Film and the Avant-Garde

An examination of film's historical relations with various avant-garde movements from surrealism, French Impressionism, German Expressionism, and Dadaism to the theoretically informed independent film of the 1970s and beyond. However, the goal of the course is not a historical survey but the investigation of various conceptualizations of "avant-gardism" and its relation to modernity, mass-culture, and technology.