Experimental film
Experimental film or avant-garde cinema is a mode of filmmaking that does not apply standard cinematic conventions, instead adopting non-narrative forms or alternatives to traditional narratives or methods of working.
[1] Many experimental films, particularly early ones, relate to arts in other disciplines: painting, dance, literature and poetry,[2] or arise from research and development of new technical resources.
[3] While some experimental films have been distributed through mainstream channels or even made within commercial studios, the vast majority have been produced on very low budgets with a minimal crew or a single person and are either self-financed or supported through small grants.
The aim of experimental filmmaking may be to render the personal vision of an artist, or to promote interest in new technology rather than to entertain or to generate revenue, as is the case with commercial films.
René Clair's Entr'acte (1924) featuring Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray, and with music by Erik Satie, took madcap comedy into nonsequitur.
Film scholar David Bordwell has dubbed these French Impressionists and included Abel Gance, Jean Epstein, Marcel L'Herbier, and Dimitri Kirsanoff.
[9] In 1952, the Lettrists avant-garde movement, in France, caused riots at the Cannes Film Festival, when Isidore Isou's Traité de bave et d'éternité (also known as Venom and Eternity) was screened.
The films of Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov, Alexander Dovzhenko, and Vsevolod Pudovkin were instrumental in providing an alternative model from that offered by classical Hollywood.
The cinema, being essentially visual, must above all fulfil the evolution of painting, detach itself from reality, from photography, from the graceful and solemn..."[14] As exemplified in the quote, the image is the real subject, not the story or the acting, an approach and attitude that remain true for the whole history of experimental filmmaking.
The United States had some avant-garde films before World War II, such as Manhatta (1921), by Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand, and The Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra (1928), by Slavko Vorkapich and Robert Florey.
Commercial artist (Saturday Evening Post) and illustrator Douglass Crockwell (1904–1968)[15] made animations with blobs of paint pressed between sheets of glass in his studio at Glens Falls, New York.
[16] In Rochester, New York, medical doctor and philanthropist James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber directed The Fall of the House of Usher (1928) and Lot in Sodom (1933).
Harry Smith, Mary Ellen Bute, artist Joseph Cornell, and Christopher Young made several European-influenced experimental films.
[18] With Slavko Vorkapich, John Hoffman made two visual tone poems, Moods of the Sea (aka Fingal's Cave, 1941) and Forest Murmurs (1947).
Early works by Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, Gregory Markopoulos, Jonas Mekas, Willard Maas, Marie Menken, Curtis Harrington, Sidney Peterson, Lionel Rogosin, and Earle M. Pilgrim followed in a similar vein.
Arthur Penn taught at Black Mountain College, which points out the popular misconception in both the art world and Hollywood that the avant-garde and the commercial never meet.
[19] The film society and self-financing model continued over the next two decades, but by the early 1960s, a different outlook became perceptible in the work of American avant-garde filmmakers.
Filmmakers like Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs, Paul Sharits, Tony Conrad, and Ernie Gehr, are considered by P. Adams Sitney to be key models for what he calls "structural film".
[20] As Sitney has pointed out, in the work of Stan Brakhage and other American experimentalists of early period, film is used to express the individual consciousness of the maker, a cinematic equivalent of the first person in literature.
Brakhage's Dog Star Man (1961–64) exemplified a shift from personal confessional to abstraction, and also evidenced a rejection of American mass culture of the time.
On the other hand, Kenneth Anger added a rock sound track to his Scorpio Rising (1963) in what is sometimes said to be an anticipation of music videos, and included some camp commentary on Hollywood mythology.
It has been argued that by breaking film down into bare components, they sought to create an anti-illusionist cinema, although Frampton's late works owe a huge debt to the photography of Edward Weston, Paul Strand, and others, and in fact celebrate illusion.
Leslie Thornton, Peggy Ahwesh, and Su Friedrich expanded upon the work of the structuralists, incorporating a broader range of content while maintaining a self-reflexive form.
In more recent years, filmmakers such as Craig Baldwin and James O'Brien (Hyperfutura) have made use of stock footage married to live action narratives in a form of mash-up cinema that has strong socio-political undertones.
Soon similar artists cooperatives were formed in other places: Canyon Cinema in San Francisco, the London Film-Makers' Co-op, and Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center.
