Book excerpt: Current accounts of American experimental filmmaking typically begin after World War II. This is largely due to the fact that rather than refer to interwar cinematic experiments in the United States as "avant-garde"-a term that even then carried an intellectually creative connotation-nearly all independent productions were unceremoniously labeled "amateur" or "non-professional." This dissertation exposes a group of individuals who actively challenged and continue to defy either label. This group is comprised by Americans who were well schooled in the language and reasoning of European modernism and who were often considered artists in other media. We thus are missing a full conception of the space homegrown experimental film practices occupied in American modernism. After all, the 1930s witnessed both the concretization of Hollywood's classical style and a canonization of avant-garde art with the opening of the Museum of Modern Art. It is my claim that these forgotten film artists played a pivotal role throughout these years so crucial for present day art history and cinema studies. The alternative I propose considers these individuals as nothing short of American modernists working at a time that lacked the vocabulary to describe them as such.