avant-garde cinema

Ricciotto Canudo's 1923 Manifesto of the Seven Arts argued cinema belonged next to painting and music, and filmmakers were already testing what that meant before he wrote it down: what light, duration and the physical material of film can do on their own, outside the industry and mostly outside narrative. Vertov took the question furthest first. Man with a Movie Camera turns the camera on its own filming and on an audience watching the result, so the subject of the film stops being the Soviet Union and becomes the machinery of watching itself. Maya Deren shrank the same question to one house in 1943: Meshes of the Afternoon sends a woman home to dream the same afternoon over and over, and refuses to let time or space agree with each other the way a camera usually consents to. Holy Motors keeps the experiment running with the plainest possible version of it, a man occupying a different identity for each of twenty-four hours, murderer to beggar to company chairman, with nothing holding the film together except the fact of the changing. There is no story to hold on to, so you end up watching the film itself.

Distinguish from Surrealist Cinema is a specific avant-garde tradition focused on dream logic and the unconscious. Avant-garde cinema is the broader category — it includes surrealism but also structural film, expanded cinema, found-footage work, and abstract film that has no interest in dreams or narrative at all.