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Landmarks of the Avant-Garde

Watch these together when you want cinema stripped to its essentials — a life, a corpse, a color, a single camera move — each one testing what film can be without story.

This is film-school avant-garde canon: revered, endlessly cited, and genuinely demanding — Brakhage's autopsy is hard to watch and Snow, Mekas, and Jarman all ask for patience and surrender rather than comfort, so come to them when you want rigor over ease.

• As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000)
• Wavelength (1967)
• The Act of Seeing with One's Own Eyes (1972)
• Blue (1993)
• The House Is Black (1963) — The overlooked one that rhymes with Brakhage's unflinching gaze and Mekas's poetry — Farrokhzad's twenty minutes inside a leper colony hold on afflicted flesh while her own verse and scripture flood the soundtrack, cinema stripped to a body, a voice, and a look you can't turn away from.