By its very nature, independent cinema allows a means of individual self-expression unburdened by audience demands or expectations, by conventional limits of duration, subject, or form. Drawing on some of the key figures of the North American postwar avant-garde, this series presents films that are unusually ambitious in scope; guided only by the artist's inspiration, they are cinematic experiences that encompass totalities of vision. Speaking of Magellan, Hollis Frampton compared it to Vladimir Tatlin's unrealized Monument to the Third International, explaining that "there are other ways to build monuments. The ways to build them are to build them immaterially, in the mind." These films, then, are mental landscapes and circumnavigations writ large. They are filmic equivalents of individuals carving out a space in time-epic reflections on the world, the history and form of cinema, the experience of perception, and the relationships between music and image, space and time, man, technology, and nature. In them we find mythic reverberations of the belief that "each thing implies the universe, whose most obvious trait is its complexity (HF)."