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Fifty-five films by twenty-five filmmakers: thirty-seven to watch here in full, eighteen by their official trailers.
Walter Ruttmann
He put painted shapes on a cinema screen in 1921, cut a day in Berlin into a symphony, made a film with no pictures, then made films for the Nazis.
Hans Richter
A Zurich Dadaist who set black and white squares moving on film, sent bowler hats flying out of reach, then ran a film school in New York.
Germaine Dulac
She filmed a housewife's daydreams, turned Antonin Artaud's script into one of the first Surrealist films and got heckled for it, then left stories behind for pure rhythm.
Viking Eggeling
A Swedish painter who spent years drawing music on long paper scrolls, finished one seven-minute film of growing lines, and died sixteen days after its premiere.
Len Lye
He painted and scratched his films straight onto the celluloid, then turned to making steel move.
Luis Buñuel
His first film opens with a razor slicing an eye. He spent the next fifty years needling the church and the middle classes.
Maya Deren
She made films that move like dreams, on almost no money, and filmmakers have been borrowing her tricks ever since.
Norman McLaren
He drew pictures and sound straight onto film, animated two grown men a frame at a time, and won an Oscar for a documentary that wasn't one.
Mary Ellen Bute
A Texan who studied stage lighting, then put abstract films set to music in front of Radio City Music Hall audiences.
Arthur Lipsett
He cut his films from the sound and footage the National Film Board threw away, and the first one was nominated for an Oscar.
Věra Chytilová
Two girls called Marie wreck a banquet for fun in her film Daisies, the censors complained about the wasted food, and after 1968 she was kept from directing for years.
Jonas Mekas
He filmed his own life in quick bursts for seventy years and built the institutions that kept avant-garde film alive.
Toshio Matsumoto
A Japanese experimental filmmaker and video artist who set Oedipus Rex in the gay bars of 1960s Tokyo.
William Greaves
An actor turned documentary maker who sent three film crews into Central Park and kept the footage of them turning on the production.
Djibril Diop Mambéty
His Touki Bouki, about a cowherd with a zebu skull on his motorbike and a student scheming to get from Dakar to Paris, cost about $30,000 and lasted four days in Senegalese cinemas.
Chantal Akerman
She held the camera still and let real time run, until peeling potatoes became the most suspenseful thing on screen.
Ed Emshwiller
A science-fiction cover painter who filmed dancers in multiple exposures, then made one of the first 3-D computer-generated videos.
Cecelia Condit
She calls her videos feminist fairy tales: sung, collaged stories in which horror and comedy share the frame.
Don Hertzfeldt
He draws stick figures with a pen, shoots them on a 1940s animation camera, and has twice been nominated for an Oscar for it.
Jodie Mack
A London-born animator who makes 16mm films, one frame at a time, out of fabric, posters and junk mail, often set to songs she writes herself.
Ben Rivers
A Somerset-born artist who shoots and hand-develops 16mm film of people living apart from the world, most often one man alone in a Scottish forest.
Kris Straub
A webcomic artist who makes three-minute hijacked TV broadcasts, and whose channel's tagline gave analog horror its name.
Scott Barley
He shoots alone on an iPhone, layering hills, water and night into long, wordless films about darkness.
Kyle Edward Ball
An Edmonton YouTuber who filmed other people's nightmares, then shot a feature of darkness and grain in the house he grew up in.
Deborah Stratman
A Chicago artist who films a place to find out what people believed there: a mound in Illinois, a gold town in the Yukon, rocks that will be here after us.