Films from the First Decade

Join us at the University of Michigan’s Hatcher Graduate Library Gallery for a one-time showing of short film highlights from the early days of the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Founded in 1963, the Ann Arbor Film Festival is the oldest avant-garde and experimental film festival in North America. And since its earliest days, the festival has promoted bold, visionary filmmakers, advancing the art of film and engaging the community with remarkable cinematic experiences.

This program highlights a cross-section of the left-field cinema art of that era: the non-narrative, the beautiful, the visually stunning, the playful, the progressive, the transgressive, the political, and the absurd—all hallmarks of the AAFF to this day. Films to be screened include Bruce Baillie’s poetic impression of place, Castro Street (1966); Gunvor Nelson and Dorothy Wiley’s critique of images of women, Schmeerguntz (1965); and Caroline and Frank Mouris’s Frank Film (1973, restored by the Academy Film Archive), an animated collage tour de force that not only won at Ann Arbor, but won an Oscar, too. Plus more — in all, about 90 minutes of rarely screened film art.

Tuesday, October 29, at 7:00 p.m. Hatcher Graduate Library, Room 100 (First Floor Gallery) 913 South University, Ann Arbor

Free and open to the public

The screening is organized by Greg Baise, Bridget Kennedy, and Autumn Wetli as part of a project funded by U-M Library’s Research and Creative Projects Committee. Watch for information about an exhibition of AAFF ephemera in the Hatcher Lobby in March 2020.