When we think of the cinema, we often think of films coming from Hollywood. But a whole world of moving image cultures exists outside of traditional circuits and national film industries. Drawing on both Art History and Film Studies, this course will study the history of the moving image from a transnationalist perspective, with an emphasis on experimental and avant-garde film and video. In the century plus since the invention of moving images, populations around the world have been subjected to unprecedented disruption, displacement, and intercultural exchange. Cinemas of exile, diaspora, and migration, geographies of collaboration and internationalist solidarity, and conditions of circulation and flow define the history of moving images, despite what national film industries would have us believe. Alternative moving image cultures have described themselves in different ways: the underground, the avant-garde, Third Cinema, imperfect cinema, militant cinema, expanded cinema, experimental media art, and more. We will study these and other movements, mapping our history around the involvement of film in decolonial struggle and movements for civil rights and social justice. We will pay particular attention to cinemas of Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and the African Diaspora, and other non-“Western” cinemas, particularly in the years between World War II and the present. There will be required weekly viewings outside of class and students will be expected to take turns presenting on the films and readings in class to facilitate participation and discussion. We may work in studio visits and visits to galleries and museums, depending on the timing and what is on in New York.