In Annette Michelson’s own words, this previously unpublished lecture traces, “in very broad outlines, the path of the North American cinema of the avant-garde in the period of its finest flowering. That trajectory spans the three decades that begin from just before our entrance into the Second World War, subsiding somewhat, though not entirely, in the mid-nineteen seventies. I begin, then, with an epigraph drawn from the text, ‘Transparencies on Film’ by T. W. Adorno: ‘I love to go to the movies; what I can’t stand are the images on the screen.’ And I must acknowledge that I have, as it were, a thesis behind this tracing, although it is but one of many under which one might want to think of this cinematic production as in some way coherent, if not wholly unified. (For of course one wouldn’t want to think of it as wholly unified, since it probably would not then correspond to any historical experience of an artistic avant-garde.) And to avoid all misunderstanding as to one’s reading of an avant-garde, I shall say that it has its sources in the various practices—poetic, musical and pictorial, as well as cinematic—of Modernism. I prefer to call it the cinema of independent persuasion and production.”