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Movies: Best "experimental" Movies

Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that rigorously re-evaluates cinematic conventions and explores non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working. Many experimental films, particularly early ones, relate to arts in other disciplines: painting, dance, literature and poetry, or arise from research and development of new technical resources. While some experimental films have been distributed through mainstream channels or even made within commercial studios, the vast majority have been produced on very low budgets with a minimal crew or a single person and are either self-financed or supported through small grants. Experimental filmmakers generally begin as amateurs, and some use experimental films as a springboard into commercial film-making or transition into academic positions. The aim of experimental filmmaking may be to render the personal vision of an artist, or to promote interest in new technology rather than to entertain or to generate revenue, as is the case with commercial films. ()
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431 movies found (page 1/15):

House(1977)

1h 28min | Comedy, Fantasy, Horror
3.7/5 (with 255 votes)

Hoping to find a sense of connection to her late mother, Gorgeous takes a trip to the countryside to visit her aunt at their ancestral house. She invites her six friends, Prof, Melody, Mac, Fantasy, Kung Fu, and Sweet, to join her. The girls soon discover that there is more to the old house than meets the eye.

Directed by Nobuhiko Obayashi - With Kimiko Ikegami, Yōko Minamida
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Cobweb(2023)

2h 15min | Drama, Comedy
3.4/5 (with 9 votes)

In the 1970s, Director Kim is obsessed by the desire to re-shoot the ending of his completed film Cobweb, but chaos and turmoil grip the set with interference from the censorship authorities, and the complaints of actors and producers who can't understand the re-written ending. Will Kim be able to find a way through this chaos to fulfill his artistic ambitions and complete his masterpiece?

Directed by Kim Ji-woon - With Song Kang-ho, Im Su-jeong, Oh Jung-se, Jeon Yeo-been, Krystal Jung, Jang Young-nam, ...

Happy End(1967)

1h 11min | Comedy
3.7/5 (with 21 votes)

A dark comedy about a murder and its consequences presented in a backwards manner, where death is actually a rebirth. The film starts with an "execution" of the main protagonist and goes back to explore his previous actions and motivations.

Directed by Oldřich Lipský - With Vladimír Menšík, Jaroslava Obermaierová, Josef Abrhám, Bohuš Záhorský, Stella Zázvorková, Martin Růžek, ...

Amelia 2.0(2017)

1h 29min | Drama, Science Fiction
2.9/5 (with 10 votes)

After his wife Amelia suffers an aneurysm that leaves her bedridden and slowly dying, police officer Carter Summerland searches for a way to revive her. He's approached by Wesley Enterprises pioneering a new program to extend life through robotics, they get caught in a public debate over human’s relationship with technology and her right to exist.

Directed by Adam Orton

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One(1968)

R
| 1h 15min | Documentary
3.7/5 (with 19 votes)

In Manhattan's Central Park, a film crew directed by William Greaves is shooting a screen test with various pairs of actors. It's a confrontation between a couple: he demands to know what's wrong, she challenges his sexual orientation. Cameras shoot the exchange, and another camera records Greaves and his crew. Sometimes we watch the crew discussing this scene, its language, and the process of making a movie. Is there such a thing as natural language? Are all things related to sex? The camera records distractions - a woman rides horseback past them; a garrulous homeless vet who sleeps in the park chats them up. What's the nature of making a movie?

Directed by William Greaves - With Don Fellows

Wavelength(1967)

43min | Drama
2.6/5 (with 36 votes)

Wavelength consists of almost no action, and what action does occur is largely elided. If the film could be said to have a conventional plot, this would presumably refer to the three “character” scenes. In the first scene two people enter a room, chat briefly, and listen to “Strawberry Fields Forever” on the radio. Later, a man (played by filmmaker Hollis Frampton) enters inexplicably and dies on the floor. And last, the female owner of the apartment is heard and seen on the phone, speaking, with strange calm, about the dead man in her apartment whom she has never seen before.

Directed by Michael Snow - With Hollis Frampton, Roswell Rudd, Amy Taubin, Joyce Wieland

Outer Space(1999)

10min | Horror
3.2/5 (with 46 votes)

A premonition of a horror film, lurking danger: A house - at night, slightly tilted in the camera's view, eerily lit - surfaces from the pitch black, then sinks back into it again. A young woman begins to move slowly towards the building. She enters it. The film cuts crackle, the sound track grates, suppressed, smothered. Found footage from Hollywood forms the basis for the film. The figure who creeps through the images, who is thrown around by them and who attacks them is Barbara Hershey. Tscherkassky's dramatic frame by frame re-cycling, re-copying and new exposure of the material, folds the images and the rooms into each other. It removes the ground from under the viewer's feet and splits faces, like in a bad dream. From the off, from outer space, foreign bodies penetrate the images and cause the montage to become panic stricken. The outer edges of the film image, the empty perforations and the skeletons of the optical sound track rehearse an invasion...

Atman(1975)

12min | Horror, Animation
3.3/5 (with 11 votes)

ĀTMAN is a visual tour-de-force based on the idea of the subject at the centre of the circle created by camera positions (480 such positions). Shooting frame-by-frame the filmmaker set up an increasingly rapid circular motion. ĀTMAN is an early Buddhist deity often connected with destruction; the Japanese aspect is stressed by the devil mask of Hangan, from the Noh, and by using both Noh music and the general principle of acceleration often associated with Noh drama.

Directed by Toshio Matsumoto

My God, My God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?(2005)

1h 47min | Science Fiction, Drama, Music
3.7/5 (with 8 votes)

A.D. 2015: A virus has been spreading in many cities worldwide. It is a suicidal disease and the virus is infected by pictures. People, once infected, come down with the disease, which leads to death. They have no way of fighting against this infection filled with fear and despair. The media calls the disease the "Lemming Syndrome".

Directed by Shinji Aoyama - With Tadanobu Asano, Aoi Miyazaki, Mariko Okada, Masaya Nakahara, Yasutaka Tsutsui, Shingo Tsurumi, ...

Mothlight(1963)

4min
2.9/5 (with 38 votes)

Seemingly at random, the wings and other bits of moths and insects move rapidly across the screen. Most are brown or sepia; up close, we can see patterns within wings, similar to the veins in a leaf. Sometimes the images look like paper cutouts, like Matisse. Green objects occasionally appear. Most wings are translucent. The technique makes them appear to be stuck directly to the film.

Directed by Stan Brakhage

Possibly in Michigan(1983)

12min | Horror, Music, Fantasy
3.8/5 (with 19 votes)

A musical horror story about two young women who are stalked through a shopping mall by a cannibal. He follows them home, and here the victims become the aggressors.

Directed by Cecelia Condit

In Praise of Love(2001)

1h 37min | Drama
3.2/5 (with 13 votes)

Someone we hear talking - but whom we do not see - speaks of a project which describes the four key moments of love: meeting, physical passion, arguments/separation and making up. This project is to be told through three couples: young, adult and old. We do not know if the project is for a play, a film, a novel or an opera. The author of the project is always accompanied by a kind of servant. Meanwhile, two years earlier, an American civil servant meets with an elderly French couple who had fought in the Resistance during World War II, brokering a deal with a Hollywood director to buy the rights to tell their story. The members of the old couple's family discuss heatedly questions of nation, memory and history.

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard - With Bruno Putzulu, Cécile Camp, Françoise Verny, Jean d'Ormesson, Jean Davy, Jean Lacouture, ...
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Emak-Bakia(1926)

18min | Documentary
3.5/5 (with 25 votes)

Emak-Bakia (Basque for Leave me alone) is a 1926 film directed by Man Ray. Subtitled as a cinépoéme, it features many techniques Man Ray used in his still photography (for which he is better known), including Rayographs, double exposure, soft focus and ambiguous features. The film features sculptures by Pablo Picasso, and some of Man Ray's mathematical objects both still and animated using a stop motion technique.

Directed by Man Ray - With Alice Prin, Jacques Rigaut, Man Ray

Kinkón(1971)

7min | Adventure, Fantasy
2.3/5 (with 3 votes)

Kinkón (1971), a silent adaptation of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1933 classic, King Kong. Zulueta re-filmed a television broadcast of the original, and through creative subtraction and manipulation of camera speed, condensed the original’s feature length to an intensified seven minutes. The cathode-ray flicker and flattening that results from the re-filming defamiliarises the original, but its classical continuity mode of address continues to operate on the viewer, and the increase in velocity makes mesmerisingly urgent the dramatic plot of the original. —Senses of Cinema.

Absurd Encounter with Fear(1967)

2min | Horror, Fantasy
2.7/5 (with 24 votes)

A man approaches a woman in a field.

Stone(1992)

1h 23min | Drama, Fantasy
2.7/5 (with 7 votes)

Via the New York Times: "...a severely obscure meditation on pre-revolutionary Russia in the form of an encounter between a ghost from the past and the ghost's present-day guardian. In fact, the two characters seem to be the shade of Anton Chekhov and the young man who tends a Chekhov museum in the Crimea, though that is never made explicit.".

Sunspring(2016)

9min | Science Fiction
3.1/5 (with 10 votes)

Sunspring is a short film about three people living in a weird future, possibly on a space station, probably in a love triangle. You know it's the future because H (played with neurotic gravity by Silicon Valley's Thomas Middleditch) is wearing a shiny gold jacket, H2 (Elisabeth Gray) is playing with computers, and C (Humphrey Ker) announces that he has to "go to the skull" before sticking his face into a bunch of green lights. It sounds like your typical sci-fi B-movie, complete with an incoherent plot. Except Sunspring isn't the product of Hollywood hacks—it was written entirely by an AI. To be specific, it was authored by a recurrent neural network called long short-term memory, or LSTM for short. At least, that's what we'd call it. The AI named itself Benjamin.

Directed by Oscar Sharp

Dog Star Man(1965)

1h 18min | Mystery, Fantasy, Drama
3.2/5 (with 16 votes)

Experimental film following a cycle of seasons as well as the stretch of a single day as a man and his dog slowly ascend a mountain.

Directed by Stan Brakhage

House(1958)

12min | Animation
2.6/5 (with 12 votes)

An experimental short film by Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica.

Directed by Jan Lenica, Walerian Borowczyk

Dreams That Money Can Buy(1947)

1h 20min | Drama, Fantasy
3.2/5 (with 7 votes)

An attempt to bring the work of surrealist artists to a wider public. The plot is that of an average Joe who can conjure up dreams that will improve his customer's lives. This frame story serves as a link between several avant-garde sequences created by leading visual artists of their day, most of whom were emigres to the US during WWII.

Directed by Hans Richter - With Libby Holman, Josh White

Gerhana(2009)

5min | Drama
1.5/5 (with 1 vote)

A dark take on media manipulation and political situation in Malaysia. The idea is to convey how normal citizens even though sometimes they know what they read and heard are absurd and not right but still with not much options to react but to accept them in order to maintain their livelihood. And at the same time powerful figures whom understands the mentality of the citizens continues to drives their ridiculous and absurd ideas and opinions to the mass.

Le Révélateur(1968)

1h 7min | Drama
3.3/5 (with 13 votes)

A 4-year-old child is the element from and around which the action develops, and brings sentiments and emotions to light.

Directed by Philippe Garrel - With Bernadette Lafont, Laurent Terzieff

Prelude: Dog Star Man(1962)

25min | Drama, Fantasy
3.2/5 (with 21 votes)

A creation myth realized in light, patterns, images superimposed, rapid cutting, and silence. A black screen, then streaks of light, then an explosion of color and squiggles and happenstance. Next, images of small circles emerge then of the Sun. Images of our Earth appear, woods, a part of a body, a nude woman perhaps giving birth. Imagery evokes movement across time. Part of the Dog Star Man series of experimental films.

Directed by Stan Brakhage

3x3D(2013)

1h 10min | Comedy, Drama
2.3/5 (with 4 votes)

A triptych of short stereoscopic films by Peter Greenaway, Jean-Luc Godard and Edgar Pêra. Includes "The Three Disasters" by Godard, "Cinesapiens" by Pêra and "Just in Time" by Greenaway.

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, Edgar Pêra, Peter Greenaway

A Colour Box(1935)

3min | Animation
3.1/5 (with 21 votes)

Animated shapes dance to Cuban music. This was one of the first animations to be painted directly onto the film.

Directed by Len Lye

The Text of Light(1974)

1h 11min
2.8/5 (with 11 votes)

Time-lapse photography of books, paintings, reflections, and light falling on textures, shot entirely through a glass ashtray.

Directed by Stan Brakhage

Teddy Bears Live Forever(2019)

1h 30min | Drama

A faded "It girl" suffering from schizophrenia decides that one of her personalities must lose her virginity.

Empire(1965)

8h 5min | Documentary
2.1/5 (with 17 votes)

Experimental film consisting of a single static shot of the Empire State Building from early evening until nearly 3 am the next day.

Directed by Andy Warhol - With Andy Warhol

Night of Pan(2009)

7min | Mystery, Fantasy
2.2/5 (with 2 votes)

A magician encounters the void that separates the human mind from divine consciousness and in turn faces the mad god.

Orgia ou O Homem Que Deu Cria(1970)

1h 37min | Drama

A countryman kills his father and heads for the big city. On his way, he meets the most bizarre and allegorical types: a robber, a drag queen who thinks he's Carmen Miranda, a black king, a fallen black angel, a priest, two whores, a pregnant cowboy, among others.

Directed by João Silvério Trevisan
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