Your Top 10 Experimental/Avant-Ga rde Films

i'm not an expert at all, but I know a little bit.

I would check out Man Ray, one of the earliest avant-garde film makers. The film I saw by him was Le Retour a la Raison.

Another cool one I saw was Ballet Mecanique, not sure by who.

Stan Brakhage- the film I saw was Window Water Baby Moving.

Of course, all of Maya Deren's stuff.

That's all I got right now.

Oh, I would check out Sans Soleil, a very cool film.

And then there's Kenneth Anger.

A lot of good stuff out there

I'm not great at ranking, but I'll give you a list of films I've enjoyed (or that I know others have enjoyed). Obviously Deren's other films would be a great place to start (I particularly liked "At Land"), but here are some others:

Bruce Baillie - I particularly enjoyed Mr. Hayashi (1961) and Roslyn Romance (Is it really true?) (1976)

Stan Brakhage - Of course. The criterion collection is really good, although transferring a lot of these films to DVD is problematic, because so much of Brakhage's work involved meticulously painting individual film cells, and DVD transfer deletes and compresses cells in the transfer process. That being said, my favorites are: Sirius Remembered (1959), Mothlight (1963), Murder Psalm (1980), and The Lion and the Zebra Make God’s Raw Jewels (1999)

James Broughton - The Bed (1968) is an interesting little avant-garde hippie film.

Luis Buñuel - Un Chien Andalou (1928) is, in many ways, similar to Deren's Meshes. I prefer Deren's film, but Buñuel set the standard.

Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie - Pull My Daisy (1958)

Sallie Fuchs - It Scares Me to Feel This Way (1987) is a traumatizing film in which a young filmmaker films her own experiences as an ongoing bulimic.

Ernie Gehr - Serene Velocity (1970) is an exploration of space and distance. A fixed camera is zoomed in and out for 20 minutes, providing different perspectives on a seemingly indifferent hallway.

Some of David Lynch's lesser-known short pieces, such as The Alphabet (1968) and his segment from Lumière et compagnie.

Marie Menken - Arabesque for Kenneth Anger (1960) is one of my favorites overall. It's a 4 minute exploration of space, shot in Spain, all silent. Her shots of the fountain are particularly compelling.

Gunvor Nelson - My Name is Oona (1969) is a really haunting study of a young girl growing up.

Paul Sharits - T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1968) is an exploration of sound. The same phrase is repeated over and over and over, against various still images. Eventually, most people start hearing their own messages in the soundtrack--kinda creepy.

Jack Smith - Flaming Creatures (1967) is an exploration of sexuality and gender identity. It's a long film by experimental standards and not my favorite, but I'll toss it out there.

Dziga Vertov - The Man with the Movie Camera (1929). I don't really know if this qualifies as experimental film, but it's great regardless. It's a excellent exploration of space, history, time, motion . . . everything. Really beautiful.

Andy Warhol - Blow Job (1964) is the only one I've seen of his films. Not really my cup of tea, but if you force yourself to sit through ten or twenty minutes of this film, you will start to see things in the ordinary that you didn't notice before.

No order:

"Le Tempestaire", by Jean Epstein.
In this 1943's film you can see many elements which would sustain the cinema of Bresson and Antonioni. Pure cinema, theorically conceived, right to the "soul" of the images.

"Filmstudie", by Hans Richter.
In my opinion, Richter is the most complete Avant-Garde moviemaker. His entire filmography is superb, so it was hard to choose only one to put here. Maybe "Filmstudie" is the best example of his work, being the first time Richter filmed "real images" but still with abstraction.

"Ballet Mécanique", by Fernand Léger.
The very human side of futurism. For those who see that Marinetti's fascist personallity became much smaller than what his Manifesto came into.

"H2O", by Ralph Steiner.
Art from simple observation of the nature. This is much more than just an "artist's insight".

"Sans Soleil", by Chris Marker.
This is in my All-Movies Top 10, side by side with Tarkovski, Bresson and the Dardenne Brothers.

"Limite", by Mário Peixoto.
Made in 1930, this brazilian film is the peak of Avant-Garde's mute years. A two-hour feature film which shows what we'd watch today if the sound hadn't come.

"Black Ice", by Stan Brakhage.
The purest of Brakhage's pure films. This is mature cinema, far from any kind of relationship with any of the "older arts". It makes me wonder why cinema is the only art where its true form, image-in-movement by itself, isn't considered classic, progenitor, but "experimental".

"Meshes Of The Afternoon", by Maya Deren.
Everything that David Lynch wishes to be (if he ever grow up), decades before his first attempts.

"Chelovek S Kino-Apparatom", by Dziga Vertov.
There's not much new to say about this, so I prefer to let the piece speak by itself.

"Le Sang D'Un Poète", by Jean Cocteau.
Cocteau's heaven is Earth without insensibility.

Kino Video put out a two-disc set called "Avant-Garde - Experimental Cinema of the 1920's and '30s". A very good collection, including some titles mentioned in this thread.

i really haven't seen enough..

1 Eraserhead
2 the holy mountain
3 zardoz
4 the garden
5 fantastic planet
6 inland empire
7 gummo
8 un chien andalou
9 fondo y lis
10 pink flamingos

1. INLAND EMPIRE
2. Un Chien Andalou
3. Satyricon
4. Meshes of the Afternoon
5. Gummo
6. L'Age D'Or
7. Pink Flamingos
8. Eraserhead
9. The Alphabet
10. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoise
11. Slacker
12. 8 1/2
13. A Clockwork Orange

Not really in any order, but all great.

"It's a strange world." - Blue Velvet

Pretty much all the suggestions here are spot-on. I just want to emphasize Eraserhead as mandatory viewing for somebody who likes this type of film. It's THE masterpiece.

The thing's hollow-it goes on forever-and-oh my God-it's full of stars!

I'll probably get mangled for this being too Mainstream-ish, but Mulholland Drive was brilliant, better (my opinion) than INLAND EMPIRE that i'm seeing popping up.

Can I aggravate some people by asking what was so great about Eraserhead? I enjoyed bits of it but it made me squamish in a few to many places. The ending seemed awesome but it was too gross.
It made me more uncomfortable than the first scene in Wild At Heart...

David Lynch is the master of combining that genre with a commercial style. He's a fantastic director.