A trip through 70 years of artists' filmmaking in, on and around the American West Coast, featuring expressionist experiments, pioneering psychodrama, freewheeling Beat Culture and the psychedelic explosion. The post-war avant-garde began in Los Angeles with the revolutionary trance films of Kenneth Anger, Maya Deren and Gregory Markopoulos, but San Francisco soon established itself as a major centre in the 1960s when Bruce Baillie, Chick Strand and Bruce Conner founded Canyon Cinema, organising screenings and distribution. This unique season included rare works by these filmmakers, and many others including Jordan Belson, Ernie Gehr, George Kuchar and Gunvor Nelson, plus Andy Warhol's scenario based on the real-life arrest for shoplifting of Ecstasy starlet Hedy Lamarr.

Christopher MacLaine, The End, 1963

Andy Warhol, Hedy (The Shoplifter), 1966

Ernie Gehr, Eureka, 1974

Bruce Baillie, Castro Street, 1967

Curtis Harrington, Fragment of Seeking, 1946

Gregory Markopoulos, Psyche, 1947-48

Friday 13 June, 7pm
West Coast Beat
The cellular, celluloid merger of the literary and artistic underground, featuring Michael McClure, Jack Hirschman, Henry Jacobs, Jay de Feo, Wallace Berman, Christopher MacLaine. Beat Poets + Beat Artists = Beat Cinema.
• Larry Jordan, Visions of a City, 1957/78, sepia, sound, 7m
• Frank Stauffacher, Sausalito, 1948, b/w, sound, 10m
• Wallace Berman, Untitled (Aleph), 1958/76, colour, silent, 10m
• Bruce Conner, The White Rose, 1967, b/w, sound, 7m
• Jane Belson, Odds and Ends, 1958, colour, sound, 5m
• Christopher MacLaine, The End, 1963, b/w & colour, sound, 35m
• Henry Hills, Kino Da!, 1981, b/w, sound, 4m

Saturday 14 June, 7pm
Hollywood Be Thy Name
Four of the avant-garde's most momentous flirtations with the glamorous world of The Movies. The dark shadow of Tinseltown looms large on the horizon.
• Robert Florey & Slavko Vorkapich, The Life and Death of 9413 - A Hollywood Extra, 1927, b/w, silent, 15m
• George Kuchar, I, An Actress, 1978, b/w, sound, 10m
• Andy Warhol, Hedy (The Shoplifter), 1966, b/w, sound, 66m
• Kenneth Anger, Puce Moment, 1949/70, colour, sound, 7m

Sunday 15 June, 7pm
Film Time / Film Motion
West Coast structuralism meets avant-garde vagary as time is lapsed, stretched, condensed and compressed using the methods and mechanics of motion pictures.
• Morgan Fisher, The Director and His Actor Look at Footage Showing Preparations for an Unmade Film, 1968, colour, sound, 15m
• Gary Beydler, Pasadena Freeway Stills, 1974, colour, silent, 6m
• Ernie Gehr, Eureka, 1974, b/w, silent, 30m
• Michael Rudnick, Panorama, 1982, colour, sound, 13m
• Bruce Baillie, Castro Street, 1967, b/w & colour, sound, 10m
• Owen Land (formerly known as George Landow), A Film of their 1973 Spring Tour commissioned by Christian World Liberation Front of Berkeley, California, 1974, b/w, sound, 11m

Tuesday 17 June, 7pm
In Between Moments
Personal emotions and experiences are documented and disclosed in three intimate films of private moments. Luminous glances at everyday life and a sensitive affirmation of female sensuality.
• Nathaniel Dorsky, Variations, 1992-98, colour, silent, 24m (18fps)
• Chick Strand, Soft Fiction, 1979, b/w, sound, 54m
• Warren Sonbert, Noblesse Oblige, 1981, colour, sound, 25m

Wednesday 18 June, 7pm
Los Angeles in the Forties
Trance and psychodrama, Surrealist montage, symbolism and sexual longing: The beginnings of the modern avant-garde and a new creative film language.
• Maya Deren, Meshes of the Afternoon, 1943, b/w, silent, 14m
• Curtis Harrington, Fragment of Seeking, 1946, b/w, sound, 14m
• Kenneth Anger, Fireworks, 1947, b/w, sound, 15m
• Gregory Markopoulos, Psyche, 1947-48, colour, sound, 25m

Thursday 19 June, 7pm
California Consciousness
The California Dream became a psychedelic hallucination when eastern mysticism fused with drug-fuelled fantasy in the heady 60s & 70s. Transcend trance end.
• James Whitney, Lapis, 1963-66, colour, sound, 10m
• Scott Bartlett, 1970, 1972, colour, sound, 29m
• James Broughton, This is it, 1971, colour, sound, 9m
• Jordan Belson, Re-Entry, 1964, colour, sound, 6m
• Pat O'Neill, 7362, 1965-67, colour, sound, 10m
• Gunvor Nelson, Take Off, 1972, b/w, sound, 10m
• Charles I. Levine, Apropo of San Francisco, 1968, colour, sound, 4m

Curated by Mark Webber for Barbican Screen and LUX