While structural film was the dominant form within the avant-garde tradition at the dawn of the 1970s, animators used shape and structure in a variety of ways that differentiated their works. Robert Russett composed geometric patterns and colour sequences in complex rhythms to create his pulsing, abstract films. Paul Glabicki created incisive, analytical works that explored objects through image, language, form and movement, drafting stunningly complicated sequences by hand.

From the City of Angels to the City of Light, the filmmaker/programmer/film restorer Mark Toscano offers us in this program recently restored copies of Los Angeles artists' films.

The avant-garde cinematographic movement of Los Angeles has been for decades little studied and shown in comparison to the other two major US avant-garde centers New York and San Francisco. The city of Los Angeles has howver witnessed an extremely varied production and that has been the origin of a particularly influential culture of experimental film.

With the artists in person.

Artistic contemporaries and longtime friends, Suzan Pitt and Pat O’Neill have each created large and diverse bodies of work in a wide variety of mediums, though none perhaps more visibly than in film. The Academy is proud to host these two visionary artists in person with a program of their radical and visually stunning short films, newly preserved by the Academy Film Archive.