The Bolex camera, 16mm reversal film stocks, commercial film laboratories, and low-budget optical printers were the small-gauge media technologies that provided the infrastructure for experimental filmmaking at the height of its cultural impact. Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture examines how the avant-garde embraced these material resources and invested them with meanings and values adjacent to those of semiprofessional film culture.

Drama and myth frame the life and death of Maya Deren. Born in Kiev in 1917, at the start of the Russian Revolution, she died forty-four years later in New York City. In her brief life, she established herself as a pioneering experimental filmmaker, prolific writer, accomplished photographer, and crusader for a personal and poetic cinema. With its dreamy circular narrative and enigmatic imagery, her first film, Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), has inspired generations of artists, filmmakers, and poets.

Paris, 1976: the Centre Pompidou had not yet opened its doors, yet it was already asserting its ambition to include in its programming artistic practices that had until then remained invisible in museums. It is at this moment of prefiguration that the exhibition A History of Cinema is being organised. What kind of history is this? In the course of the sessions, an alternative narrative to the dominant cinematographic canons took shape, on the fringes of the industry and auteur cinema.