Reviled, rioted over, and banned as pornographic even as it was recognized as an unprecedented visionary masterpiece, Jack Smith\'s Flaming Creatures is the most important and influential underground movie ever released in America. J. Hoberman\'s monograp

A vividly eccentric and entertaining posthumous collection of essays, interviews, scripts, cartoons, and fragmentary jottings from one of the granddaddies of American avant-garde filmmaking. Best known for the underground (and much banned) classic Flaming

In spite of the difficulty of most American avant-garde films, one can read volumes and find almost no mention of how to view these films. Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order addresses precisely this question: how—and to what extent—can viewers make sense of American avant-garde films? It is a controversial book that examines the implicit assumptions of traditional scholarship, advocates on alternative to dominant approaches to the avant-garde cinema, and questions some long-standing clichés about the history of the avant-garde.

Avant-garde films are often dismissed as obscure or disconnected from the realities of social and political history. Jeffrey Skoller challenges this myth, arguing that avant-garde films more accurately display the complex interplay between past events and