In what might be the earliest example of a genuine avant-garde portrait, Mr. Hayashi (1961), Bruce Baillie blends poetic syntax with oddly instrumental ends. According to Baillie the film was made as a short, silent, in-camera "newsreel" advertising the gardening services of an unemployed friend to be shown before screenings at the fledgling Canyon Cinema. (p.28)

Brakhage's Wonder Ring (1955) transforms a ride on the Third Avenue El in New York into an elegant, if silent, fugue of jiggling hand-held camera movements against layered planes of buildings, ghostly subway passages, and the onrush of parallel trains-- all of which are superimposed through natural reflections on glass surfaces. (p.47)

A disparate group of films are examining key aspects of historical representation and the filmic discourse of social memory. This movement, if it is that, may be understood as a...revision of longstanding concerns associated with the avant-garde's core mission: the uses of autobiography; the dissection of photographic illusion; the contradictions of subjectivity in cinema. (p. 62)

From a current perspective (1985), nearly all that is vital in American avant-garde film-- along with much that isn't-- aspires to the condition of television. (p. 74)

If there is a case to be made for regionalism, it must take into account two unavoidable, and interrelated predicaments: the proximity of the commercial film industry; and the role played by high technology in [Southern California's] postwar economic development and its contemporary social mythology. (p. 94)

On the face of it, the assertion of a distinct African American avant-garde cinema seems dubious, perhaps faintly dismissive. Indeed, there is little in the extensive history of post-World War II filmic experimentation that appears conducive to a black presence. It is not that the movement's aesthetic foundations, institutional paradigms, or political agendas barred inclusion; it is simply that until recently the domain of avant-garde concerns and practices appeared culturally irrelevant-- and often economically prohibitive-- to black artists. (p. 111)

It is only an ostensible paradox that as cinema nears the end of its filmic phase, the avant-garde has adopted the inquest of history as one of its dominant projects...It is in the area of found-footage collage, easily the most ubiquitous practice of the last twenty years, that the full implications of a return to history can be assessed. (p.139)

A third, nearly ubiquitous practice involves the archeological or demystifying recontextualization of found footage, what might be regarded as the preeminent gesture in postmodern aesthetics...A variety of factors contribute to the immense popularity of found-footage critique: archival material is easy to obtain and cheap to work with; it celebrates the fragment, confounds romantic residues of originality or individual genius; and it solicits an automatic connection with history (either mainstream Hollywood or fringe, non- or anti-industrial artifacts such as pornography and early cinema.) (p.163)

The central tradition of the American avant-garde film begins with a dream unfolded within shifting perspectives. Much of the subsequent history of that tradition will move toward a metaphysics of cinematic perspective itself. (p. 19)

The trance film gradually developed into the architectonic, mythopoeic film, with a corresponding shift from Freudian preoccupations to those of Jung; and then how the decline of the mythological film was attended by the simultaneous rise of both the diary and the structural film. (p. 31)

If [Sidney] Peterson and [Maya] Deren purified cinema and used its perspectives to imitate the human mind, [James] Broughton took cinema back to the time before the elaborate narratives of the early [20th] century in order to recapture the excitement of seeing and showing human bodies in action, apparitions, and sudden disappearances, and to imbue that cinema of action with a more profound sense of the cyclical rhythms of life and the feeling for the essential he equates with poetry. (p.80)

The recurrent theme of the American avant-garde film is the triumph of the imagination...The triumph of the mythopoeic film in the early sixties sprang from the film-makers' liberation from the repetition of traditional mythology and the enthusiasm with which they forged a cinematic form for the creation or revelation of new myths. [Kenneth Anger's] Scorpio Rising (1962-63) is an excellent example of this new vitality. (p. 115)

[Stan] Brakhage begins to formulate an equation between the process of making film and the search for consciousness which will become more clearly established in his later work as he has greater confidence in the truth of the imagination. (p.139)

[Stan Brakhage's] Dog Star Man (1960-64) elaborates in mythic, almost systematic terms, the world-view of the lyrical films. More than any other work of the American avant-garde film, it stations itself within the rhetoric of Romanticism, describing the birth of consciousness, the cycle of the seasons, man's struggle with nature, and sexual balance in the visual evocation of a fallen titan bearing the cosmic name of the Dog Star Man. (p. 173)

In 1971 at Anthology Film Archives [Harry Smith] spontaneously delivered a lecture to a group of students he happened upon in that theater. As they were looking at a film, not by him, in the realist tradition-- a film of photographed actuality-- he said, "You shouldn't be looking at this as continuity. Film frames are hieroglyphs, even when they look like actuality. You should think of the individual film frame, always, as a glyph, and then you'll understand what cinema is about." (p. 261)

The subject matter of [Peter Kubelka's] Adebar (1957) is dancing. In fact, like all of Kubelka's films, it was a commission; in this case as an advertisement for the Cafe Adebar in Vienna. (p. 295)

These filmmakers of the fifties and sixties [Bruce Conner, Christopher MacLaine, Robert Nelson, Ron Rice] were perhaps the first to explore the fundamental disparity between the nostalgia of the photographic image and the "nowness" of the projected film. Once this chasm began to open for them, they created an apocalyptic and a picaresque form that commented ironically on that temporality. (p. 329)

Of all the major film-makers of the mythopoeic stage of the American avant-garde film, Jack Smith was perhaps the most gifted with imaginative powers. Each sequence of Normal Love (1963-) as it was serially unveiled demonstrated the sureness with which Smith could transform his creature-actors and the landscape in which he placed them into elements of a mythic vision of redeemed innocence and heightened sexuality. (p.357)

If, as I have claimed, the often unacknowledged aspiration of the American avant-garde film has been the cinematic reproduction of the human mind, then the structural film approaches the condition of meditation and evokes states of consciousness without mediation; that is, with the sole mediation of the camera. The trance film's somnambulist, the mythopoeic film's heroes and gods, and the picaresque wanderer had been the primary mediators of the earlier stages of the avant-garde film. (p.370)

The seventies have been a quiet period for the American avant-garde cinema...In general it was a decade of new and different kinds of showcases for avant-garde film, and of the incorporation of film-makers and their films into the academic establishment... The American avant-garde was powerfully challenged by several flourishing movements in Europe...[T]he rudimentary development of an art of video drew some attention and excitement away from avant-garde film-making. (p. 398)