Avant-garde films all start with the belief that film is more interesting as art than as narrative. Not surprisingly, the first people to think this way were artists. In Germany after World War One, Swedish-born painter Viking Eggeling and Berliner Hans Richter collaborated on scroll paintings that they took to UFA studios in the hope of reproducing them as animated films. Richter agreed to prepare a scroll using simpler square shapes, and the animators produced his one-minute abstract film Rhythmus 21 (1921); Eggeling, who kept to his original designs, painstakingly made his own animated short, Diagonal Symphony (1922), but died not long after. The American-born Dadaist-turned-surrealist Man Ray was living in Paris when he made his first film in 1923, Le Retour À La Raison, combining superimpositions and shots of mobiles with his own "rayograms" (registering objects on film by placing them on the photographic surface and exposing them to light). The next year, France's great Cubist painter Fernand Léger made the first photographed abstract film, Le Ballet Mécanique, in which he wildly edited shots lit in extreme contrasts. Also in 1924, René Clair made the zany Entr'acte, with artists Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Francis Picabia appearing onscreen.

The late 1920s saw a growing international movement of avant-garde cinema. Richter used color and hand-painted the lines and squares of his Rhythmus 25 (1925); he made Film Study in 1926, combining filmed images in surrealist associations, and continued to work in film with Inflation (1927) and Ghosts Before Breakfast (1928). Man Ray made two surrealist shorts, Emak Bakia (1927) and L'Étoile De Mer (1928), as well as the whimsical Les Mystères Du Château Du Dé (1929). Germaine Dulac filmed a surreal scenario by Antonin Artaud for The Seashell And The Clergyman (1927). In Hollywood in 1927 and '28, French-born Robert Florey directed low-budget features, was an assistant director on big-budget films, and made experimental shorts: The Life And Death Of 9413 -- A Hollywood Extra (co-directed by Slavko Vorkapich), The Loves Of Zero, Johann The Coffin Maker, and Skyscraper Symphony. In Rochester, New York, James Watson and Melville Webber made an experimental adaptation of Poe with The Fall Of The House Of Usher (1928). Soviet director Dziga Vertoz made 23 editions of his one-reel news magazine Kino-Pravda from 1922 to '25, using complex, original editing techniques. His feature Kino-Glaz (1924) consisted mostly of footage of people shot unawares, and his best-known work, Man With A Movie Camera (1929) marshaled all his innovative techniques for a portrait of Moscow. Spanish surrealists Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali wrote and directed the landmark short Un Chien Andalou in 1928. Avoiding narrative or symbolic logic, they filled the screen with funny and shocking imagery (including a close-up of Buñuel slashing an eyeball with a razor). They clashed over their sound follow-up, L'Age D'Or (1930), which Buñuel took over. Widely banned for its anti-clericism, this classic feature introduced Buñuel's vision of obsessive eroticism and black comedy. Poet and artist Jean Cocteau made his first film, Le Sang D'Un Poète (1930), a personal dream journey as loaded with camera tricks as a Méliès short; later he'd return to personalized, imaginatively-shot surrealism with Orphée (1950) and Le Testament D'Orphée (1960).

Oskar Fischinger made his silent Studies, a series of abstract animated shorts, in Germany during the 1920s; he won international acclaim with his 1935 sound film Composition In Blue and came to America, where he made Radio Dynamics (1942) and Motion Painting No. 1 (1947). Dziga Vertoz used sound creatively in Enthusiasm (1931) and Three Songs About Lenin (1934), but Stalinist repression demanded simpler films. Europe darkened with the growth of fascism and the impending war, and by the end of the 1930s Buñuel, Richter, and Ray had left for America. After the war, Richter would make Dreams That Money Can Buy (1946), an American feature with sequences scripted by himself, Ray, Léger, and their fellow artists Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, and Alexander Calder. (Later he'd also do the episode film 8 X 8 (1957) with Jean Arp, Duchamp, Ray, Yves Tanguy, Calder, Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, and Cocteau.) In the States, Watson and Webber made their imaginative and erotic Lot In Sodom (1933) only to find that there were few venues where they could screen so daring a film. The artist and sculptor Joseph Cornell began making films in the late 1930s. His celebrated Rose Hobart (1937) took footage of the titular actress from her low-budget jungle movie East Of Borneo (1931) and collaged it into an elegant celebration of Hobart. His later films, some of which went unfinished for decades, include the trilogy Cotillions -- The Children's Party -- The Midnight Party (edited in 1968 from footage shot in the '30s) and A Legend For Fountains (shot in 1957 but unreleased until 1970). Mary Ellen Bute, shooting objects in extreme close-ups with a variety of lenses, made over a dozen short abstract films, starting in 1934 with Rhythm In Light. (co-directed by Melville Webber and Ted Nemeth). The film premiered at Radio City Music Hall as a pre-feature attraction, as did her Spook Sport (1939, animated by Norman McLaren) and Color Rhapsody (1948). Bute later made the features The Boy Who Saw Through (1958) and Passages From Finnegans Wake (1965).

In the 1940s, another woman filmmaker became a catalyst for the American avant-garde. Russian-born Maya Deren, with her husband Alexander Hammid, made Meshes Of The Afternoon (1943), a psychodrama of a woman haunted by visions of death. Deren made several notable films in the '40s: At Land (1943), The Private Life Of A Cat (1945, also with Hammid), A Study In Choreography For Camera (1945), Ritual In Transfigured Time (1946), Meditation On Violence (1948). By 1946, she was giving screenings of avant-garde films by herself and others and encouraging a greater awareness of experimental cinema. Deren also spent several years filming Voudoun rituals in Haiti and even became a priestess, but in the last decade of her life she was unable to edit the footage into a completed work; her final film was The Very Eye Of Night (1955).

The psychodrama -- laying bare the subconscious in personal, supercharged imagery -- became an important filmmaking style in the '40s. The teenage Kenneth Anger made Fireworks (1947), a homoerotic dream of death and transfiguration, and went on to become one of the major American avant-garde filmmakers with such classics as Rabbit's Moon (1950), a studio-made tale of Pierrot; Eaux D'Artifice (1953), in which sprays of water become exquisite abstract studies; Inauguration Of The Pleasure Dome (1954), a hallucinatory assembly of archetypes; and Scorpio Rising (1963), an insightful and witty dissection of biker mythology. Anger's involvement with ceremonial magic informs his dazzling Invocation Of My Demon Brother (1969) as well as his magnum opus, Lucifer Rising (1980), a vision of transcendental forces and beings at work on Earth.

Sidney Peterson and James Broughton collaborated on their first film, The Potted Psalm (1946). Peterson went on to make such psychodramas as The Petrified Dog (1948) and The Lead Shoes (1949) before retiring in the '50s. Broughton's later work includes Mother's Day (1948), The Pleasure Garden (1953), and The Bed (1968); starting in the mid '70s he worked in collaboration with Joel Singer (Together, 1976; Shaman Psalm, 1981; Scattered Remains, 1988). Gregory Markopolous began combining mythology and homoerotic imagery in Du Sang, De La Volupté Et De La Mort (1948), but after Swain (1950) and Flowers Of Asphalt (1951) he spent the '50s working on the Greek production Serenity (1961). In the '60s his earlier style gained a new visual refinement and originality with such major films as Twice A Man (1963), Eros, O Basileus (1967), Himself As Herself (1967), and The Illiac Passion (1967). He also made films without people, such as the multiple-exposure classic Ming Green (1966), and developed a decontextualizing editing style in which shots are glimpsed only at odd intervals, with Gammelion (1968) and Hagiographia (1973). Markopolous spent the last years of his life cutting together all his films into the mammoth, 22-film-cycle Eniaios (1990).

Willard Mass made several gay-inflected psychodramas; his wife Marie Menken assisted on Images In The Snow (1948), and Ben Moore collaborated with him on The Mechanics Of Love (1955) and Narcissus (1956). Menken's own films, including Hurry! Hurry! (1957), Go Go Go (1963), and Wrestling (1964), are prized for her editing skills. Stan Brakhage began making films in the early '50s and by 1955 was making psychodramas: Reflections On Black, Way To The Shadow Garden. The following year he made Nightcats, filming cats in a nighttime yard. The dim light, decontextualizing angles and compositions, and extreme close-ups turned the cats into abstract textures, and since then the prolific Brakhage has made masterpieces with this aesthetic. Usually eschewing a soundtrack, he creates rhythms through action, editing, and film speeds. The most extreme distortions of focus or camera movement become visual poetry, offering a new way to see not just cinema but the world, in such short films as Window Water Baby Moving (1959), Door (1971), and The Riddle Of Lumen (1972), and his classic features Dog Star Man (1964) and Scenes From Under Childhood (1970). Brakhage's Mothlight (1963) consisted of flower petals, moth wings, and blades of grass sandwiched between two clear strips of film; he has also painted on the film stock itself in numerous works, including The Horseman, The Woman And The Moth (1968), Murder Psalm (1981), Trilogy (1995), and Lovesong (2001). His recent photographic films include The God Of Day Had Gone Down Upon Him (2000).

In England in 1935, New Zealander Len Lye made the first non-camera movie, Colour Box, which he painted directly on film. Lye's later work was more traditional, but by the end of the decade, an American teenager, unaware of Lye, was drawing and etching on film; Harry Smith made five shorts in this manner, ending with Number 5 -- Circular Tensions in 1946. He then began photographing animation and developed a style of moving collages, into which he poured his years of studying alchemy and the Qabalah, culminating in 1962 with his classic Number 12 -- Heaven And Earth Magic. His magnum opus was the 141-minute, four-screen Number 18 -- Mahoganny (1980). Other avant-garde animators of the 1940s also created their most admired work in the '60s. John and James Whitney made abstract animation together starting with their Variations series (1941-43). After 1950 they worked independently: John developed films based on the graphics of first the analogue and then the digital computer (Catalogue, 1961; Permutations, 1968); James drew the basic dot-structures for his Yantra (1957) but adapted John's analogue-computer process for Lapis (1966). Jordan Belson made animated films in the late 1940s and by the late '50s was creating his multi-media Vortex Concerts in San Francisco, the density of which led to his '60s films combining animation and photographic techniques: Allures (1961), Re-Entry (1964), Samadhi (1967), Momentum (1969). Stan VanDerbeek made accomplished animated collages, such as Breathdeath (1963) and Dance Of The Looney Spoons (1965), and then began using computers with Computer Art (number one) (1966) and his series of Poem Field films, starting in 1968.

In the 1960s gay and transgendered men expressed their imagination and sexuality without the angst of Markopolous or Anger: Taylor Mead was a holy fool in Ron Rice's The Flower Thief (1962); the wit and theatricality of Jack Smith are the core of Ken Jacobs' Little Stabs At Happiness (1958/63) and Blonde Cobra (1959/63). Smith made the era's classic, Flaming Creatures (1963), shooting on backdated black-and-white stock that gave the film an exploded, archaic look. His pageant of nudity and crossdressing met with many censorship attacks, much to Smith's horror, and a follow-up feature, Normal Love, made with backdated color stock, went uncompleted until after his death. Ron Rice's Chumlum (1964) however offered glimpses of Smith and his cast from Normal Love; so did a short "newsreel" from an artist making his second try at using a camera: Andy Warhol. Warhol started making minimalist films in 1963, silently photographing mundane events from the short Kiss to the six-hour Sleep; in 1965 he made the eight-hour Empire, consisting of the Empire State Building seen from one unchanging angle. That same year his use of sound also brought more character and humor to his work, beginning with his films written by Ronald Tavel, such as Screen Test with drag performer Mario Montez, The Life Of Juanita Castro with filmmaker Marie Menken, and Vinyl, a version of Anthony Burgess's novel "A Clockwork Orange." In 1966 he and Tavel made The 14 Year Old Girl [aka Hedy; Hedy The Shoplifter] and More Milk, Evette (aka Lana Turner) with Montez, and Kitchen with Edie Sedgwick. Sedgwick also starred in Warhol's Poor Little Rich Girl (1964); Jack Smith appeared in his Batman Dracula (1964) and Camp (1965). My Hustler (1965) looked at lust and commerce on Fire Island. Warhol's landmark 3-1/2-hour film The Chelsea Girls (1966) consisted of 12 uncut reels of people from his circle, shown in random sequence two at a time from two adjacent projectors, but with only one soundtrack audible. After Lonesome Cowboys (1968) Warhol turned to producing for writer/director Paul Morrissey, most notably in Flesh (1968) and Trash (1970) with Joe Dallesandro, and Women In Revolt (1972) with Holly Woodlawn, Jackie Curtis and Candy Darling.

Other experimental filmmakers also made major works in the '60s -- indeed, taken as a whole, the decade is something of a golden age for American avant-garde film. Twin brothers Mike and George Kuchar began making 8-mm films in the 1950s, and by the early '60s had adapted the situations and language of Hollywood melodramas to their no-budget Bronx-made movies: I Was A Teenage Rumpot (1960), Pussy On A Hot Tin Roof (1961), Lust For Ecstasy (1963). By the mid '60s the brothers worked independently. Mike's films include his science-fiction reinventions Sins Of The Fleshapoids (1965) and Dwarf Star (1974), as well as the abstract Fragments (1967); George's notable later films include Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966), The Devil's Cleavage (1973), and Cattle Mutilations (1983). More recently both have worked in video, with such efforts as Mike's Purgatory Junction (1994) and The Stranger In Apartment 9F (1999) and George's Cult Of The Cubicles (1987), The Weather Diary (1990), and Nectar Of The Neophytes World (2001). Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank made the quintessential "Beat" film with his first effort, Pull My Daisy (1959), written by Jack Kerouac and co-directed by Alfred Leslie; his later films include the feature-length Me And My Brother (1969), with documentary and staged scenes. Another "Beat"-inspired filmmaker was Christopher MacLaine who made The End (1953) and Beat (1958). In 1958, Bruce Conner made a powerful debut editing found footage for his A Movie. He went on to create such major films as Cosmic Ray (1961), which combines found footage with glimpses of a woman dancing naked; Report (1967), a reworking of television news footage of the Kennedy assassination; and Crossroads (1976), about the atomic bomb. Bruce Baillie made several outstanding films, working with real locations in To Parsifal (1963) and Castro Street (1966), and using superimpositions, negative film, and alternate speeds and exposures in Mass For The Dakota Sioux (1964). George Landow (aka Owen Land) creatively used looped footage in Film In Which There Appear Sprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles, Etc. (1966) and The Film That Rises To The Surface Of Clarified Butter (1968); he'd later parody instructional films with Remedial Reading Comprehension (1971) and New Improved Institutional Quality: In The Environments Of Liquids And Nasals A Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops (1976). Lithuanian-born Jonas Mekas, besides working ceaselessly to promote avant-garde cinema, also made the notable films Guns Of The Trees (1961), The Brig (1964), and the film diaries Hare Krishna (1966), Walden (1969), and Lost, Lost, Lost (1976); his brother Adolfas made the comic Hallelujah The Hills (1963) and the macabre Windflowers (1968). Warren Sonbert, another stylish diarist, made Amphetamine (1966, co-directed by Wendy Appel), Rude Awakening (1976), and Noblesse Oblige (1981). Jerome Hill's autobiographical Film Portrait (1971) used footage he shot in the 1920s and '30s. Robert Nelson combined humor and social commentary with Oh Dem Watermelons (1965) and The Great Blondino (1967). James Benning has made numerous rigorous and haunting examinations of the American scene, including One Way Boogie Woogie (1977), Landscape Suicide (1986), and North On Evers (1991); his daughter Sadie began making original videos about lesbian life while still a teenager, such as If Every Girl Had A Diary (1989) and Me And Rubyfruit (1990). More visually austere are the films of Michael Snow: Wavelength (1967), a continuous 45-minute zoom, and the feature-length <---> (1969, aka Back And Forth; The Double-Headed Arrow), highlighted by an accelerating back-and-forth pan. Snow's later work includes Seated Figures (1988), a landscape shot from a moving car. Minimalism also figured in the films of Robert Huot (Leader, 1966; Scratch, 1967) and Hollis Frampton (Surface Tension, 1968; Zorns Lemma, 1970).

In 1969 Ken Jacobs made Tom Tom The Piper's Son, re-editing an old silent short into a commentary on itself. Jacobs began his "Nervous System" performances in the '70s, using two near-identical prints shown by two projectors capable of single-frame advance and freezes; the slight discrepancies between prints create 3-D effects in such works as The Impossible: Chapters One To Five (1975-80) and Two Wrenching Departures (1989). Tony Conrad's The Flicker (1966) was stroboscopic light, from 24 flashes per second to four and back to 24. Paul Sharits adapted Conrad's method to include footage of people and objects in Peace Mandala/End War (1967) and N:O:T:H:I:N:G (1968). In Austria, Peter Kubelka worked in a similar vein with Arnulf Rainer (1960), while his Unsere Afrikareise (1966) raised film and sound editing to new heights. Kurt Kren imaginatively cut looped footage in 15/67 TV (1967), and the "materialaktions" of Otto Muehl used food, paint, nudity, sexual activity, excreta, and violence for such shocks-to-the-system as Sodoma (1969).

In the '70s, several notable avant-garde films came from writer/directors who would also work in commercial cinema. David Lynch made the bizarre but touching abused-child short The Grandmother (1970) and his classic feature, the entropic vision Eraserhead (1977). In Mexico, Alexandro Jodorowky made the violent and allegorical El Topo (1970); his other surreal features of blood, religiosity, and insanity include The Holy Mountain (1973) and Santa Sangre (1989). England's Derek Jarman began making striking abstract films shot in super-8, such as The Art Of Mirrors (1973) and In The Shadow Of The Sun (1974); in the '80s he adapted these techniques for his great non-narrative features, The Angelic Conversation (1985) and The Last Of England (1987). Blue (1993), Jarman's final film, shows only a blue screen as the soundtrack relates his thoughts in the last weeks of his terminal illness from AIDS.

Czechoslovakia's Jan Svankmajer began making stop-motion animation shorts in the mid '60s. Whether using antique dolls (Jabberwocky, 1971), chairs (The Fall Of The House Of Usher, 1981), or sculpted clay (Dimensions Of Dialogue, 1982), his imagination has captivated audiences internationally and led to highly original features combining live action with stop-motion: Alice (1988), Faust (1994), Conspirators Of Pleasure (1997), Little Otik (2000). Equally sensitive to texture, atmosphere, and enigmatic weirdness are the stop-motion shorts of the Brothers Quay, such as Street Of Crocodiles (1986), Rehearsals For Extinct Anatomies (1987), and The Comb (From The Museums Of Sleep) (1990). Identical twins from America who live and work in England, they also made the live-action feature Institute Benjamenta (1995). Texture and enigma also define the extraordinary live-action "Cremaster Cycle" of sculptor and performance artist Matthew Barney. The films, which are numbered out of sequence, range from the mythic characters of Cremaster 4 (1994), created with the striking prosthetic makeups of Gabe Bartalos, and the breathtaking symmetries of Cremaster 1 (1995), where people on a football field re-create intricate patterns designed within a blimp that floats overhead, to the endurance art of Cremaster 5 (1997), with Barney himself methodically climbing the proscenium arch of an opera house, and a nightmare vision of the execution of Gary Gilmore in Cremaster 2 (1999). The series culminates in the three-hour Cremaster 3 (2002), Barney's masterpiece, in which he evokes Irish mythology, stages a demolition derby in the lobby of the Chrysler Building, climbs the interior of the Guggenheim Museum, and provides athlete Aimee Mullins, a double amputee, with various artificial legs before transforming her into a cheetah woman.

The punk-inspired Cinema of Transgression has produced several noteworthy sex-and-violence films. Richard Kern's plot-driven shorts are especially memorable: The Right Side Of My Brain (1985) and Fingered (1986), both co-written by and starring Lydia Lunch, and Manhattan Love Suicides (1985) and King Of Sex (1986), both with Nick Zedd. Other notable works of like-minded filmmakers include Tessa-Hughes Freeland's Nymphomania (1993), Where Evil Dwells (1986) by David Wojnarowicz and Tommy Turner, and Cassandra Stark's Parade Of Cruelty (1995). Most striking are the shockers of writer/director/actor Nick Zedd: Totem Of The Depraved (1983, co-directed by Ela Troyano), Thrust In Me (1984, co-directed by Kern), the police-brutality melodrama Police State (1987), the alternately abstract and erotic Whoregasm (1988), the phantasmagoric War Is Menstrual Envy (1992), the Nietzsche reinvention Thus Spake Zarathustra (2001, co-directed by Jon Vomit). Zedd's excesses may be hard for some to swallow, but he comes from a long line of shock-mongers, including Buñuel, Anger, and Muehl -- all means are acceptable to break down the audience's conditioning and expose people to something genuine, both onscreen and within themselves. Cinematic transgressions are verboten in entertainment, which must always work within the audience's familiarity; one way or another, they represent an underlying impulse of all avant-garde cinema.