"To call any work of von Trier's life affirming, especially one that ends in, of all things, the apocalypse, must seem seriously misguided. Life affirmation in von Trier? The most notoriously nihilistic director of his generation? But surprising as it sounds, a close reading of the film reveals that this reevaluation is just what he is after."

"Nolan is making evident, both through form and narrative, his criticism of the sweeping radicalization of cinematic work that has privileged the technological wonder of the movies over formulations of innovative and complex narratives that deal with human existence."

"At no point are Erika's fantasies visualized, and so the spectator's reference points are the same as Erika's — the extremes of hardcore pornography and the austerity of bourgeois Vienna."

"Moricz's work assaults the viewer with a whiplash barrage of familiar plot lines, trite turning points, and cliché characters spouting simultaneously banal and inflated rhetorical dialogue, all infusing narratives propelled by a poignant and urgent anxiety derived from the tensions of everyday life."

"One who knows how to, as they say, 'read' the images, can tell everything about me."

The scandal-plagued release of Lars von Trier's latest film inspired Jack Stevenson, American expat in Copenhagen, to take a deeper look at the film in a Danish context.

"Avant garde filmmaking has been defined almost entirely in opposition to the Hollywood mainstream."

"Story, characters, and other reassuring elements are simply obliterated by what appears to be Maybury's quite elaborate private mythology."

Maddin at his most masochistic — and magical

Autobiography sometimes trumps art in these uneven works

Art for [PAM]'s sake

pa·limp·sest: n., Writing material (as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased; something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface (Webster's)

Part 1: Austrian Exhibitionists

Navigating a haunted, and haunting, world

Naked rough trade, sleepy rimmers, a man licking a modem — these are some of the denizens of Abate's sensual, skewed world

A Cruel and Rebellious Plot to Pervert the Minds of Viewers to Unholy Uses

Painter, photographer, sculptor, composer, musician — and here, seminal experimental filmmaker

"An infinite number of possible worlds . . . and this is the worst one."

Those crazy "cut ups" Burroughs, Gysin, and Balch restored to their rightful place in avant garde film history

"I have been making art for 50 years and have never allowed myself to be corrupted. Quite the opposite, I was locked up." (Otto Mühl)

Warhol's trashy, timeless "girls" come a-callin'

Kern's trashy teens fight and fuck their way through an incomprehensible world

Child’s compulsive visual collages are visual and aural legerdemain

Jordan’s collage films are "moving" in two senses

The work of an avant-garde master now restored

George Kuchar scrutinizes sasquatch droppings and outer space

A look at Ernesto Che Guevara: The Bolivian Diary, Grüninger’s Fall, and Arthur Rimbaud: A Biography

Ecstasy for all! says the pied piper of queer experimental film.

Major figures in the American Underground film movement of the 'sixties, George and Mike Kuchar are the acknowledged pioneers of the camp/pop aesthetic that would influence practically all who came after them, from Warhol and Waters to Vadim and Lynch.

Martin Arnold's short black-and-white experimental films restore much of the novelty, terror, and humor of early cinema. Using elaborate optical and aural manipulations, he turns scenes from old Hollywood movies into hilariously weird, black-comic nightmares.

What do Edie Sedgwick, Hedy Lamarr, Mary Woronov, and a pack of queer cowpokes have in common? Andy Warhol, natch.

Sadie Benning has been a cause celebre in the queer community for almost a decade. Born in 1973 to a filmmaker father and an artist mother, she began making short films at age 15 and two years later came out as a lesbian. An iconoclast even as a teen, she employed the infamous "Pixelvision" camera in most of her early work and continues to use it.

Warhol's high standing as a visual artist and cultural icon has overshadowed his radical work in the cinema, but the recent emergence of many of his early films may change some of that.

Called the "father of postwar European avant-garde cinema" and regarded in some circles as the continental equivalent of America's Stan Brakhage, Kurt Kren (1929–1998) was an unlikely pioneer. A bank cashier by trade and by all accounts rather elfin, charming, and unassuming in manner, his films predate and predict many of the strategies of present-day radical art.

The man who gave us Urinal and Lillies now turns his playful eye on circumcision, copyright, and Pierre Trudeau.

The tragedy of the temporal dominates the work of this gifted Canadian experimental filmmaker.

By 1935, the films of avant-garde animator Oskar Fischinger were being shown on cinema screens and at film festivals throughout the world as the last word in modernism.

The six-part Queer Innovators series at the 1998 San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival highlights the queer contribution to experimental film for the last seven decades.

How does it happen that a filmmaker once lauded as "the American avant-garde cinema's supreme erotic poet" vanishes entirely from the cultural landscape? Gregory Markopoulous was complicit in his own disappearance from the histories of modern art and cinema, where by any reasonable standard he belongs in the very forefront.

Barbara Hammer is best known for her groundbreaking experimental film Nitrate Kisses (1992), which fearlessly broke two taboos by showing older lesbians in extended erotic embrace, all in richly detailed black and white. Hammer has been making films since the 1970s (she was one of the inspirations for Word Is Out), and wanted to create her autobiography "before someone else does it." Tender Fictions (1995) is the result — a playful, imaginative, penetrating description of an artist's life.