 | This articleneeds additional citations forverification. Please helpimprove this article byadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Experimental film" – news ·newspapers ·books ·scholar ·JSTOR(April 2025) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Experimental film oravant-garde cinema is a mode offilmmaking that does not apply standard cinematic conventions, instead adoptingnon-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.[4]
Experimental filmmakers generally begin as amateurs, and some use experimental films as a springboard into commercial film-making or transition into academic positions. 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.[5]
The term experimental film describes a range offilmmaking styles that frequently differ from, and are often opposed to, the practices of mainstream commercial anddocumentary filmmaking.Avant-garde is also used, for the films of the sort shot in the twenties in France, Germany or Russia, to describe this work, and "underground" was used in the sixties, though it has also had other connotations. Today the term "experimental cinema" prevails, because it's possible to make experimental films without the presence of any avant-garde movement in the cultural field.
While "experimental" covers a wide range of practice, an experimental film is often characterized by the absence of linear narrative, the use of various abstracting techniques—out-of-focus, painting or scratching on film, rapid editing—the use of asynchronous (non-diegetic) sound or even the absence of any sound track. The goal is often to place the viewer in a more active and more thoughtful relationship to the film. At least through the 1960s, and to some extent after, many experimental films took an oppositional stance toward mainstream culture.
Most experimental films are made on very low budgets, self-financed or financed through small grants, with a minimal crew or, often a crew of only one person, the filmmaker. Some critics have argued that much experimental film is no longer in fact "experimental" but has in fact become a mainstreamfilm genre.[6] Many of its more typical features—such as a non-narrative,impressionistic, or poetic approaches to the film's construction—define what is generally understood to be "experimental".[7]
In the 1920s, two conditions made Europe ready for the emergence of experimental film. First, the cinema matured as a medium, and highbrow resistance to the mass entertainment began to wane. Second, avant-garde movements in the visual arts flourished. TheDadaists andSurrealists in particular took to cinema.René Clair'sEntr'acte (1924) featuringFrancis Picabia,Marcel Duchamp, andMan Ray, and with music byErik Satie, took madcap comedy into nonsequitur.
ArtistsHans Richter,Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp,Germaine Dulac, andViking Eggeling all contributed Dadaist/Surrealist shorts.Fernand Léger,Dudley Murphy, and Man Ray created the filmBallet Mécanique (1924), which has been described asDadaist,Cubist, orFuturist.[citation needed] Duchamp created the abstract filmAnémic Cinéma (1926).
Alberto Cavalcanti directedRien que les heures (1926),Walter Ruttmann directedBerlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927), andDziga Vertov filmedMan with a Movie Camera (1929), experimental "city symphonies" ofParis,Berlin, andKiev, respectively.
One famous experimental film isLuis Buñuel andSalvador Dalí'sUn chien andalou (1929). Hans Richter's animated shorts,Oskar Fischinger's abstract films, andLen Lye'sGPO films are examples of more abstract European avant-garde films.[8]
Working in France, another group of filmmakers also financed films through patronage and distributed them through cine-clubs, yet they were narrative films not tied to an avant-garde school. Film scholarDavid Bordwell has dubbed theseFrench Impressionists and includedAbel Gance,Jean Epstein,Marcel L'Herbier, andDimitri Kirsanoff. These films combine narrative experimentation, rhythmic editing and camerawork, and an emphasis on character subjectivity.[9]
In 1952, theLettrists avant-garde movement, in France, caused riots at theCannes Film Festival, whenIsidore Isou'sTraité de bave et d'éternité (also known asVenom and Eternity) was screened. After their criticism ofCharlie Chaplin at the 1952 press conference in Paris for Chaplin'sLimelight, there was a split within the movement. TheUltra-Lettrists continued to cause disruptions when they announced the death of cinema and showed their newhypergraphical techniques; the most notorious example isGuy Debord'sHowlings in favor of de Sade (Hurlements en Faveur de Sade) from 1952.
The Soviet filmmakers, too, found a counterpart to modernist painting and photography in their theories ofmontage. The films ofDziga Vertov,Sergei Eisenstein,Lev Kuleshov,Alexander Dovzhenko, andVsevolod Pudovkin were instrumental in providing an alternative model from that offered byclassical Hollywood. While not experimental films per se, they contributed to the film language of the avant-garde.[10]
Italy had a historically difficult relationship with its avant-garde scene, although, the birth of cinema coincided with the emerging of ItalianFuturism.[11]
Potentially the new medium of cinema was a perfect match for the concerns of futurism, a renowned for promoting new aesthetics, motion, and modes of perception. Especially, given the futurist fascination with the sensation of speed and the dynamism of modern life. However, what is left of futurist cinema is mostly on paper, many films very lost, and other never got made. Amongst those literatures there areThe Futurist Cinema (Marinetti et al., 1916), Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912), The Variety Theatre (1913), The Futurist Synthetic Theatre (1915), and The New Religion – Morality of Speed (1916).[12] Perhaps, the futurists were amongst the first avant-garde filmmakers group devoted to the potential of the image, praising motion and aiming towards an anti-narrative aesthetic.[13] As an example, Marinetti's quote:
"The cinema is an autonomous art. The cinema must therefore never copy the stage. 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.
Anton Giulio Bragaglia is one of the most known filmmakers from the futurist movement.[15][16]
The United States had some avant-garde films beforeWorld War II, such asManhatta (1921), byCharles Sheeler andPaul Strand, andThe Life and Death of 9413: a Hollywood Extra (1928), bySlavko Vorkapich andRobert Florey. However, much pre-war experimental film culture consisted of artists working, often in isolation, on film projects. In the early 1930s, PainterEmlen Etting (1905–1993) directeddance films that are considered experimental. Commercial artist (Saturday Evening Post) and illustratorDouglass Crockwell (1904–1968)[17] made animations with blobs of paint pressed between sheets of glass in his studio atGlens Falls, New York.[18]
InRochester, New York, medical doctor and philanthropistJames Sibley Watson and Melville Webber directedThe Fall of the House of Usher (1928) andLot in Sodom (1933).Harry Smith,Mary Ellen Bute, artistJoseph Cornell, and Christopher Young made several European-influenced experimental films. Smith and Bute were both influenced by Oskar Fischinger, as were many avant garde animators and filmmakers. In 1930, the magazineExperimental Cinema appeared.[19] The editors wereLewis Jacobs and David Platt. In October 2005, a large collection of films of that period were restored and re-released on DVD, titledUnseen Cinema: Early American Avant Garde Film 1894-1941.[20]
With Slavko Vorkapich,John Hoffman made two visual tone poems,Moods of the Sea (akaFingal's Cave, 1941) andForest Murmurs (1947). The former film is set toFelix Mendelssohn'sHebrides Overture and was restored in 2004 by film preservation expertDavid Shepard.
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) byMaya Deren andAlexander Hammid is an early American experimental film. It provided a model for self-financed16 mm production and distribution, one that was soon picked up byCinema 16 and otherfilm societies. Just as importantly, it established an aesthetic model of what experimental cinema could do.Meshes had a dream-like feel that hearkened to Jean Cocteau and the Surrealists, but equally seemed personal, new and American. Early works byKenneth Anger,Stan Brakhage,Shirley Clarke,Gregory Markopoulos,Jonas Mekas,Willard Maas,Marie Menken,Curtis Harrington,Sidney Peterson,Lionel Rogosin, andEarle M. Pilgrim followed in a similar vein. Significantly, many of these filmmakers were the first students from the pioneering university film programs established inLos Angeles andNew York. In 1946,Frank Stauffacher started the "Art in Cinema" series of experimental films at theSan Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where Oskar Fischinger's films were featured in several special programs, influencing artists such as Jordan Belson andHarry Smith to make experimental animation.
They set up "alternative film programs" atBlack Mountain College (now defunct) and theSan Francisco Art Institute.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. Another challenge to that misconception is that late in life, after their Hollywood careers had ended, bothNicholas Ray andKing Vidor made avant-garde films.
Film theoristP. Adams Sitney offers a concept of "visionary film", and he invented a few genre categories, including themythopoetic film, the structural film, the trance film and the participatory film, in order to describe the historical morphology of experimental cinema in the American avant-garde from 1943 to the 2000s.[21]
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 likeMichael Snow,Hollis Frampton,Ken Jacobs,Paul Sharits,Tony Conrad, andErnie Gehr, are considered byP. Adams Sitney to be key models for what he calls "structural film". Sitney says that the key elements of structural film are a fixed camera position, flicker effect, re-photography off screen, and loop printing.[22] As Sitney has pointed out, in the work ofStan 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'sDog 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 hisScorpio Rising (1963) in what is sometimes said to be an anticipation ofmusic videos, and included somecamp commentary on Hollywood mythology.Jack Smith andAndy Warhol incorporated camp elements into their work, and Sitney posited Warhol's connection to structural film.
Some avant-garde filmmakers moved further away from narrative as artistBruce Conner created his early examples such asA Movie (1958) andCosmic Ray (1962). Whereas the New American Cinema was marked by an oblique take on narrative, one based on abstraction, camp and minimalism, structural filmmakers like Frampton and Snow created a highlyformalist cinema that foregrounded the medium itself: the frame, projection, and most importantly, time. 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 ofEdward Weston,Paul Strand, and others, and in fact celebrate illusion. Further, while many filmmakers began making rather academic "structural films" followingFilm Culture's publication of an article by P. Adams Sitney in the late 1960s, many of the filmmakers named in the article objected to the term.
A critical review of the structuralists appeared in a 2000 edition of the art journalArt in America. It examined structural-formalism as a conservative philosophy of filmmaking.
In the 1970s,Conceptual art pushed even further.Robert Smithson, a California-based artist, made several films about hisearthworks and attached projects.Yoko Ono made conceptual films as part of theFluxus movement. The most notorious of these isRape, which centers on a woman's life being invaded with cameras, as she attempts to flee. Around this time, a new generation was entering the field, many of whom were students of the early avant-gardists.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.
Andy Warhol, the man behindPop Art and a variety of other oral and art forms, made over 60 films throughout the 1960s, most of them experimental. In more recent years, filmmakers such asCraig Baldwin andJames 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.Chris Marker'sLa Jetée (1962) consists almost entirely of still photographs accompanied by narration, whileJonás Cuarón'sYear of the Nail (2007) uses unstaged photographs which the director took of his friends and family combined with voice acting to tell a fictional story. Other examples of films created in the 21st century with this technique areLars von Trier'sDogville andDavid Lynch'sfilmography.
Experimental animation is a form ofanimation in whichmotion pictures have their own rhythm and movement where it has no narration or a specific structure in animated films.
Some animated features since in the 1960s also produce more independent, experimental form created by auteurs and independent filmmakers. For example:
Laura Mulvey's writing and filmmaking launched a flourishing offeminist filmmaking based on the idea that conventional Hollywood narrative reinforced gender norms and a patriarchal gaze. Their response was to resist narrative in a way to show its fissures and inconsistencies.Chantal Akerman andSally Potter are just two of the leading feminist filmmakers working in this mode in the 1970s.Video art emerged as a medium in this period, and feminists likeMartha Rosler andCecelia Condit took full advantage of it.
In the 1980s feminist, gay and other political experimental work continued, with filmmakers likeBarbara Hammer,Su Friedrich,Tracey Moffatt,Sadie Benning andIsaac Julien among others finding experimental format conducive to their questions about identity politics.
Thequeercore movement gave rise to a number experimental queer filmmakers such asG.B. Jones (a founder of the movement) in the 1990s and laterScott Treleaven, among others.
With very few exceptions,Curtis Harrington among them, the artists involved in these early movements remained outside the mainstream commercial cinema and entertainment industry. A few taught occasionally, and then, starting in 1966, many became professors at universities such as theState Universities of New York,Bard College,California Institute of the Arts, theMassachusetts College of Art,University of Colorado at Boulder, and theSan Francisco Art Institute.
Many experimental-film practitioners do not in fact possess college degrees themselves, although their showings are prestigious. Some have questioned the status of the films made in the academy, but longtime film professors such asStan Brakhage,Ken Jacobs,Ernie Gehr, and many others, continued to refine and expand their practice while teaching. The inclusion of experimental film in film courses and standard film histories, however, has made the work more widely known and more accessible.
Beginning in 1946,Frank Stauffacher ran the "Art in Cinema" program of experimental and avant-garde films at theSan Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
From 1949 to 1975, theKnokke-Le-Zoute Experimental Film Festival [fr]—located inKnokke-Heist,Belgium—was the most prominent festival of experimental cinema in the world. It permits the discovery of American avant-garde in 1958 with Brakhage's films and many others European and American filmmakers.
From 1947 to 1963, the New York-basedCinema 16 functioned as the primary exhibitor and distributor of experimental film in the United States. Under the leadership of Amos Vogel and Marcia Vogel, Cinema 16 flourished as a nonprofit membership society committed to the exhibition of documentary, avant-garde, scientific, educational, and performance films to ever-increasing audiences.[24]
In 1962,Jonas Mekas and about 20 other film makers foundedThe Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York City. Soon similar artists cooperatives were formed in other places:Canyon Cinema in San Francisco, theLondon Film-Makers' Co-op, and Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center.
Following the model of Cinema 16, experimental films have been exhibited mainly outside of commercial theaters in smallfilm societies,microcinemas,museums,art galleries, archives andfilm festivals.[25]
Several other organizations, in both Europe and North America, helped develop experimental film. These includedAnthology Film Archives in New York City, The Millennium Film Workshop, theBritish Film Institute in London, theNational Film Board of Canada and the Collective for Living Cinema.
Some of the more popular film festivals, such asAnn Arbor Film Festival, theNew York Film Festival's "Views from the Avant-Garde" Side Bar, theInternational Film Festival Rotterdam, andMedia City Film Festival[26] prominently feature experimental works.
TheNew York Underground Film Festival,Chicago Underground Film Festival, theLA Freewaves Experimental Media Arts Festival,MIX NYC the New York Experimental Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, and Toronto'sImages Festival also support this work and provide venues for films which would not otherwise be seen. There is some dispute about whether "underground" and "avant-garde" truly mean the same thing and if challenging non-traditional cinema and fine arts cinema are actually fundamentally related.[27]
Venues such asAnthology Film Archives,San Francisco Cinematheque,Pacific Film Archive inBerkeley, California, Tate Modern, London and theCentre Pompidou in Paris often include historically significant experimental films and contemporary works. Screening series no longer in New York that featured experimental work include the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema, Ocularis and theCollective for Living Cinema.
All these associations and movements have permitted the birth and development of national experimental films and schools like "body cinema" ("Écoles du corps" or "Cinéma corporel") and "post-structural" movements in France, and "structural/materialism" in England for example.[28]
Though experimental film is known to a relatively small number of practitioners, academics and connoisseurs, it has influenced and continues to influencecinematography,visual effects andediting.[29]
Experimental film reached mainstream audiences at world exhibitions, especially those in Montreal,Expo 67,[30] and Osaka,Expo 70.[31]
The genre ofmusic video can be seen as a commercialization of many techniques of experimental film.Title design andtelevision advertising have also been influenced by experimental film.[32][33][34][35]
Many experimental filmmakers have also made feature films, and vice versa.[29]
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
