UC Berkeley's History of Avant Garde Film

Created by SanderO.

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A course taught at Berkeley in the fall of 2012 by Professor Jeffrey Skoller.

“Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all!” -- Andre Breton

Avant-garde film is a cinema of subversion, of sensual perversion, filled with constantly challenging, unruly images and ideas that are often messy, sublime and like life, complicated! Avant-Garde Film is also a cinema of counter-culture whose filmmakers are challenging the edges of aesthetic, social, intellectual and sexual, acceptability. Not bound by the bottom line of corporate checkbooks and middle-brow gentility, avant-garde cinema challenges us to see, think and feel differently. Each film is a pipe cleaner for the mind clearing out sludge from years of watching the mind numbing conventions of shopping mall cinema and infantilizing info-tainment TV. We explore the rich and varied history of films made by fine artists who are experimenting with the formal, perceptual and narrative elements of film as well as looking at the poetic traditions of the first person cinema. Through weekly screenings, the reading of word texts, talking to visiting artists, discussing and writing about the films as well as making short filmic artworks, we move back and forth between historical and contemporary practices sampling from the garden of underground, personal, poetic, queer, surrealist cinemas, feminist, structural-materialist, punk, found films, love films and smash-the-state films!


The Dante Quartet by Brakhage is listed twice.

Pushcarts of Eternity by Ken Jacobs (2006, 10 minutes) is listed but I can only find The Pushcarts leave Eternity Street (2011, 13 min) which doesn't seem the same so I did not add it.

(Posthumous) by Ghassan Salhab (2007, 28 minutes) does not seem to be on IMDb.

Dead Weight of a Quarrel Hangs by Walid Raad (2001, 18minutes) does not seem to be on IMDb.