Announcements

View on your own: Rear Window by Hitchcock at film reserves or linked to course reserves online. To access this you need to be on campus or using web proxy and use course password (BGCOGN).

Experimental / Avant Garde Cinemas

engaging with the medium challenging the form

Experimental / Avant Garde Cinemas

Filmaker as artist / auteur - the central voice to the work.

Not studio driven / made independently--TRULY independently

Experimentation with the medium / engagement with the form / challenging conventions / dialog with a community of other artists and critics

Liberated from institutional constraints: standardized duration, breadth of audience (engages intellectual or aesthetic niches), etc

Un Chien Andalou (Andalousian Dog), Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, 1928 Narrative causality Mismatched cuts fracture space and time Absurdity of inner titles

Un Chien Andalou (Andalousian Dog), Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, 1928 Surrealist film Employing montage editing but subverting it Disjointed, not structured by a rational plot. Free association, dream logic, the unconscious

mind Disrupted vision (effects, editing)

Un Chien Andalou (Andalousian Dog), Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, 1928

Elements of narrative relate to psychology of the spectator - participation

Distanciation created through the breaks in meaning and closure.

Meshes of the Afternoon, Maya Deren, 1943

Post World War II, new narrative, age of anxiety

Domestic space Actions interrupted Fantasy of suicide

Meshes of the Afternoon, Maya Deren with Alexander Hammid , 1943

Spiral structure Protagonist and spectator search for connecting threads Psychological imagery

Maya Deren, Film Medium as Muse and Means

Maya Deren, Film Medium as Muse and Means

Freedom in being an amateur

Accidents within limits: “photography is the art of the controlled accident”

Film Medium as Muse and Means, Deren

“You hold in your hands the point of departure for an exciting adventure and regardless of how little, or how you pursue it, the time you spend, and the filming you do as you go along, will be far more satisfying and rewarding for you yourself, if you approach it as an exploration.”

Film Medium as Muse and Means, Deren

Explore the medium itself - the camera, the motor, the projector, the editing process.

Portability of the camera - woman steps from sea to sand, use bounced light, dolly the camera by hand

“you will find that putting the camera on a tripod will feel like putting on a straight jacket.

Lenses - the zoom lens - don’t see it as an easier way of doing something you did before. It is a way of doing new and marvelous things.

Film Medium as Muse and Means, Deren

Changing space and time Part of filmmaking - “an art which makes its statement in

terms of time and movement.” Motor - slows down action, speeds it up Allows for a mind state to be projected on screen To study the nature and structure of movement Editing - adjusts space and time. Creative manipulation but

“such decisions should be the first process, for only by planning, in advance, how the shot is to relate to the one preceding and the one following it, and how this group will sit in the whole, can you know how best to film each shot.”

Experimental / Avant Garde Cinemas

Experimentation of genre - Far From Heaven (Todd Haynes)

Experimentation with documentary modes - Coffee colored Children and The Body Beautiful (N. Onwurah), Smell of Burning Ants (J. Rosenblatt)

Experimentation with narrative modes -Bunuel/Dali, Deren, Brakhage

Experimentation with basic formal structure or medium - Stan Brakhage, Hollis Frampton

Stan Brakhage

First person filmmaking Window Water Baby Moving (1959)Intimate, fragmented documents. Subjective sense of time and

orientation. Not intended to reproduce space/time through realist conventions.

“Camera-less” works Mothlight (1963)Film as material object that interacts with light and the mechanisms

and artifacts of projection. Deterioration and aging.

Camera-less Filmmaking

Drawing, painting or collage directly on film

Exposing film emulsion with stencils or shadows

Scratching into film emulsion Use of optical printer to copy frames /

create multiple exposures Use of found footage Often individual frames are distinct from

those adjacent creating abrupt change--strobe or flicker effects.

Camera-less Filmmaking

Dates from the period of silent cinema to present. Early abstract animations were presented as symphonies of light and color.

Oskar Fischinger Hans Richter Viking Eggling Len Lye Mary Ellen Bute Robert Breer

Fireworks, Kenneth Anger (1947)

Film shot at home when Anger was 17 Director stars in the film Silent Underground film presenting the occult and ritualistic Experimental narrative subverts expectations Innovative approach to visual storytelling Construction of the gaze unique, a new language

Structuralist Film of the 1960s-70s

Minimalist, almost abstract Form takes precedent over subject Highly reflexive--engages audience with fundamental

aspects of the medium: How it structures experience and meaning through time, light, fragmentation, movement

Example: Critical Mass, Hollis Frampton, 1971

Recent Experimental Work

Example: Not a Matter of If But When (brief records of a time in which expectations were repeatedly raised and lowered and people grew exhausted from never knowing if the moment was at hand or was still to come), Julia Melzter and David Thorne w/ Rami Farah, 2006

Engages gaps in intercultural and transnational communication. Limits of translating experience.

Digital Media and the proliferation of Non-commercial Media

Increasing fluidity between commercial, independent, and amateur production (DIY: Do it yourself tools and culture)

Circulation of media in a variety of forms and venues Appropriation of media and contesting intellectual property

law.

Example: Gimme the Mermaid, Negativeland and Tim Molone (2002)

Disney animator Tim Maloney created this short for Negativland using employer's equipment after hours.