Experimental and Avant-Garde cinema 

 

Parallel tradition of experimental and avant-garde cinema existed alongside mainstream narrative.

              Aligned often with major art movements of 20th century: Dada,(Hans Richter),  Surrealism (Bunuel& Dali), and other influences, the gestural painting of Jackson Pollock, writings of Beat poets

From these emerged a number of approaches to experimentation:

Collage

Experimental Narrative

Lyrical

Abstract

Direct films (no use of camera)

Dada – repudiation of existing artistic standards, lacks structure, traditional artist is  aprop of a rotten society/artistic taste of the middle classes is merly bad habit;

They use buffoonery, insult, obscenity, shock, anger, change, accident.

Some types of their art: Readymades (Urinal by Marcel Duchamp)

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Surrealism –use of chance, accident, primacy of dream and the unconscious decontextualization of objects, to achieve a moment of surralism – a moment in which two contradictory elements resolve into a higher reality.  (Dream logic)

P. Adams Sitney: The surrealist cinema depends upon the power of the film to evoke…the horror and irrationality of the unconscious”.  These films show us neither dream nor waking…the startling changes of place, violence, teroticism, the tactility…suggest the dream image.

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BESIDES DADA/SURREALISM, FOUR MAIN POSTWAR TRENDS

1. Abstract Film - reaches its apex with "flicker films"

2. Experimental Narratives

This genre of experimental film anticipated some of the exploration of narrative ambiguities that characterizes postwar European art cinema

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MOST INFLUENTIAL POSTWAR FILMMAKER: Maya Deren

(Film clips)

3 The Lyrical Film

Tries to capture a personal perception or emotion, a flash of insight, conveys a mood or sensation directly without using any narrative structure.

-puts camera into first person position (of the protagonist of film)\

-vision and looking are the crucial aspects of this film

Stan Brakhage  as example

*first person seeing  (camera movement & framing represent the filmmaker’s physical vision)

*can explore surface, texture, hue, light, reflection.

Self-perception: artist feels more deeply and sees more deeply than others. He sought to capture untutored vision, beginner’s vision, sense of space and light unspoiled by knowledge and social training.(Eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective/unprejudiced by compositional logic.

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4. Collage film

Fragments/re-editing someone else’s film (use of found footage which is given new context through juxtaposition with other materials that were not part of its original source film)

Also called assemblage

5. 1970s and 1980s - Countercinema

Allied with feminist movement - It is a reaction to dominant cinema that positions women characters in subordinate roles to men in the narrative and to visual practices which present women's bodies as a spectacle for male viewers.

Aims: question dominant cinematic practices by "interrupting" narrative, unusual framings that frustrate the notion of spectacle.

No one style dominates; all styles try to deconstruct classical narrative centered on male hero

Interacts with audience's understanding of gender, race and class stereotypes established in western culture

Thriller by Sally Potter 1979

Retells the plot of Puccini opera La Boheme from point of view of heroine, Mimi, who dies. The film essentially questions why Mimi has to die in this narrative.

Film "splits" the character of Mimi by using different actors who may/may not be playing this character

Tries to point out the artificiality of narrativve construction through this.

Also works as an "in-joke" for those who are familiar with the opera