attempting to flee the doomed ship in an escape pod.

Unlike most depictions of sleek, stylish, and roomy spaceships, the Nostromo from Alien is a bulky, ugly, cramped blue-collar rig . In a future where space travel is commonplace, spaceships will probably take on a more practical look, especially on a commercial towing vehicle. Putting the crew in suspended animation is also a practical and more scientifically workable practice for long-distance travel than faster-than-light.

Alien (1979)

Watch on Hulu

14 'Deep Impact' (1998)

Directed by mimi leder.

A tidal wave starts knocking New York buildings over like dominoes in 'Deep Impact'

With an ambitious storyline following humanity's efforts to prevent a comet designed as Wolf-Beiderman from colliding with Earth and unleashing chaos all around the globe, Deep Impact sees various characters and depicts their struggles to deal with the disaster.

The disaster movie is perfect for anyone keen on the exciting blend of these two genres definitely took some dramatic liberties to make the plot more gripping. However, Deep Impact is still a compelling movie that was praised for its special effects when it was released, with the depiction of the comet being a standout. It also features some scientific plausibility, especially in how it accurately portrays potential devastation and its atmospheric effects. To this day, the Morgan Freeman movie is still lauded by scientists : according to planetary scientiest Dr. Chapman , it has "the best combination of reasonably correct science, good special effects, a dramatic story, and a look at what a comet strike would mean." – Daniela Gama

Deep Impact

13 'blade runner 2049' (2017), directed by denis villeneuve.

Officer K under the rain looking up at something in Blade Runner 2049

Taking off 30 years after the events of the original film, this Denis Villeneuve contemporary classic sci-fi film starring Ryan Gosling has won over many, whether for its stunning world-building and visuals or the utterly engaging narrative. It follows a replicant blade runner who uncovers a secret that could plunge society into chaos.

When it comes to Blade Runner 2049 's scientific accuracy, the portrayal of highly advanced AI stands out, as well as the film's illustration of environmental degradation concerning the (almost) irreversible effects of climate change. This is not to say that the precise future will be as pictured in the film — which clearly takes some liberties for dramatic purposes — but rather that it does provide audiences with a believable depiction of what it could potentially look like. – Daniela Gama

Blade Runner 2049

12 'primer' (2004), directed by shane carruth.

Aaron and Abe by their time machine in Primer.

Shane Carruth 's incredible low-budget time-traveling movie has captured the attention of many ever since its release. Primer focuses on four friends who wrestle over their new invention, which is being built in one of their garages. The invention? By accident, they construct a time machine that can loop time and allow objects to travel backward.

Although there is technically no way to tell what an accurate depiction of time traveling is, Primer manages to do so in a believable way . The way it uses principles of physics and engineering to construct the time machine — and elaborately explains it — makes it a realistic science fiction film, even if with its own limitations. This complex Carruth movie is an engaging watch throughout, perfect for anyone who is keen on the subject of time travel. – Daniela Gama

Primer (2004)

Watch on Apple TV+

11 'Moon' (2009)

Directed by duncan jones.

Sam Rockwell as Sam Bell leaning and gripping a small red mini ladder in a white and gray room and looking to the right in Moon

Sam Rockwell delivers an astounding performance as Sam Bell in this Duncan Jones picture. Moon focuses on the nearing 3-year solitary journey of an astronaut who is sent to space to mine helium-3 on the far side of the moon for Lunar Industries with his only companion being an AI named GERTRY.

Incredibly written and thought-provoking, essentially for the way it sheds light on the psychological effects of isolation in space and its impressive technical execution, Moon is definitely an underrated gem worth checking in the genre. It is based on plausible science, with its premise inspired by real scientific proposals . Furthermore, Moon also portrays a plausible evolution of current AI tech, with GETRY being a great example. – Daniela Gama

10 'Minority Report' (2002)

Directed by steven spielberg.

Based on the 1956 short story of the same name by acclaimed sci-fi writer Phillip K. DIck , Minority Report has been prescient about the direction modern society is moving towards. The plot centers on “precogs,” or humans who have the psychic ability to anticipate murders before they occur, and the Precrime unit, which uses this information to arrest people. John Anderton ( Tom Cruise ) is the chief of the Precrime unit until the precogs foresee that he would murder someone and he must go on the run to prove his innocence.

While clairvoyant children may not exist, much of the future predictions Minority Report has made have come to pass as time marches forward. Tom Cruise must hop across rows of driverless cars in one intense action scene, a technology that is continuously growing these days. Another example of predictive science was the existence of fully automated homes controlled by the sound of one’s voice which many people now have. Of course, and more disturbingly, the biggest thing Minority Report gets right is the extreme surveillance society now predominantly possible thanks to the internet, smartphones, cameras, and more .

Minority Report

9 'her' (2013), directed by spike jonze.

Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore on a ferry in Her

Director Spike Jonze 's Her follows the (now eerily accurate) experiences of Theodore ( Joaquin Phoenix ), a lonely yet introspective man who makes a living by composing heartfelt letters on behalf of others. When he gets a new operating system, he meets "Samantha" (voiced by Scarlett Johansson ), whose human-like personality soon leads to genuine love on Theodore’s part.

Aside from its dubious ending, Her hits all the right scientific notes with its narrative. Praised by computer scientists like Ray Kurzweil for the way it "compellingly presents the core idea that a software program (an AI) can – will – be believably human and lovable," Her is turning into a reality right before audiences' eyes . With recent developments in artificial intelligence and the way users are interacting with tools like ChatGPT as if they were actual partners , it won’t be long before something (or someone) like Samantha could exist.

8 'Arrival' (2016)

Amy Adams as Louise Banks, wearing an orange hazmat suit and holding a whiteboard that says "Human" in Arrival

Arrival proves that love is a powerful force that drives people to do outlandish things like converse with an alien species that doesn’t speak any known language. The plot revolves around linguist Louise Banks ( Amy Adams ), who gets recruited by the United States government to assist them in communicating with visitors from outer space. Banks sees visions of her future daughter as she continues to make breakthroughs with the alien’s unconventional language.

The chances of sharing a vocabulary comparable to that of an extraterrestrial species are slim to none. That said, the film is renowned for its incredible use of real concepts from linguistics, as the Arrival 's creators even consulted real professionals from that field to make it as accurate as possible. In that regard, Arrival manages to be scientifically accurate in its portrayal of the deconstruction of language and the basics of how communication and understanding can take place.

7 'Interstellar' (2014)

Directed by christopher nolan.

An astronaut team explores a frozen planet

Many critics consider Christopher Nolan ’s Interstellar to be one of the best science fiction movies ever made, although opinions were split at the time of its premiere. The plot revolves around former NASA pilot Joseph Cooper ( Matthew McConaughey ), who leads a team of astronauts on a journey to discover a suitable planet for. The crew must travel to three potential applicants, each with their own set of hurdles, as Earth is rapidly becoming uninhabitable. In the end, Interstellar is a great example of an incredibly emotional sci-fi film that will make people want to cry and appreciate the science and visuals at work.

Some of Interstellar 's seemingly outlandish elements, such as wormholes and time dilation, appear to be implausible, yet have a basis in theoretical physics to back them up. The black hole is also an extremely accurate visual portrayal of how light would bend inside of it. It’s called gravitational lensing, and depending on your angle of approach, a dazzling halo could form around it. The movie nails scientific accuracy likely thanks to its renowned scientific consultant and executive producer, Kip Thorne , who is a theoretical physicist and Nobel Laureate.

Interstellar

6 'contact' (1997), directed by robert zemeckis.

Contact is an adaption of astronomer Carl Sagan ’s novel about what it would be like to make first contact with aliens. Dr. Ellie Arroway ( Jodie Foster ) attempts to analyze a communication from the Vega star system in order to prove the existence of extraterrestrial life. She must do it while dealing with an antagonistic National Security Advisor ( James Woods ) and religious fanatics determined to stop her at any cost.

Carl Sagan’s involvement undoubtedly gives weight to the science of the beloved alien movie Contact . Jargon such as “Hydrogen times PI” may appear to be nonsense, yet it has a rational foundation to explain the plausibility of the protagonist’s activities. Contact , according to many astronomers, is also strikingly loyal to the ethos and methodology of the SETI Institute’s quest to prove the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence.

Contact (1997)

5 '2001: a space odyssey' (1968), directed by stanley kubrick.

Dr. David Bowman (Keir Dullea) walks through the Discovery One in '2001: A Space Odyssey'.

2001: A Space Odyssey , which debuted in the late 1960s to ambivalent reviews, is today deservedly acknowledged as one of the best sci-fi films of all time . Scientists find a bizarre monolith buried on the moon’s surface that sends an enigmatic signal into space. Years later, a crew of astronauts and the supercomputer HAL9000 get dispatched on a trip to Jupiter, but the mission becomes jeopardized when HAL acts erratically.

With director Stanley Kubrick ’s famous attention to detail and author Arthur C. Clarke ’s background in physics and mathematics, it’s no wonder 2001: A Space Odyssey has many scientifically accurate moments. Moments like no sound in space, depictions of zero gravity, and even the design of the ship Discovery One are based on real scientific study and experience . That the film came out when the first man hadn’t even walked on the moon yet makes the accuracy far more impressive.

2001: A Space Odyssey

4 'gravity' (2013), directed by alfonso cuarón.

Sandra Bullock as Ryan Stone in her space-suit looking at an object offscreen in Gravity

Directed by the talented Alfonso Cuarón , Gravity is a sci-fi thriller that sees Dr. Ryan Stone ( Sandra Bullock ) and a veteran ( George Clooney ) on a space mission. Things go downhill when debris from a destroyed satellite damages their space shuttle and the two are left adrift in space.

Combining the survival and sci-fi genres, this captivating movie is one of the most beloved in the category, delivering an edge-of-your-seat premise complemented by astounding performances. Even though it also features some less accurate elements, the Academy Award-winning movie is generally said to accurately portray the effects of zero gravity, spacewalk, and debris collision quite well . "The movie does an outstanding job of capturing what it is like to do a spacewalk — much better than any previous sci-fi film. Having done three spacewalks myself, I can tell you — this is legit," a former NASA astronaut reveals . – Daniela Gama

3 'Gattaca' (1997)

Directed by andrew niccol.

Gattaca embodies many people’s anxieties that technology may eventually lead to scientists playing God, as people can genetically screen every child for things like defects and future potential. Vincent Freeman ( Ethan Hawke ) aspires to reach the stars but gets confined to Earth because he is a genetically inferior “in-valid.” He’s able to covertly swap his DNA profile with Jerome Morrow ( Jude Law ), a “valid” and join the space program. Unfortunately, a murder investigation into one of his peers threatens to unravel his plans.

In the world of Gattaca , there are many unsettling implications, such as eugenics. However, it is already possible to artificially fertilize embryos and screen out genetic defects using a process known as pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). Hopefully, scientific ethics will contribute to preventing the employment of these tools in the grim future that the scientific movie Gattaca portrays.

Gattaca (1997)

2 'the martian' (2015).

Is it possible to withstand not only a harsh climate but also loneliness? That is the arduous task presented to astronaut Mark Watney ( Matt Damon ), who gets hit by debris during an evacuation mission and becomes stranded on the surface of Mars all alone in one of the best real science movies. While grounded, he must learn to survive in a wholly unprecedented situation, using only his wits and infrequent communications with a NASA crew.

Watney’s use of human feces as fertilizer for the Martian soil is the most scientifically correct plot point in The Martian . He grows potatoes with it, which NASA researchers were able to reproduce successfully under extreme conditions similar to Mars. Other accurate moments include the shelter on Mars, the way Mark synthesizes water, and the life-saving rocket. A TIME article even notes that the "movie’s errors are minor and even cosmetic," which is impressive considering how the film still manages to be remarkably gripping and exhilarating the entire time.

The Martian

1 'apollo 13' (1995), directed by ron howard.

Tom Hanks as Jim Lovell inside a space shuttle in Apollo 13

Apollo 13 , a gripping Hollywood drama, is based on the real-life events that took place the titular lunar mission. Astronauts Jim Lovell ( Tom Hanks ), Fred Haise ( Bill Paxton ), and Jack Swigert ( Kevin Bacon ) embark on their journey and initially experience a smooth trajectory. However, catastrophe strikes when a devastating oxygen tank explosion abruptly terminates their planned lunar landing. The emergence of even more technical challenges puts the astronauts' lives at stake.

Directed by Ron Howard , the 1995 classic is known as "the most realistic of all the space movies," which is an actual statement from an interview with the retired astronaut Chris Hadfield . The film's depiction of scientific aspects like the explosion and accumulation of carbon dioxide were accurate to what actually happened. Most artistic liberties taken were around dramatizations of the human interactions, like the iconic "Houston, we have a problem" line, which was altered from what Commander Lovell actually said – "Ah, Houston, we’ve had a problem here."

NEXT: The Best Sci-Fi Movies of All Time, Ranked

The Best Experimental Documentaries, Ranked

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13 Dumb Movies to Turn Off Your Brain and Chill With

10 best r-rated movies you can watch on disney+, 10 times the boys went too far.

The first films ever made were documentaries: depictions of everyday life as it simply existed, shot through a camera. When we watch movies today, we view them first as we would view these late-nineteenth-century relics – before we even approach the idea of them being narrative constructions, we see them first as depictions of life. As such, documentaries are a disruption of the narrative film, but they are also the precursor to it, and without them, we wouldn’t have Scorsese, Marvel movies, or Rob Schneider in The Hot Chick .

Though they have gained in popularity over the years, the impact and importance of documentaries is still staggeringly underappreciated. And even more underappreciated are those documentaries which break the fourth wall, blur the line between fiction and reality, and meditate on the nature of film itself. Of course, the true-crime documentary is as meticulously constructed as any Hollywood blockbuster. But sometimes the more interesting documentaries draw attention to their own form; they are less interested in informing or provoking thought than they are in showing the full fluidity of cinema and demonstrating that genre is illusory. These are just some of the best experimental documentaries ever made.

Filmmaker Cheryl Dunye is likely best known for The Watermelon Woman – a romantic comedy about a video store clerk researching the enigmatic legacy of a Black actress named Fae Richards. Though the film deftly blends documentary elements with its fictional story, it is perhaps The Owls , one of Dunye’s later films, that fits the category of “experimental documentary” even better.

The Owls (an acronym standing for Older Wiser Lesbians) is primarily fictional, concerning a group of old friends, a reunion, and a horrible crime. The story is engaging enough – something of a middle-class Knives Out by way of Long Island – but what makes it truly interesting is that the story will periodically “break” to show interviews with the actors and Dunye herself (who also appears in the film) about the making of the movie. It’s a simple juxtaposition of real and fake that is nonetheless effective, hypnotic, and fascinating, and makes you question and meditate on the nature of what you’re watching. It is not so much a film within a film; rather, it is a film about a film encased in a larger film that is still the film.

5 The Exquisite Corpse Project

Two men hold hands and shoot eye lasers in The Exquisite Corpse Project

The “exquisite corpse” is the name of a popular process through which artists and storytellers can collaborate to generate work of a fragmented, stream-of-consciousness nature. They might each draw a different part of the body to create some kind of Frankensteinian monstrosity. In a storytelling context, Writer #1 might type 10 pages and then Writer #2 will type ten more pages based on having only seen the final page of Writer #1’s work.

Related: These Are Some of the Most Hypnotic Movies of All Time

It is this kind of storytelling conceit that governs The Exquisite Corpse Project . A group of five comics (including Adam Ruins Everything ’s Adam Conover and Bojack Horseman ’s Raphael Bob-Waksberg before they were famous) are challenged by their director friend Ben Popik to write a movie from scratch using the “exquisite corpse” method, and he will produce and direct it. What begins as a documentary gradually shifts into the creators’ devised narrative, with results both baffling and hilarious. In ways similar to The Owls , it provides a fascinating window into the creative process while also showing the fruits of that labor. Any fan of sketch comedy and absurdist narratives would do well to check this one out.

4 My Girlfriend Candice

It’s probably impossible to find a single dud in Casey Neistat’s massive library of videos. The internationally famous YouTuber is responsible for elevating the vlog and video essay to a cinematic art form, creating one video every day for eighteen months, and turning mundane everyday moments into epic moviemaking. His short docs are bite-sized masterpieces, suffused with a joie de vivre and an unending love for New York City .

Neistat’s short doc My Girlfriend Candice , a road movie chronicling the romantic relationship central to his life, is a perfect synthesis of his trademarks: snappy editing, melancholic romance, and biting narration. This true story, a contemporary National Lampoon’s Vacation , is joyful and full of remarkable self-awareness, but is also suffused with deep sadness and nostalgia – and admissions of guilt, both spoken and not. One sequence, involving a mini-rom-com shot on three iPhones, looks like an OK GO music video as directed by Wes Anderson. You might disagree with Neistat’s outlooks on life and find him hard to take at times, but it is also part of what makes his work so singular and entertaining.

3 City Hall

The great documentarian Frederick Wiseman would hardly consider himself an experimental filmmaker. Over the course of his decades-long career, he has made upwards of 40 docs (almost one per year) and all of them in the same style. The director’s approach to cinema verité is one of the most simplified, stripped-down versions you will see: there are no talking heads, no narration of any kind, just long scenes playing out from start to finish. But despite a seemingly uncreative approach, Wiseman’s films are epic, expansive, and hypnotic. And it’s probably because there are so few people who actually make movies like he does.

One need only look to City Hall , Wiseman’s latest film, which documents the seat of Boston’s municipal government. The picture runs four hours with no intermission (and still not Wiseman’s longest film by any means), but remains rapturous for its entire run. It is certainly not for everyone, but for viewers who are patient enough, it is full of rewards and phenomenal characters. Just as narrative films will ask us to find the real within the entertaining, Wiseman asks us to find the entertaining within the real – and it is there in spades.

2 Can’t Get You Out of My Head

Can't Get You Out of My Head by Adam Curtis - But What if The People Are Stupid

The approach of British documentarian Adam Curtis veers wildly from academic to aesthetic and everything in between. His latest project, Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World , is a six-part miniseries produced for the BBC, and it’s a real head-trip. Using found footage exclusively (as he is wont to do), Curtis’ brooding narration resembles a nightmarish Ken Burns as he weaves a rich tapestry of dystopian and stranger-than-fiction sagas from across 20th-century world history.

Related: Some of the Best British Miniseries, Ranked

Even more memorable than the stories he tells or the arguments he makes are Curtis’ talents for juxtaposing music and visuals. Contained within the project are numerous sequences, outrageous and sublime, where the narration drops out completely and we are left watching strange, anachronistic montages set to Nine Inch Nails, Aphex Twin, and Sex Pistols (to name only three of the many needle drops ). Curtis is surely a serious man, fascinated by history and eager to express his ideas, but he also has a perverse, idiosyncratic sense of fun about him. To watch Curtis’ work, you need not necessarily be interested in the subject matter, absorbing though it is. Rather, one of the reasons you watch Curtis is for his unique artistic sensibility – you are always curious to see what he will do next, and how he will connect such disparate dots.

Two men on a motorcycle in Close-Up from Abbas Kiarostami

Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up is the quintessential hybrid docufiction film , but it is also so much more than that. It chronicles the true story of a con man who scammed a family into believing that he was a famous film director. It’s an interesting enough tale on its own, but the linchpin here is that, though the film begins as a traditional documentary, Kiarostami will soon cast the real-life players to reenact the events of the story, and they will play themselves (including the filmmaker himself, as well as the director who was impersonated).

One of the most acclaimed films of all time from one of our greatest filmmakers, Close-Up is a strange, intimate, character-driven saga that transcends its seemingly high-concept premise. It does not so much blur the line between fiction and reality; rather, it blurs the line between reality and stories about that reality. The stories we tell about events aren’t necessarily equal to the events themselves, but could they not be just as real, if not more so?

Movie Lists

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The leftovers: nine experimental films to watch for.

The purpose of this piece is to draw your attention to some significant experimental film works that emerged in 2021. These are films that mostly played small festivals, such as Prismatic Ground, the new Light Matter festival in Alfred, New York, or Mark McElhatten’s “Carte Blanche” program at MoMA. Others, to my knowledge, have not yet debuted in North America. This piece intends to draw your attention to these films (although you may have already seen some of them), and to make a case on their behalf.

I have started writing this piece several times, and each time I have scrapped my introductory remarks. In one draft, I talked about those festivals in some depth. In another, I briefly analyzed the 2021 selections for the New York Film Festival’s Projections program, conjecturing about the prevalence of essay films as part of a backlash against formalism. In another, I talked about Gramsci and hegemony, how the current domination of the film world by superheroes isn’t just a reduction of choice but an attempt to curtail our ability to imagine other possibilities; in yet another, I considered the return to cinemas in light of the COVID vaccine, and the looming threat of yet another variant. In the final attempt, I engaged in some self-criticism, noting that my views on the cinema may not be any more significant than anyone else’s.

This difficulty in beginning may be telling me a few different things. First, this has been another difficult year. Things seemed to be improving, but we now find ourselves in another post-traumatic replay of the pandemic. Will things ever feel normal again? Should they? Is another massive tragedy looming around every corner? There is an assumption that we should pick up where we left off, as if that place even exists anymore. Also, there are probably no lessons from this. There is no Zeitgeist, no overriding sense of things being one way or another. The quarantine may have produced a spike in the overall productivity of artists, but there are few commonalities in what that work was like.

In other words, the more we demand answers to these problems, the further off-track we get. We are going to have to come to terms with uncertainty, which is of course incredibly difficult. Our economy, our justice system, intergenerational relationships—precariousness is the hallmark of our times. And now we can’t feel confident about being outside? It can seem like a cruel joke. This overbearing sense of drift may prompt us to look elsewhere for the predictability we crave, and popular culture is more than happy to oblige. But it’s also possible that the challenges of experimental art, a positive form of uncertainty, may help us derive strategies for navigating an unmoored world.

The following are nine films that did not receive as much exposure as they should have. Saying this, of course, is a bit paradoxical, since very few good films ever receive the exposure they deserve. But even if we (somehow) bracket the pandemic from consideration, it seems clear that film art is in a moment of flux, accelerated by the broad reach and ever-narrowing potential of the internet. I detest the phrase “now more than ever,” but I must admit, the current environment is uniquely hostile to small, artisanal production. This is my small attempt at redress. In a sense, these films were sent out into the world like messages in a bottle, and I did my best to pull them in.

From Bakersfield to Mojave (James Benning)

Benning's latest feature film may not exactly form a trilogy with his two earlier films, RR (2007) and BNSF (2013), but in a lot of ways it does seem like a very precise amalgamation of those two previous works. RR depicted dozens of trains slicing through the American landscape, often moving so quickly as to reconfigure our basic relationship to filmic space. BNSF , meanwhile, is a three-hour film that is nearly static, showing sequential trains on a single length of track. A train crosses the frame once every fifteen minutes or so, as minor events (dust, wind, cloud movement) organize the wait time.

From Bakersfield to Mojave consists of nine individual shots, taken with an unmoving camera and meticulously framed. Each shot is around ten minutes long, and a length of railroad track appears in some place in the image. Sometimes it bisects the landscape; other times it hugs the horizon line and is barely visible. But each of the nine shots implies potential movement that we are prompted to wait for. We know that a train is coming, in much the same way that we can watch a narrative film and anticipate certain actions based on our previous experience and cognitive faculties. From Bakersfield ’s title makes it evident that the film has a starting point and a destination, but Benning’s patient observation of brief segments of the journey reminds us that the landscape challenges our movement, grounding us in the unavoidable physicality of time. Or, as our man from Stockton Steven Malkmus put it, “between here and there is better than anything here or there.”

Future From Inside (Dani and Sheilah ReStack)

With their third film in a trilogy about “feral domesticity,” the ReStacks have moved away from the extremely private eros of Strangely Ordinary This Devotion and Come Coyote (both 2018). The new work expands on the ReStacks’ highly developed mode of montage, bringing various objects and situations into conversation through a process of abrupt accumulation.

But it also moves toward something quite new. Future features a cast of dozens, women who slide into a sculptural contraption and allow a pipette to drop water into their eyes. This is an opening up, and the logical conclusion to the duo’s exploration of time, memory, and kinship. By welcoming so many others in, Future From Inside ends up functioning as a kind of public art.

Hotel Royal (Salomé Lamas)

Situated somewhere between structural cinema and abstract narrative, Lamas's newest film owes a certain debt to Chantal Akerman (especially Hotel Monterrey ) while more than staking out its own aesthetic language. Hotel Royal is constructed around a semi-fictional conceit, that of a part-time chambermaid (Ana Moreira) who occupies the titular hotel like a ghost, roaming the halls and entering the private sanctums of various guests. Each room is introduced in the same way, visually described by the same set of shots.

As a metronome clicks off the seconds of her day, the chambermaid narrates the various contents of each room, a set of stories implied by objects temporarily abandoned by their owners. Itinerant labor is the unseen force that drives both the film and the functioning of the hotel itself, and Moreira emphasizes her detachment from everything she sees. She is not interested in fantasy, envisioning herself entering the secret lives of others. That's because her time, and to some extent her consciousness, are already bought and paid for.

Merapi (Malena Szlam)

Mount Merapi is an active volcano, one of several on the island of Java. In this silent film, Szlam conducts a fragmented survey of the landscape around Merapi, closely observing such ordinary phenomena as cloud movement, sunrise and sunset, and the subtle interplay between light and shadow, the horizon and the mountains that tower over it.

Although Szlam's camera is mostly stationary (there is one noteworthy right-to-left pan early on), this is a film in the tradition of Brakhage, composed of brief shots and edited according to rhythmic gestures. Close-ups and long shots suddenly follow one another, and the sky, conveyed with radiant reds and ambers, suddenly gives way to the dense blue of dusk. And of course we see the steam rising from Mount Merapi, a signal of the earth’s own temporality. Molten terrain bubbles just beneath the surface, waiting for the perfect moment to reorganize the landscape.

THAT WAS WHEN I THOUGHT I COULD HEAR YOU (Matt Whitman)

The only filmmaker on the list who was a complete discovery in 2021, Matt Whitman produced one of the most criminally underseen films of the year. For starters, its all-caps title has a built-in irony. The eight-minute film is completely silent. And although the title suggests some sort of personal response or subjective statement, THAT WAS WHEN I THOUGH I COULD HEAR YOU is an eerily formal effort, one that generates a sort of shotgun wedding between old and new media.

At its start, we observe an image that is difficult to place. It appears to be a translucent white cloth, and underneath it spins a large metal halo, of the sort that the sculptor James Lee Byars used to produce. It slowly rotates like an otherworldly gas station sign, until we cut to a collection of leaves strewn across a background of flashing lights. In the center of the frame, Whitman displays an isolated iPhone. For the remainder of the film, we see a placid confrontation between digital phone video and organic light on celluloid. This film-within-a-film offers clear, bounded images within a highly permeable frame, suggesting a kind of technological Russian doll scenario, the future always just out of reach.

Time Crystals (Abinadi Meza)

I wasn’t sure if including Meza’s film was kosher, strictly speaking, since I premiered it in my program at the Houston Cinema Arts Festival. Clearly I think highly of it, but I didn’t want to confuse my identities as a critic and programmer. Nevertheless, it’s one of the most original works I’ve seen in quite a long time. Meza is a multimedia artist, and a lot of his recent work has been in the area of sound installation. This concern with ambiance and envelopment is wholly evident in Time Crystals .

It is composed of scratchy images and short passages of leader, giving the entire film the feeling of a long lost artifact, its distressed surface suggesting the neglect of a society that has perhaps moved beyond its need for images. As the visual fragments pass before our eyes, we hear a voice, mechanized but distinctly female. In her short phrases—“I remember before the crystals formed,” “before the patterns”—hint at epochal change, a past that we haven’t yet lived through. Memory, and film along with it, has mutated into some undefined state, as if the random access of our digital present broke down into an impressionistic miasma, from which logic and identity cannot be extracted. This is a work that resonates, and I hope more people have the chance to see it.

Untitled (34bsp) (Philipp Fleischmann)

For quite some time now, Fleischmann has used hand-built cameras to generate direct, mostly lens-free inscriptions of exhibition spaces on the celluloid. Rather than simply photographing a museum structure, he abandons the 24fps system of representation, creating conditions in which the architecture's own organization becomes the organization of the film. The results often resemble classic structuralism or flicker films, but Fleischmann's use of organized light reveals the visual systems implicit in the buildings themselves, the way they focus the occupant's attention on certain details while obscuring others.

Untitled (34bsp) was commissioned by the São Paolo Biennial's 34th edition, hence the title. The film is bracketed by lime green and peach colored frames, produced by direct exposure to available light. In between, Fleischmann shows us the red-tinted sunlight piercing the building, as well as the more controlled slats of gallery light. The building under investigation is the Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, designed by Brazil's greatest architect, Oscar Niemeyer. Untitled (34bsp) does not bring outside images into the Biennial. Rather, the film documents the physical conditions under which the Biennial can occur at all, the spatial arrangement that inflects every work of art ever shown in the Pavilion. As such, Fleischmann's film (literally) exposes the political enfranchisement of national culture, an arena defined by having both an inside and an outside.

Wasteland No. 3: Moons, Sons (Jodie Mack)

Mack's newest addition to the Wasteland series, Moons, Sons , is sort of a direct sequel to her previous entry, Hardy, Hearty (2019). Like the earlier film, No. 3 depicts bits of collected flora and vegetation that have been frozen in water, much of the film consisting of Mack's camera watching the ice melt around the now-dead flora. But whereas No. 2 's white background and subtle distance from the objects lent it a quasi-scientific mien, No. 3 is a kind of unexpected requiem for life itself.

Mack has stuffed all manner of flowers and plants together into cups and frozen them into circular clumps. The result is somewhere between a flower arrangement and a car crash, a tangle of different colors and forms artificially packed together in a brutal crush. We slowly observe the moisture dribble away from these leaves, and while No. 2 's melting suggested a minor liberation, No. 3 's gradual thaw conveys nothing so much as the oozing away of life.

The Well-Prepared Citizen’s Solution (Lydia Moyer)

Moyer's new film may be one of the only artworks about COVID that will still be worth looking at in a few years’ time. That's because Well-Prepared Citizen is only tangentially about the pandemic, and more about how it threw into relief certain cultural divides and geographical tendencies that already existed. Moyer speaks in the first person throughout the five-minute piece. In the first half, we see a number of text phrases presented on different colored screens. Statements like "I'M THE ONLY ONE WHO DOESN'T OWN A GUN" or "WE DON'T EVER WEAR MASKS" clarify Moyer's point. She is a creative leftist who lives in a conservative enclave (in Oregon), and yet she is accepted as belonging to the small community.

In the second half, we see distorted images of Moyer and the neighborhood, as the filmmaker speaks to us directly. She describes her neighbors as generous with their whisky and their meat from hunting, and at the same time outsiders are looked at with extreme suspicion. Moyer articulates her differences from the people around her, while explaining that COVID has made it clear that she is one of them, and they will be there for her if she's in need. Prioritizing community— "we take care of our own"—is essentially a conservative ethos, but that doesn't mean there's no room for an oddball or two.

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Experimental/deviant short film top 50

2. La Jetée

3. Night and Fog

Luis Buñuel, Pierre Batcheff, Salvador Dalí, Jaume Miravitlles, Simone Mareuil, and Fano Messan in Un chien andalou (1929)

4. Un chien andalou

5. Blood of the Beasts

6. The Seashell and the Clergyman

7. Scorpio Rising

Maya Deren in Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

8. Meshes of the Afternoon

9. The Blood of a Poet

10. Song of Love

11. Sirius Remembered

12. L'étoile de mer

13. Wavelength

14. Rose Hobart

15. Entr'acte

16. Ballet mécanique

17. The Private Life of a Cat

18. Patriotism

19. Impatience

20. Tsuburekakatta migime no tame ni

21. Hapax Legomena I: Nostalgia

22. The Big Shave

23. Elegiya dorogi

24. Fingered

25. Mediterranean

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COMMENTS

Top 25 Experimental Films
2046 (2004) *. Science Fiction - Drama - Romance - Fantasy - Romantic Drama - Hong Kong's Oriental-Hotel Mid-60s - Hedonistic Sci-Fi-Novel Writer - Womanizer - Extramarital Women Lovers - Passionate Affairs - Lost True-Love - Unconsummated Affair - Loneliness - Melancholy - Regret - Nostalgia - Emotional Odyssey ...
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Eraserhead. Jack Nance, Charlotte Stewart, Allen Joseph. 53 votes. Released: 1977. Directed by: David Lynch. Eraserhead is widely regarded as a seminal work within the annals of experimental filmmaking history due in large part to David Lynch's singular vision and artful execution.
The Top 50 Avant-garde / Experimental Movies of All Time
Here are a few examples of ways you can filter the charts: The Top 10 Avant-garde / Experimental Movies of All Time; The Top 20 Avant-garde / Experimental Movies of All Time
Experimental film
Ballet Mécanique (1924) directed by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, one of the earliest experimental films Limite (1931) directed by Mário Peixoto, an early example of experimental feature filmmaking. 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 ...
The 50 Greatest Experimental Films
The 50 Greatest Experimental Films show list info. I love the avant-garde cinema, so I decided to create a new list dedicated to it! ... Seen It is a new app from the creators of List Challenges. You can view movies and shows in one place and filter by streaming provider, genre, release year, runtime, and rating (Rotten Tomatoes, Imdb, and/or ...
Top 10 Experimental Films to Watch Right Now
The experimental film genre goes back as far as film history takes us. One of the first experimental films was done by Thomas Edison's assistant, William Dickson, on the kinetoscope called "Monkeyshines No. 1" around 1889 or 1890. In fact, you could say all early silent cinema was experimental as the filmmakers were literally figuring out how to use the camera and editing to tell a story ...
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1 'Upstream Color' (2013) Upstream Color is written, directed, produced by, and stars Shane Carruth. The film is about two people, Jeff (Shane Carruth) and Kris ( Amy Seimetz ), whose lives ...
Best Experimental and Avant-Garde Films of All Time
For example, some of the films on this list appear to be mainstream films with experimental or avant-garde elements. I am surprised by the absence of Matthew Barney's Cremaster cycle (1995-2002) and Christian Marclay's The Clock (2010) and disappointed that two of my favorite short films - Bruce Conner's Cosmic Ray (1962) and Arthur ...
What is Experimental Film
What is an experimental film? An experimental film is a project bucks the trends of conventional cinema and pushes the medium of film in unexplored ways. The spectrum of experimental films is extremely broad; this genre encompasses a great many types of projects of varying lengths, styles, and goals. There are experimental feature films, though ...
Top 10 Experimental Films
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. Director: Michael Snow | Stars: Hollis Frampton, Lyne Grossman, Naoto Nakazawa, Roswell Rudd. Votes: 3,006
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An experimental film diary about young people in Winnipeg who have difficulty making ends meet. Director Isiah Medina Stars Erik Berg Eliza Bronte Alexandre Galmard. 19. Weekend. 1967 1h 45m Not Rated. 6.9 (16K) Rate. A surreal tale of a married couple going on a road trip to visit the wife's parents with the intention of killing them for the ...
Top 100 Experimental Films
A list of 102 films compiled on Letterboxd, including Outer Space (1999), Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), Fire in Castilla (Tactilvision from the Moor of the Fright) (1961), At Sea (2007) and Wavelength (1967). About this list: The second in our series of genre polls at the SCFZ film forum covered experimental film. As in our other polls, voters were free to decide for themselves which films ...
Ten Masterpieces of Experimental Cinema
Ten Masterpieces of Experimental Cinema. April 5, 2020. The following list by Justin Remes, author of Motion (less) Pictures: The Cinema of Stasis and the forthcoming Absence in Cinema: The Art of Showing Nothing, considers ten canonical experimental films. You can also watch the films below. • • • • • •.
5 Best Experimental Films: A Showcase of Cinematic Innovation and Artistry
16. Prelude: Dog Star Man (1962) Prelude: Dog Star Man is a 1962 experimental film directed by Stan Brakhage. The film is a meditation on the human experience, using a series of abstract images and sounds to explore themes of life, death, and rebirth.
The Best Avant-garde / Experimental Movies of the 2020s
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The primary characteristic of experimental films is to focus on the exploration of new cinematic techniques and visual expression. Experimental films are often either manipulated photographic images, collage films, short films, or a combination of all three. Some feature abstract film techniques, sound manipulation, rapid changes in image size ...
50 Avant Garde and Experimental Cinema Gallery
50 Avant Garde And Experimental Films Gallery: From 'Meshes Of The Afternoon', 'The Holy Mountain', 'Scorpio Rising' To 'The Lighthouse' & More. By Robert Lang. January 19, 2023 7 ...
Lists of avant-garde films
This is chronological list of avant-garde and experimental films split by decade. Often there may be considerable overlap particularly between avant-garde ... documentaries, fantasy, and science fiction films); the list should attempt to document films which are more closely related to the avant-garde, even if it bends genres. List by decade ...
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1 The Holy Mountain. ABKCO Films. Master of the midnight movie, Alejandro Jodorowsky is accustomed to creating surreal cinematic experiences, and The Holy Mountain reigns chief among them. The ...
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After getting into a serious car accident, a TV director discovers an underground sub-culture of scarred, omnisexual car-crash victims who use car accidents and the raw sexual energy they produce to try to rejuvenate his sex life with his wife. Director: David Cronenberg | Stars: James Spader, Holly Hunter, Elias Koteas, Deborah Kara Unger.
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Ant-Man is one of the MCU's most underrated films and stars funnyman Paul Rudd as Scott Lang who burglarizes scientist Hank Pym's (Michael Douglas) home and steals an incredible shrinking suit ...
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6 The Owls. Parliament Film Collective. Filmmaker Cheryl Dunye is likely best known for The Watermelon Woman - a romantic comedy about a video store clerk researching the enigmatic legacy of a ...
The Leftovers: Nine Experimental Films to Watch For
The purpose of this piece is to draw your attention to some significant experimental film works that emerged in 2021. These are films that mostly played small festivals, such as Prismatic Ground, the new Light Matter festival in Alfred, New York, or Mark McElhatten's "Carte Blanche" program at MoMA. Others, to my knowledge, have not yet ...
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The following list presents some really strange, offbeat, and funky Sci-Fi movies. ... "Begotten" is an experimental black-and-white film that presents a dark and surreal interpretation of the ...
a gift horse's mouth
a gift horse's mouth features five short films by various artists that address relationships between the body, mechanical labor, and market forces. Taking its title from the timeworn saying "don't look a gift horse in the mouth," the films offer critical artistic accounts of technological economies that ask how the financialization of technical resources impacts the possibility for ...
Experimental/deviant short film top 50
6. The Seashell and the Clergyman. 1928 40m. 7.0 (2.3K) Rate. Short. Obsessed with a general's woman, a clergyman has strange visions of death and lust, struggling against his own eroticism. Director Germaine Dulac Stars Alex Allin Lucien Bataille Genica Athanasiou.