About the guide
Outsider Cinema is a guide to films made outside the mainstream: experimental and avant-garde work, DIY productions, odd ways of telling a story, and films that take behaviour or genre somewhere strange. It's for people who love films and want to find ones they haven't heard of.
Each filmmaker gets a poster in their own colour, a short biography and a handful of films to start with. Every film page links on to others, and the influence lines follow these films' ideas to where they turned up later: Hollywood features, title sequences, music videos, sometimes a whole movement.
The movement pages explain the movements, forms and techniques these filmmakers worked in, such as trance film and optical printing, each with a few films to try first.
We say how well each influence line is documented. Some rest on a director's own words; others are comparisons critics have been making for decades. We'd rather tell you which is which than claim more than we can show.
The flicker strip
The black and white bars on every poster nod to Tony Conrad'sThe Flicker (1966), a film made of nothing but black and clear frames. Plenty of experimental filmmakers worked like that, a frame at a time, on the strip itself. Here the strip steps forward a frame as you move through the guide.
Images
Eighty-eight of the 157 films show a still from the film, taken from TMDB. They aren't licensed or credited yet, and stand in until cleared ones replace them. The rest show a marked image slot, cut to the shape of a film frame. Every filmmaker has a portrait, twenty-eight from freely licensed or public-domain photos and sixteen from press or archive photos whose rights stay with their owners, each credited under it.
Watching the films
We don't host or sell films. Thirty-seven films in the guide have a free, full copy on YouTube or Vimeo, posted by the rights holder or in the public domain in the US, and their pages carry a Watch button. Many of the rest are still screened at repertory cinemas and film archives, and specialist labels have released some.
Where we can confirm a disc, distributor or archive holds a film, its page says where to find it.