OUR TOP 10 LISTS

At any given festival the so-called discoveries tend to be flavors of the week more than genuine groundbreakers. Still, Sundance has seen its share of bold aesthetic innovations, and the Frontier section, an often neglected showcase for experimental filmmakers, has grown in recent years. These 10 works, most of them tucked away at the fringes of the festival, tried to do something new.

Author: Dennis Lim

10. STRANGE CULTURE (2007)

In recounting the bioterrorism case of artist and FBI target Steve Kurtz, Lynn Hershman Leeson uses a fluid blend of re-enactments and deconstructions that coalesce into an intelligent, indignant response to Patriot Act America.

9. ZIDANE: A 21ST CENTURY PORTRAIT (2006, shown in 2007)

Video-art giant Douglas Gordon, co-directing with Philippe Parreno, train 17 cameras on French soccer star Zinedine Zidane for the duration of a match: an intriguing experiment in real time and cubist perspective.

8. THE JOY OF LIFE (2005)

A moving tribute to a city and a departed friend, Jenni Olson's haunting experimental documentary pairs static shots of an eerily emptied-out San Francisco with a lyrical voiceover meditation on desire and death.

7. 1ST LIGHT (2005, shown in 2007)

Paul Chan's digital-animated video projection, the first piece of what would become the series THE 7 LIGHTS, casts drifiting silhouettes on the floor: plummeting bodies and levitating objects, a provocative melding of painful 9/11 images and cliched rapture imagery.

6. THE BEAVER TRILOGY (2000, shown in 2001)

This almost indescribably strange cult object originated in 1980, when Trent Harris made a brief documentary about a young Utah man who impersonates Olivia Newton-John at a local talent show. Harris proceeded to retell this story, first with Sean Penn (pre-FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH) in the central role, then Crispin Glover.

5. SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE 2 1/2 (2005)

Another recursive, self-reflexive fiction/doc hybrid: William Greaves returns to the scene of his 1968 experimental classic, SYMBIOPSYCHOTAXIPLASM: TAKE 1, a deconstructed account of a Central Park film shoot. No less than the original, this multiple layered sequel is a playful exploration of the the power dynamics of the filmmaking process.

4. PROVING GROUND (2006)

The year Sundance rebranded its avant-garde section as New Frontier, opening the door to installations and new-media experiments, a festival highlight turned out to be this multimedia performance by committed rabble-rouser Travis Wilkerson. Backed by multiple screens and the folk-punk band Los Duggans, Wilkerson delivered a fiercely polemical illustrated lecture on the history of U.S. aerial bombing — and brilliantly revived the art of agitation.

3. CLEAN, SHAVEN (1993)

With its auditory hallucinations and visual abstractions, Lodge Kerrigan's remarkable debut forces the viewer to share the head space of a tormented schizophrenic (PULP FICTION's Peter Greene, in a great performance). A mix of clinical detail and raw poetry, this radical film demolishes the notion that movies are not suited to expressing inner life.

2. GERRY (2002)

Gus Van Sant emerged from his years in the studio wasteland with this wilderness hike, a road to nowhere that led the director out of a creative dead end. A movie with Hollywood stars (Matt Damon, Casey Affleck) that borrows heavily from the likes of Chantal Akerman, Andy Warhol, and Bela Tarr, it was met with bewilderment and walkouts at its Sundance premiere but kicked off a remarkable career reinvention.

1. DECASIA (2002)

Bill Morrison's found-footage piece, assembled entirely from degraded archival clips, is a beautiful, ambivalent essay on the looming extinction of celluloid: an implict call for film preservation and a Zen-like meditation on the state of decay.