This course is a survey of the history and aesthetics of experimental and alternative media forms and practices situating them in relation to the larger art historical, social and intellectual contexts from which they arise.

This course offers a survey of international avant-garde film movements over the last century and the challenges they pose to mainstream cinema. Whereas latter has been accused of complicity with the worst aspects of the 20th century – racial and gender oppression, imperialistic capitalism, and the development of a violent state apparatus – the avant-garde and underground film offers an alternative view of the 20th century. Over the six weeks of our course, we will consider some of the following questions: what makes a film “traditional”, and with what urgency or need is there a call for an avant-garde in opposition to it? How do these films’ experiments with time, space, and sensory perception raise questions about the medium-specific properties of cinema? How might the critique of classical representation be useful to progressive ideological projects, from workers movements to campaigns against discrimination? To answer these questions, we will turn to a set of films, some canonical and some unknown, by Luis Buñuel, Cindy Sherman, Stan Brakhage, Mario Peixoto, Toshio Matsumoto, Maya Deren, Hollis Frampton, Kenneth Anger, Arthur Jafa, Andy Warhol, Germaine Dulac, Paul Sharits, Antonio Reis, Peter Tscherkassky, and Ken Jacobs – using these and others as resources to understand the variety of ways film can be used as a subversive art. The subtitle to this course, “For Life, Against the War”, refers to the 1967 anthology film of the same name made by a group of filmmakers from the American underground protesting the Vietnam War. This subject will help to focus the second half of the course, which will consider films from the avant-garde made against war by filmmakers including Masao Adachi, Jocelyne Saab, Harun Farocki, Skip Norman, Jean-Luc Godard, Leo Horowitz, Želimir Žilink, Yoko Ono, Marcel Hanoun, Santiago Alvarez, and Peter Watkins.

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