7 Essential Avant-Garde Films

Film

The origins of avant-garde cinema date to the silent era, when artists in the 1920s like Man Ray, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dalí began to explore film as a kind of abstract form. In the 1930s and ’40s in America, Harry Smith, Mary Ellen Bute and Maya Deren also started experimenting with the medium’s conceptual possibilities, similarly to how the Cubists had used paint in earlier decades. The French writer Jean Cocteau, who made a series of nonnarrative films that explored the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, gave what might be the most succinct definition of avant-garde cinema in a title card of his work “The Blood of a Poet” (1930): “Every film is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered.”

When asked to cite some essential avant-garde films, the filmmakers John Cameron Mitchell, 63, the director of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” (2001), and Julio Torres, 39, the director of “Problemista” (2024), chafed at the term, which has been used to characterize everything from experimental shorts to surreal dramas. Mitchell describes his offerings below as “films that I love that broke some barriers and were useful for me.” For Torres, a film is avant-garde when it articulates an experience at a different frequency.

‘Un chant d’amour’ (‘Song of Love,’ 1950), directed by Jean Genet

Genet is best known as a writer, but his roughly 26-minute short is an icon of experimental filmmaking. In it, he observes the increasing intimacy between two incarcerated men separated by the wall of their respective cells. “It’s a love story,” says Mitchell. Among his favorite scenes is when one of the men uses a straw to shotgun a cigarette through a tiny hole to the other. “It’s very sexual, and it’s very romantic, too,” he says. “Song of Love” informed Mitchell’s 2006 film, “Shortbus.” What the two works lack in shared style, they make up for in similar intentions, “reminding us that sex is a metaphor for other parts of our lives.”

‘Playtime’ (1967), directed by Jacques Tati

In this satirical movie (above), a bumbling man, the actor and director’s recurring character, Monsieur Hulot, navigates an uncanny and intimidating version of Paris. Tati portrays “the physical comedy of interacting with a city that is supposed to be streamlined and efficient but is full of design flaws,” says Torres. Shot on an enormous set, the film expanded the audience’s expectations of just how absurdist cinema can be. Tati does “with the city what Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin do with their bodies,” says Torres.

‘Taxi zum Klo’ (‘Taxi to the Toilet,’ 1980), directed by Frank Ripploh

A gay schoolteacher’s cruising routine comes to a halt after he falls in love, in a German film that contends with “what happens when you have too much freedom,” Mitchell says. “And there’s an amazing ending that underlines again that sex is not about sex. It’s about other things.”

‘Nun o goldun’ (‘A Moment of Innocence,’ 1996), directed by Mohsen Makhmalbaf

Makhmalbaf’s semi-autobiographical drama — “one of the most moving films” Mitchell says he’s ever seen — follows the Iranian filmmaker as he tries to make amends with a police officer he stabbed during a protest as a teen. It’s notable for its unapologetic confrontation with violence, questioning “whether it’s actually useful politically,” says Mitchell.

‘Papurika’ (‘Paprika,’ 2006), directed by Satoshi Kon

Kon’s animated psychological thriller follows a psychiatrist who develops a therapeutic device to tap into patients’ dreams. Torres sympathizes with viewers who struggle with the Japanese film’s difficult and nonlinear plot — a kind of disorienting (though beautifully rendered) trip that’s ultimately about the tenuous relationship between humans and technology. “My brain had to be rewired a little bit in order to ease into that world,” he says.

‘Sorry to Bother You’ (2018), directed by Boots Riley

One reason Torres loves this dark comedy is because it articulates familiar feelings — like being frustrated with one’s job — in uncanny ways. The film follows a telemarketer (played by LaKeith Stanfield) whose success lands him right in the middle of a corporate conspiracy. When Torres first saw it, he thought, “Thank God someone is talking about the absurdity and loneliness of capitalism.”

‘2 Lizards’ (2020), directed by Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki

During the pandemic, Torres came across a web series about two anthropomorphized lizards who navigate a city that’s been impacted by the disease and upended by social isolation. The Moroccan artist Bennani and the Israeli filmmaker Barki originally released the project as an eight-part episodic series, but it was presented at the Whitney Museum in New York as a narrative film in 2022. “It had that very Sunday scaries feeling that isolation during Covid felt like,” says Torres.

These interviews have been edited and condensed.

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