UPDATE: A Sneak Preview of the Treasures 6: Next Wave Avant-Garde can be read about here.

The National Film Preservation Foundation has recently announced that they will be producing a second DVD set of avant-garde short films that will be released in 2013. The box set will be entitled Treasures 6: Next Wave Avant-Garde and will explore “how avant-garde film took root and spread after the 1950s as the next generation embraced diversity and forged connections with conceptual and performance art.”

Treasures 6 is the follow-up project to the amazing Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, 1947-1986 that the NFPF released in 2009. This new collection will include 5 1/2 hours of about two-dozen films on a 2-disc set. Although no specific film titles that will be included on Treasures 6 have been announced yet, the NFPF says that none of these films have ever been released on DVD before and that many of them have not even been available as good quality prints for many years.

The films chosen will come from the preservation efforts of several avant-garde film archives, including the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Anthology Film Archives, Harvard Film Archive, the Museum of Modern Art, New York University, the Pacific Film Archive, and UCLA Film & Television Archive.

This new DVD set is being funded through a grant awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts just last month, as well as through an earlier grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

The Treasures IV avant-garde DVD set included films by acclaimed underground filmmakers such as Bruce Baillie, Jonas Mekas, Stan Brakhage, George Kuchar, Andy Warhol, Owen Land and Chick Strand, plus rarely screened, but pivotal films such as Christopher Maclaine’s The End.

The NFPF, which was founded by the U.S. Congress to help preserve all of America’s film history, followed Treasures IV with Treasures 5: The West, 1898-1938, a 10-hour DVD set that celebrates “the dynamic, gender-bending, ethnically diverse West that flourished in early movies but has never before been seen on video.” Treasures 5 was released just this year.

Treasures 6: Next Wave Avant-Garde will be released in the fall of 2013. For more information on the NFPF, please visit their official website.