What Is Avant-Garde? Definition, Movements & Film Examples

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Published: June 3, 2024 | Last Updated: June 11, 2025

The word avant-garde started in the military. In French, it means “advance guard,” referring to the soldiers sent ahead to scout new territory. Philosopher Henri de Saint-Simon was one of the first to link this idea to artists.

By the 1800s, painters such as Gustave Courbet had begun to embrace the label. Courbet painted working-class people instead of royalty, and during the Paris Commune, he helped tear down a monument to imperial power.

Early avant-garde artists didn’t just want to create art; they sought to transform the impact of art on society.

What makes a film avant-garde?

There’s no checklist, but avant-garde films usually do at least one of these things:

• Break away from traditional story structure
• Use found footage, still images, or non-actors
• Focus more on rhythm, tone, or texture than plot
• Disrupt how we see or hear time and space
• Question cultural norms, institutions, or politics

It can be subtle or chaotic. The goal isn’t to confuse you, but to unstick your habits. These films ask you to see something differently, even if that something is just the flicker of light on film stock.

Early avant-garde film

Surrealist filmmakers like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí made headlines with Un Chien Andalou (1929), a short full of violent, dreamlike images and no narrative structure.

At the same time, Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) reimagined what editing could do. It has no characters or story, just raw footage of Soviet city life, sliced together into something rhythmic and alive:

In the U.S., Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) introduced personal, psychological imagery to avant-garde film. Stan Brakhage took it further by painting and scratching on film stock by hand. These early experiments weren’t about making movies that looked like life. They were about seeing how far the medium could stretch.

Avant-Garde and the Isms

Many famous art movements you’ve heard of, Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Futurism, were also part of the avant-garde. They weren’t just painting styles. They were revolts.

Each art movement rejected what art was supposed to look like and how it was supposed to function. Some focused on abstraction, others on chaos, and many responded directly to war, politics, or industrial change.

These movements fed directly into early experimental film. Dada artists like Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling made abstract animations. Surrealists like Buñuel and Dalí used dream logic and shock to rupture cinematic form.

Even movements rooted in painting, like Cubism and Suprematism, influenced editing and visual fragmentation on screen. The avant-garde wasn’t a single group, it was a wave of disruptions that kept rolling through different mediums.

Key avant-garde artists and movements

The avant-garde doesn’t belong to one era. It shows up whenever someone pushes the form forward. In 1915, Kazimir Malevich painted Black Square, a solid black shape on white canvas. That painting had no subject, no illusion. It was an idea in paint.

Marcel Duchamp took it further with his ready-mades, like a signed urinal titled Fountain, turning everyday objects into art just by labeling them. See also What is fine art?

Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque took visual space apart with Cubism. Sonia Delaunay brought abstraction into fabric, fashion, and stage design. Later, artists like Nam June Paik used video and performance to keep pushing boundaries. The common thread isn’t style, it’s refusal. These artists chose not to follow the rules of their time.

Late Avant-Garde and Structural Film

By the 1960s, a new wave of avant-garde filmmakers moved away from surrealism and toward pure form. Known as structural film, these works focused on repetition, time, and perception. The camera might barely move. Edits might follow a fixed pattern. The content wasn’t the subject, the structure was.

Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) is a 45-minute zoom across a loft. Nothing really happens, but the pace of movement builds tension.

Hollis Frampton’s Zorns Lemma (1970) replaces plot with an evolving alphabet of images and sounds.

These films aren’t about emotion or narrative. They ask you to watch differently, to see the medium itself as the message.

How it shaped modern cinema

Even if you don’t watch experimental shorts, their influence shows up everywhere. You can feel it in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, MGM), especially during the Stargate sequence:

Aronofsky used rapid montage and repetition in Requiem for a Dream (2000, Artisan) that echoes avant-garde editing. Gaspar Noé’s films are full of long takes, distortion, and color fields straight out of video art.

David Lynch blurs the line completely. Eraserhead (1977, Libra Films) has a plot, but it’s buried under texture, mood, and sound design. His films don’t explain. They drift, break, or just stop.

Beyond cinema

Today, you’ll see avant-garde thinking in places that didn’t exist 50 years ago. Artists project short films onto public buildings or stage interactive performances on livestreams. Some use VR to build abstract spaces you can walk through. Others remix algorithmic patterns or 3D scans into hybrid film-sculpture hybrids.

Museums like the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego now host multimedia events like the Avant Garde Ball, part performance, part installation, part party.

The tools have changed. The attitude hasn’t. These artists continue to aim to unsettle, to push the boundaries of what image and sound can do, and to prompt you to question where art ends and the world begins.

Summing up

Avant-garde film throws out the rulebook to explore something more raw, abstract, or confrontational. It began with a military metaphor, evolved into a political force, and became a lasting undercurrent in cinema. Even now, it keeps shaping how we frame images, cut time, and build meaning. It doesn’t always give answers. But it always gives you something to think about.