The London Film-Makers' Co-operative (LFMC) was founded in October 1966, and soon grew from its beginnings as a film-viewing group to become one of the major centres of a worldwide network of avant-garde film culture. In contrast to similar co-operative endeavours, the LFMC's activity was not limited to distribution – within a few years it was also running a regular program in its own cinema and, most notably, it democratized the means of production by establishing a film workshop that enabled filmmakers to control every stage of the creative process.

Over the last 15 years, Deborah Stratman's (*1967) moving image works have gained increased recognition in the art world as well as the world of cinema. She has developed a unique documentary form which, though interested in the material reality of visible and audible surroundings, sees these as mirror images of an inner disposition. Natural landscapes and landscapes marked by civilization, traditional and pop-cultural rituals, and fragments of a history of cinema come together in a pointed documentary essayistic expression of the (mainly) American soul.

Maria Lassnig, who died in 2014, is internationally regarded as one of the most important painters of the 20th century. Her lyrical abstraction, developed from her own physical experience - the so-called "body awareness", in which emotional experience and physical sensibility are combined - also found cinematic expression in the early 1970s. As part of her New York exile, Lassnig attended an animation film class at the School of Visual Arts and began filming on 8mm and 16mm.

After Bruce Bailie, the Film Museum pays respect to another key figure of the New American Cinema revolution – this time one from the East rather than the West Coast: Hollis Frampton (1936-1984). After his formative "year of apprenticeship" spent with poet Ezra Pound (1957/1958), Ohio-born Frampton moved to New York in order to establish himself as a painter. He moved from photography to 16mm film and was soon celebrated as a visionary of Structural Film.