In the spirit of Open City’s challenge to conventional histories and ideas of documentary cinema, this program interweaves distinct yet complementary modes of avant-garde non-fiction cinema made by independent artists working outside any stable system. Alternating between diary films, found footage collage, and meditations on the medium itself, these seven films each explore alternate approaches to the documentary less as a way of ‘capturing’ the real than of sharing a world entirely of their own making. In their own ways, each film seeks to give expressions to singular life experiences and understandings of the camera, narrative and the moving image itself. All of the artists worked equally in other media – painting, poetry, photography, sculpture, theatre – that influenced their unique approaches to filmmaking. All prints are from the Harvard Film Archive, one of the largest and most important university-based motion picture collections in the USA.