Free Independent & Avant-Garde Films — Watch Online

This shelf is the site's smallest and strangest: independent film made entirely outside the studio system, on a budget of almost nothing, by people answering to no one but themselves. Maya Deren's "Meshes of the Afternoon" (1943), co-directed with and starring her husband Alexander Hammid, runs fourteen minutes and rewrites itself as it goes — a woman comes home, falls asleep, and dreams the same walk down the same hallway again and again, a flower on the path, a key that becomes a knife, a hooded figure with a mirror for a face. Deren shot it on a rented 16mm camera in the house she and Hammid lived in, financed the print herself, and edited it into a spiral where you can't always tell which version of the woman is awake. It is generally credited as the film that founded American avant-garde cinema — the first widely seen demonstration that a movie could work like a poem or a dream rather than a story with a beginning and an end, made years before "underground film" was even a term critics reached for. There's only one film on this shelf so far, but it's the one every experimental filmmaker after it was, in some way, responding to.