Avant-garde is a word from the French, meaning 'ahead of the crowd'. In contemporary English, we'd say it's on the 'cutting edge'. Avant-garde filmmakers want to experiment with new ideas, forms, techniques, and expressions - and are often said to be 'ahead of their time'. Avant-garde films are characterized by a high degree of experimentation - whether it be in manipulation of narrative materials, highly stylized visual representation, or radical departures from the norms and conventions current at the time, avant-garde film is always a vehicle for the filmmaker's expression. Surrealism, abstract studies of light and form, Dadaism, and impressionistic studies of people and things figure heavily in early works of the genre. Below is a Alice's extensive collection in this genre. Right: The famous eyeball scene from Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali's 'Un Chien Andalou'.
Inspired by a shocking true life shooting spree in Vienna in 1993, Michael Haneke's challenging film weaves together fragments of the story in an atte... Read more
From the famed director of 'The Draughtsman's Contract' and 'The Belly of an Architect', this film is an erotic, beautiful, disturbing, absurdist and... Read more
Jan Svankmajer, the Czech master of animation, has fulfilled a lifetime ambition in this interpretation of Alice in Wonderland. Svankmajer's Alice rem... Read more
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant in this classic slice of 60s life, featuring troubadour Arlo Guthrie in his only major film appear... Read more
David Mamet's profane, provocative three-character play. Dustin Hoffman plays a self-ennobled world expert who horns in on the plans of his friend, a... Read more
An outrageous erotic fantasy in which a young suburban couple become fully entangled in a wish-fulfillment world of black leather, punk rock and sexua... Read more
A haunting, erotically charged drama set in Victorian England, where a poor anthropologist decides to take residence with a wealthy family after a dis... Read more
Lars von Trier's enormously controversial and challenging psychodrama stars Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a grieving couple who retreat to... Read more
Culled from the collection of noted movie archivist Raymond Rohauer, this two-disc set features more than 20 artistically diverse experimental short f... Read more
This enchanting and affectionate fable unveils, in a series of wonderful vignettes, the developing friendship between several oddball characters. Mari... Read more