The postwar American avant-garde

The U.S. had some avant-garde filmmakers before World War II, but much pre-war experimental film culture consisted of artists working, often, in isolation. Douglass Crockwell (1904–1968) made animations with blobs of paint pressed between sheets of glass at Fall River, New York.

In Rochester, New York, James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber directed The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and Lot in Sodom (1933). Harry Smith, Mary Ellen Bute, artist Joseph Cornell, and painter Emlen Etting (1905–1993) made early masterpieces in the 1930s, and Christopher Young made several European-influenced experimental films. In 1930 appears the magazine Experimental Cinema (for the first time, the two words are directly connected without any space between them. The editors are Lewis Jacobs and David Platt. A very large panel of films of that time are been edited, in 2005, on DVD : Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant Garde Film 1894-1941.

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) by Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid is considered to be one of the first important American experimental films. It provided a model for self-financed 16 mm production and distribution, one that was soon picked up by Cinema 16 and other film societies. Just as importantly, it established an aesthetic model of what experimental cinema could do. Meshes had a dream-like feel that hearkened to Jean Cocteau and the Surrealists, but equally seemed personal, new and American. Early works by Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, Gregory Markopoulos, Jonas Mekas, Willard Maas, Marie Menken, Curtis Harrington and Sidney Peterson followed in a similar vein. Significantly, many of these filmmakers were the first students from the pioneering university film programs established in Los Angeles and New York. In 1946, Frank Stauffacher started the "Art in Cinema" series of experimental films at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

They set up "alternative film programs" at Black Mountain College (now defunct) and the San Francisco Art Institute. Arthur Penn taught at Black Mountain College, which points out the popular misconception in both the art world and Hollywood that the avant-garde and the commercial never meet. Another challenge to that misconception is the fact that late in life, after each's Hollywood careers had ended, both Nicholas Ray and King Vidor made avant-garde films.