Avant Garde

1600 years after its legendary foundation, Venice continues to be unique: the urban environment, made of stone, earth, and water, and for its legendary history. But, above all, Venice is unique for its identity as a city of oxymorons, holding together opposing DNA in a formidable contradiction: the allure of decadence, and the frenzy of the avant-garde. VENEZIA-INFINITA AVANGUARDIA is a labyrinth of stories, works of art, palaces, celebrities of social and cultural life, places, extravagances, and traditions. It's a sensory experience made of lights, water, and music. Beside connections and suggestions, testaments flow by of art historians, urbanists, sociologists, philosophers, curators, musicians, writers, journalists, artists, and our contemporaries.

The dramatic story of three great Russian avant-garde painters from the beginning of the last century – Kazimir Malevich, Pavel Filonov and Vladimir Tatlin – and their supporter, Nikolai Punin, the first post-revolution Commissar of the Hermitage and Russian Museums. They dedicated their lives to belief in the revolution and its connection to avant-garde art, but the communist regime betrayed them. The history depicted on the painted canvases reflects the tumultuous period of the 1920s and 30s in the Soviet Union, in Leningrad and in artistic circles of the time. Only with perestroika have the avant-garde paintings, stored in museum archives, again seen the light of day.

Short Experimental - Art - Film discovers the French Revolution and its values and expressing abstractly its dissemination via body, materials, and history. Thoughts, Secrets, and even Evils of Marie Antoinette and the Rebels are reflected.

This film is a supertemporal oeuvre. The support of the audience's participations is constitued by an image, which has varied several times during the course of many a projection. A projection by Maurice Lemaître, himself, in the soundtrack, clarifies the function of the session and finishes on a challenge thrown to the room.

Short documentary with English narration that was prepared for the Inside Out: New Chinese Art exhibition at Asia Society in New York City, which ran from September 15, 1998 to January 3, 1999.

An artist's self-portrait problematizing the choice between tradition and the avant-garde, between being free or being disciplined.

Engines of the future. The true creators of the revolution. Revolutions of the spirit. The stars of the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century managed to make a real world revolution. Their works, their ideas still influence the life of every modern person. The film will focus on the Russian avant-garde in art and literature. Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marc Chagall, Vasily Kandinsky, David Burliuk, Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Tatlin and many others - they were called hooligans and rowdies from art, and they were looking for a new form for a new life. They changed everything - from painting and architecture to advertising and music. It was a challenge to the whole world, a rebellion and an attempt to create a man of the future. That is why modern young people should talk about the most revolutionary trend in art. They try on the roles of avant-gardists, evaluate situations and facts, looking into the past from the 21st century.

A film about the great 20th century sculptor whose work was inspired by the cubism of the 1920s, and her life story which contains all possible dramas for a creative person living in the previous century.

A unique film in which an elderly man creates miracles in his daily life by playing the leading role himself. The film depicts the process of creating a mysterious world that transcends reality through the act of filming and leads to a surrealistic conclusion.

In 1989, a group of avant-garde artists who had collaborated in private for years received permission to organize their own exhibition at the National Art Museum of China. However, one of the terms was to exclude performance artists from participating. The seven artists who were left out took action. At the opening ceremony, their lives changed as the sounds of gunfire rang out.

SILENT AVANT-GARDE offers an essential collection of 21 short art film experiments in HD to 5K scans made from 35mm and 16mm picture elements. Highlights include brand new digital restorations of classic experimental films, The Enchanted City (1922), Return to Reason (1923), Ballet Mechanique (1924, 1931), The Twenty-Four Dollar Island (1925), Eisenstein Mexican Footage (1930), Escape, Synchromy No. 4 (1938), The Eclipse (1936-1949), Look Park (1973), and Tenga fe (2022). Each film features a brilliant accompaniment of original silent film music specially prepared, composed, improvised and/ or performed by a master of experimental new music. SILENT AVANT-GARDE desires to focus on the creative possibilities of image, sound, and silence used in American-made experimental films of the 20th century.

nspired by the music of Lindsay Katt, The Avant-Gardener follows the colorful life of an artist discovering her voice. As she learns from the mistakes of her parents, she struggles to find the balance between self-expression, commitment to her lovers, and the intense drive to further her creative passion. We follow her journey as she delves deep into her subconscious, an often terrifying place, to find the answers she seeks.

Edo Avant-Garde reveals the pivotal role Japanese artists of the Edo era (1603 – 1868) played in setting the stage for the “modern art” movement in the West. During the Edo era, while a pacified Japan isolated itself from the world, audacious Japanese artists innovated stylization, abstraction, minimalism, surrealism, geometric composition and the illusion of 3-D. Their elegant originality is most striking in images of the natural world depicted on folding screens and scrolls by Sotatsu, Korin, Okyo, Rosetsu, Shohaku and many others who left their art unsigned.

In her three-part series VALIE EXPORT takes a look at the themes of "staged space - staged time", "real movement - movable reality", and "structural film", a genre which no longer exists on public-service television. Using numerous examples from films prepared for the specific media, for example by Wojciek Bruszewski, Malcolm LeGrice, Sergey Eisenstein, Maya Deren, Kurt Kren, Yvonne Rainer, Anne Severson, Alfred Hitchcock, Linda Christanell, Gary Beydler and Marc Adrian, narrative and non-narrative forms of story-telling are examined and compared. Adrian appears in a live interview, and he attempts to explain the conditions of production, methods and Zeitgeist through his own work, including his first computer film, Random (1963). The advanced level of this film is also indicated by the high density of theoretical quotes from Christian Metz, Charles S. Peirce, Vsevolod I. Pudovkin and Ferdinand de Saussure.

Davidovich searches in vain for the meaning of "avant garde." The artist travels to Iowa City, where he conducts a series of "man on the street" interviews with artist Michael Smith, painter and critic Walter Robinson, University of Iowa professor of art history W.J. Tomasini, a security guard at the University of Iowa Museum of Art, an art school secretary, and strangers on the street.

Jaime Davidovichn searches in vain for the meaning of "avant-garde".