Recently, we were the opening night film for the Wisconsin Film Festival in Madison for almost 1,200 people. The Madison moviegoers were extremely hospitable.

I was having a conversation today in which I was recounting a transcendent experience watching Nathaniel Dorsky’s incredible Song and Solitude at the Wisconsin Film Festival. Ever since, I’ve been thinking about the state of avant-garde (experimental, etc., call it what you will) film.

I first encountered the 1970 Mexican film El Topo the same way a lot of people did who were too young to catch the film in its theater run; I encountered it in the library, or publicity stills of it anyway, as excerpted in the book Midnight Movies. This black-and-white cult film survey called El Topo the "first midnight movie," and so now we all say that it was, besting Rocky Horror by a few years. The images from that book stick in my mind so strongly that when I watch El Topo now, I still find myself disconcerted to see them moving. And with what life and energy! The legless man perched on the back of the armless man, staring forward resolutely as a single unit...the diapered tyrant writhing on the floor in his beehive-shaped fort...the nude hippy girl with the boyish physique holding a black umbrella while she wades in a desert oasis...and that umbrella hanging over the head of the black-clad master gunfighter, who rides on a horse through the desert with his naked son, leaving behind a framed picture of the boy's mother, half-buried in the sand. This last image has become so famous that it's now as synonymous with surrealist cinema as Dali and Bunuel slitting open an eye.