Experimental Films of the 1950s

In the 1940s the experimental film scene was thriving due to the increased availability of filmmaking equipment and production programs at universities, and this trend continued in the 1950s. These films were also seeing greater exposure due to the rise of festivals like Cannes. A lot of the key avant-garde figures of the 1940s continued their work, but there were several notable new faces as well.


The most important experimental work of this decade was Hiroshima Mon Amour, from French director Alain Resnais, who was a key figure in the French New Wave of the late 1950s and 1960s. As opposed to the slightly more mainstream directors associated with Cahiers du Cinema like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, Resnais was part of the Left Bank group that also included Agnes Varda and Jacques Demy. The Left Bank was more associated with leftist political views and made films that were less referential than the Right Bank.

Hiroshima Mon Amour came out in 1959, and along with Truffaut's The 400 Blows that same year, basically started off the French New Wave as a movement.

At the time, Resnais had only made documentary shorts, most notably 1955's Night and Fog about the Holocaust. Hiroshima Mon Amour was his first feature-length movie as well as his first fictional work, although it did start out as a documentary short no longer than 45 minutes that grew bit by bit into a feature.



The black and white film's most experimental aspect is its extended opening sequence that blurs the lines between documentary and fictional filmmaking by using actual newsreel footage from the aftermath of the nuclear bomb in Hiroshima, Japan.

This part is quite powerful and a bit disturbing, especially for 1959 standards. After this, the movie does become more straightforward and less avant-garde, but there's no regard for mainstream story structure or satisfying resolution. There are pretty much only two characters, with all others being very minor and even the two leads are nameless.

Resnais uses some very innovative editing, particularly in the way flashbacks are presented. Flashbacks aren't just shown as separate, delineated scenes, but rather fragmented and intertwined with the present. It's often unclear when and where things are taking place.

Resnais' film feels quite modernist as opposed to the more postmodern, intertextual work of Godard, who famously called this the "first film without any cinematic references."

Hiroshima Mon Amour was helped by the previously mentioned burgeoning film festival scene as it received an International Critic's award at Cannes but was excluded from the official selection. Writer Marguerite Duras even earned an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay.

It starred Japanese actor Eiji Okada who couldn't speak French and performed his lines phonetically, and Emmanuelle Riva in her first major role. She went on many decades later to become the oldest person ever nominated for a lead acting Oscar at the age of 85 for her work in Michael Haneke 2012 film Amour.

Resnais would make another landmark avant-garde film in 1961 with Last Year in Marienbad and worked until his death in 2014.



One of the undeniable titans of experimental film was Stan Brakhage and he also began work in the 1950s. While Hiroshima Mon Amour blurred the lines between experimental and traditional films, the same can't be said of a lot of Brakhage's work.

In a way, he is fundamentally different from the other experimental filmmakers of the past and his era. Works like Un Chien Andalou and Meshes of the Afternoon disregarded logic and causality, but still centered on people and recognizable objects.

A few went abstract like animator Oskar Fischinger, but even he used common shapes and patterns, whereas Brakhage finally took cinema into a world of complete abstraction, with shorts like Mothlight that are an incomprehensible blur. He called his films visual music and often bypassed the camera entirely by painting or scratching the film itself, or even taping moths to it.

The earlier experimental directors like Bunuel and Deren were influenced by surrealism, but Brakhage's work has more in common with non-representational abstract expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock.

He wasn't quite there yet in the 1950s, but his films of the era were still very avant-garde and transgressive. His first effort was 1952's Interim, shot in black and white and unlike much of his later work contained audio and what could vaguely be considered characters, but no dialogue.

His longest of the decade was 1958's Anticipation of the Night, which almost reached the full-blown abstraction he went with in the 60s and later.

Still from Anticipation (1958)

The most well-known of Brakhage's 50s output is Window Water Baby Moving from 1959 which is an extremely and absurdly graphic depiction of Brakhage's wife giving birth. The processing lab didn't even want to process it and Brakhage had to lie and say it was for medical research.

It uses a very unconventional, rapid editing style, lots of extreme close-ups, handheld camera and jump cuts around to different angles in a disorienting way. One way this does compare to Hiroshima Mon Amour is that uses elements of both nonfiction and narrative filmmaking. It could be considered a documentary as it is just footage of unvarnished reality, but the way it's presented makes it more of an abstract film.

The same year Brakhage produced Cat's Cradle, which had a similar visual style to Window Water Baby Moving, but was thankfully much less disturbing.

Brakhage also worked on several industrial films in the 1950s and lived in poverty for most of the decade.

Brakhage made what many consider his magnum opus in the early 1960s with Dog Star Man and put out over 350 films until his death in 2003. He was massively influential, especially in the avant-garde world, but on the mainstream as well. His editing style has been cited as inspiring music video creators when they gained prominence decades later.


Despite being seemingly so far removed from other filmmakers, Brakhage did describe a few as being his related contemporaries in an early interview with Pauline Kael. One was American director Marie Menken, and he specifically mentioned her 1957 short Hurry, Hurry! Also in 1957, she directed the five minute Glimpse of the Garden, that like its title suggests, consists solely of clips of a garden set to audio of birds chirping.

Brakhage knew Menken personally, as well as Maya Deren and John Cage. He also was friends with another artist he referred to as one of his contemporaries, Joseph Cornell, who created the landmark 1936 collage short Rose Hobart, and they even collaborated in the mid-50s. Cornell commissioned Brakhage's The Wonder Ring from 1955 and later produced his own version of it that was played backward and upside down.

Brakhage taught at the University of Colorado and his students included the creators of South Park. He even appeared in their early film Cannibal: The Musical.



Kenneth Anger was active in the 1940s, but his style became fully formed in the 1950s. He made a short in 1953 called Eaux d'Artifice but directed his most important work of the decade the year after that with Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.

Anger was a follower of Aleister Crowley and this 38-minute film is filled with occult symbols and imagery. It's dialogue-free and emphasizes mood over narrative while featuring biblical characters and pagan gods. Pleasure Dome contains a few visual tricks and lots of superimposition, along with vivid colors and striking visuals.

In 1955, Anger released a short documentary called Thelema Abbey about Aleister Crowley's temple in Italy. He'd make more landmark films in the 1960s and 70s like Scorpio Rising, Invocation of my Demon Brother, and Lucifer Rising. Anger is still alive at age 90 and has put stuff out as recently as 2010.



Maya Deren directed her most influential works in the 40s, but she still worked on a few minor pieces in the 50s. A couple were never released and her only finished one of the decade was also her final one before her death in 1961. It was 15 minutes long, titled The Very Eye of Night. This has a much different feel than her earlier work as it's more abstract and purely cinematic. It also shows Deren's interest in dance since it features dancers from the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School.


In 1958 Bruce Conner created an experimental collage film simply titled A Movie. In the tradition of the 1936 Joseph Cornell short Rose Hobart that entirely consisted of preexisting footage, Conner does the same with clips from a variety of sources. These include newsreels, B-movies, and even softcore pornography.

A Movie features shots of car crashes, Teddy Roosevelt, the famous clip of an extremely wobbly bridge, and topless women, as well as stylistic touches like flashing numbers and a title card reading "The End" randomly appearing more than once way before the actual ending.


Some others I'd like to briefly mention are John Cassavetes' feature-length Shadows, Pull My Daisy, written and narrated by author Jack Kerouac, Jean Cocteau's Orpheus, and Christopher Maclaine' short The End.

There were also tons of great art films that I chose not to include here, but definitely have experimental elements, as the 1950s saw the first or relatively early major works from lots of respected directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and Robert Bresson.

Finally, I'd like to quickly note that sources often differ on many of the release years mentioned above, but I tried to just go with the most commonly accepted one, and regardless they rarely varied by more than a year.