Christopher MacLaine's Beat is a short choreographic study of human movement (1958, 16 mm, 6 minutes) while The End is his darkly humorous take on the last day of life for six people, culminating in an imaginary end-of-the-world sequence set to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (1953, 16 mm, 35 minutes).

Filmed in Chicago in the late 1950s, Cry of Jazz provides an Afrocentric view of jazz history and presciently predicts the civil unrest of subsequent decades. (Edward O. Bland, 1958, 16 mm, 35 minutes)

Pull My Daisy is the quintessential beat experience on film, an improvisational scene from an unproduced play by Jack Kerouac, shot in a Greenwich Village apartment. (Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie, 1959, 35 mm, 30 minutes)

Intense repartee in The Savage Eye between a down-and-out woman and a poet (her own conscience) is "a tour-de-force lesson in camera-eye technique," said Jonas Mekas, and a precursor to the cinema verité movement. (Ben Maddow, Sidney Meyers, Joseph Strick, and Haskell Wexler, 1959, 16 mm, 68 minutes)

Introduction by Desson Thomson

With its unstructured, naturalistic narrative about three young people footloose in Manhattan, Shadows comes close to emulating the improvisational qualities of jazz. (John Cassavetes, 1959, 35 mm, from UCLA Film Archive with new preservation funded by The Film Foundation and Hollywood Foreign Press, 82 minutes)

In Bridges-Go-Round, stock footage of Manhattan's bridges becomes counterpoint for two wildly divergent musical tracks, one jazz and the other electronic. (Shirley Clarke, 1958, 16 mm, 7 minutes)

An anthology of 16 mm films by Kenneth Anger, including Eaux d’Artifice (1953, 13 minutes), Scorpio Rising (1964, 30 minutes), and Rabbit's Moon (1972, 8 minutes), is followed by Ken Jacobs' Little Cobra Dance (1957, 2 minutes), and Stan Brakhage's Desistfilm (1954, 7 minutes) and The Dead (1960, 11 minutes). Bruce Baillie's Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1963–1964, 20 minutes) is last.

In Echoes of Silence, short installments from the isolated lives of people living in Greenwich Village are sustained by the soundtrack music of Charles Mingus, Pete Seeger, Igor Stravinsky, and Sergei Prokofiev. (Peter Emmanuel Goldman, 1965, 16 mm, 75 minutes)

Jonas Mekas' collection of clips from John Lennon's life includes the singer's birthday party, an art opening in Syracuse, a 1972 concert in Madison Square Garden, and the vigil on the day of his death. (Jonas Mekas, 1972–1996, 16 mm, 24 minutes)

Assembled from Jonas Mekas' footage collection, this diary-like film records his friends and acquaintances from the 1960s, including many figures in the avantgarde—Hollis Frampton, Peter Kubelka, Ken Jacobs, and P. Adams Sitney, among others. (Jonas Mekas, 1985, 16 mm, 124 minutes)