This course examines the history, aesthetic innovation, and exploitation of avant-garde and experimental film and moving images. Avant-garde and Experimental cinema self-consciously formulates images and aesthetics quite distinct from those of conventional feature films. In the films, videos and digital images that we will be studying in this course, the narrative is either radically reshaped, or displaced altogether in order to challenge its audience’s assumptions and beliefs. The course will begin by exploring films of the historical avant-garde movements of 1920s Europe. When experimentation in visual and other arts was curtailed by World War II in the late 1930s, film innovation moved to the United States. Therefore, we will follow the development of avant-garde film and moving images to post-war America. In the second half of the course, we will be looking at examples of film and image making that have developed over the past 30 years. We will examine how artists and filmmakers have used experimental forms to explore sexual and gender identity, racial empowerment, and working-class protest. In addition, we will discover the attraction and exploitation of avant-garde moving image forms for the critique of war, incarceration, and industrial capitalism’s devastation of the human and natural environments.