Forty Photographs From Avant-garde Film : Photographs by Robert A. Haller

From 1970 I attended a very adventurous film exhibition program at the Carnegie Institute Museum of Art in Pittsburgh under the direction of Sally Dixon, who brought personal, avant-garde artists to the city on a monthly basis. Simultaneously a community-based group, Pittsburgh Film-Makers, began doing the same thing on a more modest scale. At every screening, and informally, I photographed all of them. Today only a few of these exhibtors survive.

This publication is a small tribute to the film-makers of the avant-garde film community in the United States and to the few organizations who show this independent cinema and their tenacious commitment to endure. These photographs are of the artists and some of the curators who opened windows on this new art of our time.

Robert A. Haller is director of collections and special projects at the Anthology Film Archives in New York City and the author of Intersecting Images: The Cinema of Ed Emshwiller and Crossroads: Avant-Garde Film in Pittsburgh in the 1970s.