Contrary to postmodernist clichéé, avant-garde moving image culture is not dead; rather it is ubiquitous, although in intertwined utopian and dystopian forms. A plethora of independent exhibition venues in Los Angeles and indeed the urban fabric of the city sustain unprecedentedly vibrant and complex forms of popular cinema, according to this survey of 2008 events.

ABSTRACT The international success of Im Kwon-Taek's Chihwaseon prompts consideration of its relation to other films that use narra-tives about art and artists as allegories for filmmaking: the reflexive art films that established Im's reputation; feature films about artists made in the West, especially Pollock ; and other recent reflexive films from Korea and China.

In the late 1920s, European expatriates in Hollywood made a number of independent experimental films influenced by avant-garde cultural movements. But these were preceded by three short experimental films made in 1920 by an American, Dudley Murphy, of which one, Soul of the Cypress , survives. Influenced by California Pictorialist photography of the preceding decades, it was in its own day recognized as an avant-garde film, but nevertheless it secured successful commercial distribution. The surviving print of the film, however, was drastically framed by the later addition of a pornographic coda that radically transformed its erotic theme and its social function.