Appearing in 1974, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde invented a tradition and created a history for a field that was generally regarded, except by a few zealots, as an obscure backwater. Visionary Film opens with founding mother Maya Deren, goes on to explicate her heirs Gregory Markopoulos, Kenneth Anger, and Stan Brakhage, ruminates on the radical nature of underground movies and Harry Smith's arcane animations, and concludes with a formalist tendency the author himself had identified several years before and named "Structural Film."