Altered Visions: Lecture Series by Richard Peña

Altered Visions: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-1968 

4-day lecture series with Richard Peña, Director Emeritus, New York Film Festival; Professor Emeritus of Film and Media Studies, Columbia University.

During the 1920s, largely in France and Germany, a new kind of cinema began to emerge, very often made by artists already associated with other artistic media, These “avant-garde films” were a kind of an aesthetic protest against the dominance of the Hollywood film model, demonstrating the many possibilities for cinematic language. Although there were some earlier examples of avant-garde filmmaking in the US, it was really in the 1940s, with the sudden availability of cameras sold off by the US military and the drastic improvements in 16mm film stock, that a newly-energized film avant-garde erupted in the US. From a wide variety of backgrounds, these filmmakers made works that were not only daringly personal, but also pushed the boundaries of film style and language. 

This series will explore the intellectual and artistic roots of this movement, tracing its development through four of its most important phases and tendencies.

Thursday, 27th March | 5:30 pm - 8:00 pm

The Trance Film: Beginnings of the Cinematic Avant-Garde | Works by Maya Deren, Curtis Harrington, Kenneth Anger.

Inspired at least partially by an earlier generation of avant-garde films, a number of young American filmmakers began to create works that continued the innovation in film style while adding a far more direct, personal vision. Sometimes known as “trance films,” the films often featured the filmmakers themselves as figures caught in increasingly dreamlike landscapes, films with interesting relationships with some of Hollywood’s film noir crime melodramas.

Friday, 28th March: 5:30 pm - 8:00 pm

The Lyrical Film | Works by Stan Brakhage, Bruce Baillie.

The earlier “trance film” generation of avant-garde filmmakers sought to represent emotional, psychological states on film; in the 1960s, a new generation of filmmakers instead wanted to express psychic experience directly on film, creating kaleidoscopic floods of images that mixed memories, dreams, fears, desires and actual physical experiences in an experience of consciousness. With the growth of university film programs and the emergence independent film programs, avant-garde filmmaking reached new levels of outreach and influence.

Saturday, 29th March: 5 pm - 7:30 pm

Avant-Garde Cinema and Radical Theater | Works by Andy Warhol, Jack Smith and Barbara Rubin

Avant-Garde cinema always maintained close relations with a number of other artistic media, and never was this more true than in the powerful correspondence between New York’s avant-garde theater scene and a an emerging generation of filmmakers beginning in the early 1960s.. Often focusing on the body as the ultimate medium of expression, these films celebrated transgression, often of a sexual variety, while emphasizing the medium’s capacity to record what’s put in front of it.

Sunday, 30th March: 2.30 pm - 5 pm

The Structural Film | Works by Michael Snow, Larry Gottheim, Paul Sharits.

“Minimalism” in the 1960s was a movement that coursed through a number of artistic disciplines, from the visual arts to music to modern dance; it often sought to focus on what were seen as the essential elements that defined each medium. The cinema responded with its own conception of minimalism, known as “structural film,” that turned away from the intense personal experience of the lyrical film towards a cooler, almost clinical exploration of the mechanisms, technological as well as psychological, that make cinema possible.

Museum entry fee applicable. Please refer to museum website for more information.

50% waiver applicable with valid student ID card.

Prior booking necessary. Limited spots.

Suitable for ages 16 and above.