What is the relationship between film and life? Is film an attempt to directly represent life, or does life, as both Oscar Wilde and Lana del Ray have proposed, imitate art? What are the visual and conceptual ways thorough which film has attempted to break the barrier between art and life? Starting from these questions, this course will provide an alternative reading of film history, focusing on visual and theoretical works that frame cinema not simply as a medium to capture reality, but as a technique which affects, influences and produces life. We will examine avant-garde cinema in Europe and America from the 1920s to the 1970s, focusing in particular on the work of film-makers such as Maya Deren, Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Andy Warhol and Chantal Akerman among others. We will combine film screenings with readings of philosophers and writers that have speculated on the subversive potential of cinema and literature (Antonin Artaud, André Bazin, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Malina/Julian Beck, Gertrude Stein, Cesare Zavattini).