Bruce Baillie, who died on April 10th of this year, was the pioneer of the "Western American Experimental Film" and the key figure in the pioneering avant-garde awakening in the San Francisco Bay Area in the sixties. In memoriam we show two of the main works by this underground poet: Mass for the Dakota Sioux is a picture-sound poem as a requiem for a native culture destroyed by "civilized" America (as an outsider, Baillie naturally identifies with the Sioux and orchestrates the Gregorian chorales on the soundtrack like an accusation to the world of the white conquerors).

Scottish poet filmmaker Margaret Tait (1918–1999) has long been one of the best-kept secrets of British cinema. In intimate films attuned to the secret life of things, people, and landscapes, Tait sought to reveal the other side of existence – the side we only notice when our own presence in the world comes to the foreground. An independent mind and eye, she focused on what she saw before her, be it the streets of Edinburgh, the crashing sea on Orkney or a pair of old boots in a barn, shedding an singular light on the manifold dimensions of things.

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.