Experimental film
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| ===The New American Cinema and Structural-Materialism=== | ===The New American Cinema and Structural-Materialism=== | ||
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Experimental film [or "experimental cinema"] is a term used to describe a range of filmmaking styles that are concerned with avant garde approaches to film making. Many film scholars have argued that experimental film is one of the major modes of filmmaking, along with the narrative film, the documentary film and the animation film. Like these wide ranging categories, a single definition of what constitutes exprimental film therefore does not adequately cover the many differing approaches, philosophies and techniques that have informed its history. It has been argued that experimental film is in fact a film genre and that many of its more typical features - such as a non-narrative, impressionistic or poetic approaches to the film's construction - define what is popularly understood to be "experimental". [1] [Apr 2007]
Contents |
History
The European avant-garde
The postwar American avant-garde
The New American Cinema and Structural-Materialism
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. Stan Brakhage's Dog Star Man exemplified a shift from personal confessional to abstraction. Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising was an inverted musical of sorts and a camp commentary on Hollywood mythology. Jack Smith and Andy Warhol incorporated camp minimalism into their work.
Some avant-garde filmmakers moved further away from narrative. Whereas the New American Cinema was marked by an oblique take on narrative, one based on abstraction, camp and minimalism, Structural-Materialist filmmakers like Hollis Frampton and Michael Snow created a highly formalist cinema that foregrounded the medium itself: the frame, projection, and most importantly time itself. By breaking film down into bare components, they sought to create an anti-illusionist cinema.
Main article: Structural film
The 1970s and time arts in the conceptual art landscape
Conceptual art in the 1970s pushed even further. Robert Smithson, a California-based artist, made several films about his earthworks and attached projects. Yoko Ono made conceptual films, the most notorious of which is Rape, which finds a woman and invades her life with cameras following her back to her apartment as she flees from the invasion. 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.
Feminist avant-garde and other political offshoots
Laura Mulvey's writing and filmmaking launched a flourishing of feminist 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 and Sally 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 like Martha Rosler and Cecelia Condit took full advantage of it. In the 1980s feminist, gay and other political experimental work continued, with filmmakers like Barbara Hammer, Su Friedrich, Tracy Moffatt, Sadie Benning, Moira Sullivanand Isaac Julien among others finding experimental format condusive to their questions about identity politics.
Distribution
Some distributors of experimental film today include Light Cone in Paris, Canyon Cinema in San Francisco, Canadian Filmmaker's Distribution Centre, The Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York, and Lux in London. 16mm prints are still available through these organizations.
Prior Note in this section regarding removed material: This section is under serious dispute due to one particular stylistic offshoot of avant-garde film's belief in its "chosen" status - see dispute columns for evidence. Distribution remains unproven and art historical sitings have not been provided. Furthermore, deletion of several key reviews (one overwhelmingly negative) and statements by museum directors, which were factual, art historical, and most importantly accurate have been deleted by previous posters who, again, desire to skew the importance of their particular style. This matter has been reported to arbitration.
Disputed section:
Traditional film festivals with festival directors are increasingly unlikely to have ever been exposed to the format and instead base their programming choices on what they find at large established promotional formats like the Independent Feature Project, rather than watching movies submitted to them cold. Festivals are no longer community run, but have a bottom line based on ticket sale prices, and need the incoming revenue of stars and industry.
Finding an audience for experimental films has been just as difficult as making them. From 1947 to 1963, the New York-based Cinema 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.
Vogel's selection did not please everyone. In 1962 Jonas Mekas (recent inductee to the Library of Congress' list of most influential and important films as well as long time Village Voice film contributor) and about 20 other film makers founded The Film-Makers' Cooperative in New York City. Soon similar artists cooperatives were formed in other cities: Canyon Cinema in San Francisco, the London Film-Maker's Co-op, and Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Center. This strategy worked but remains questionable - is it art finding a venue, or is it simply vanity distributorship?
Several other organizations in both Europe and North America helped develop experimental film. These included Anthology Film Archives, The Millennium Film Workshop, the British Film Institute in London, the National Film Board of Canada and the Collective for Living Cinema.
Most of the self-organised and run distributors and collectives have been bought by large museums, such as the New York Museum of Modern Art, which bought New York Filmmaker's Co-Op and never offered any monetary incentives to the creators of the films. MOMA continues to distribute the films without paying the creators.
Experimental Film and the Academy
Many of the artists involved in these early movements remained outside of the mainstream commercial cinema and entertainment industry. They have become professors at universities such as the State Universities of New York, Bard College, and the Massachusetts College of Art, San Francisco Art Institute. Many of the structuralist practicioners of experimental film do not in fact possess college degrees themselves, although their showings are prestigious, which is even more of conundrum when considering their relationship to a supposed cognoscenti of academics. Further, many of the schools at which they teach, with a few exceptions, do not have large experimental film collections, if at all, causing one to wonder; what do they teach? (Bard Library, SUNY Library, Massachusetts College of Art Library) Or, more succinctly, is it art? Or even more of a contrarian point of view: most academic art is seen as a footnote, or outside of the art-world mainstream or historical zeitgeist. The very fact that these films are entrenched as academic, in some way points out the flaws in the structuralist reasoning that the experimental film is the "true way" of film, in which hidden truths are uncovered about the nature of the language of film by highlighting the ways in which the films are made. Those that do teach at these more traditional prestigious schools have mostly come from traditional film backgrounds, as graduates of "alternative" programs do not gel well with the academic model most of these schools fashion themselves under, and are not taken as seriously as academics having received the (art world prepratory) MFA degree rather than the Ph.D. degree (academic college teaching degree). It would seem the teaching of this practice is as problematic as the distribution and showing, leaving some to wonder if it isn't useful in some way, how good can it be? There have been no real substantial changes to the formula of experimental film since the structuralists. Many feel that identity politics is (charitably) its end-zone, (or rather less charitably) a cul-de-sac brought on a larger form by a small group of like-minded academics.
Reviews express this concern most dramatically:
A review of the structuralists appeared in a 2000 edition of the art journal "Art In America". The review was devastating: cold, a little alienated perhaps a product of it's time at the end of the Vietnam War, and in the midst of the Cold War, the work seemed dated, and perhaps too inward. it reflected a yearning for a simpler view of both communism and the U.S. The review examined the ways in which structural-formalism is actually quite a conservative philosophy of filmmaking. (Art In America.)
Exhibition
Following the model of Cinema 16, experimental films have been exhibited mainly outside of commercial theaters in small film societies, microcinemas, museums, art galleries, archives and film festivals.
Some of the more popular film festivals, such as Ann Arbor Film Festival, the New York Film Festival's "Views from the Avant-Garde" Side Bar and the International Film Festival Rotterdam have in the past prominently featured experimental works. Many of these, other than the New York Film Festival, espouse that they no longer really support this type of filmmaking.
The New York Underground Film Festival, Chicago Underground Film Festival, the LA Freewaves Experimental Media Arts Festival, MIX NYC, Toronto's Images Festival and the New York Lesbian and Gay Experimental Film/Video Festival still 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.
Venues such as Anthology Film Archives in New York City, the [[San Francisco Cinematheque}} in San Francisco, the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, CA, and the Centre 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 The Collective for Living Cinema.
Recently Pacific Film Archive eliminated their experimental Tuesday night program. The new curator (since 2000) of the Whitney stated in a 2001 interview on Charlie Rose that he believed it was the responsibility of the Anthology Film Archives to show the work because the work is essentially unsellable and the Whitney was not interested in "renting" video art and films. He went on to intimate that it would fall out of favor in coming biennials. (PBS/Charlie Rose).
Influences on commercial media
Though experimental film is known to a relatively small number of practitioners, academics and connoisseurs, it has influenced and continues to influence cinematography, visual effects and editing.
The genre of music video can be seen as a commercialization of many techniques of experimental film. Title design and television advertising have also been influenced by experimental film.
Many experimental filmmakers have also made feature films, and vice versa. Notable examples include Kathryn Bigelow, Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Jean Cocteau, Isaac Julien, Sally Potter, Gus Van Sant and Luis Buñuel, although the degree to which their feature filmmaking takes on mainstream commercial esthetics differs widely.
See also
Key critical texts
- A. L. Rees, A History of Experimental Film and Video (BFI, 1999).
- Malcolm Le Grice, Abstract Film and Beyond (MIT, 1977).
- Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, 1992 and 1998).
- Scott MacDonald, Avant-Garde Film: Motion Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
- James Peterson, Dreams of Chaos, Visions of Order: Understanding the American Avant-Garde Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1994).
- P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).
- Michael O’Pray, Avant-Garde Film: Forms, Themes and Passions (London: Wallflower Press, 2003).
- David Curtis (ed.), A Directory of British Film and Video Artists (Arts Council, 1999).
- David Curtis, Experimental Cinema - A Fifty Year Evolution. (London. Studio Vista. 1971)
- Wheeler Winston Dixon, The Exploding Eye: A Re-Visionary History of 1960s American Experimental Cinema. (Albany, NY. State University of New York Press, 1997)
- Wheeler Winston Dixon and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (eds.) Experimental Cinema - The Film Reader, (London: Routledge, 2002)
- Stan Brakhage. Film at Wit's End - Essays on American Independent Filmmakers. (Edinburgh, Polygon. 1989)
- Stan Brakhage. Essential Brakhage - Selected Writings on Filmmaking. (New York, McPherson. 2001)
- Parker Tyler, Underground Film: A Critical History. (New York: Grove Press, 1969)
