Willfully Nonconformist : A look at Experimental Cinema

The term ‘experimental’ was largely used in the 1940s and 1950s, and these films later were known in the 1960s by the term ‘underground cinema’. The term avant-garde is now preferred.

Experimental movies are as old as film itself. Some experimental works tell narratives but decide to do so in unconventional ways and often focus on the bizarre. Others are more interested in the nature of images themselves and can be quite abstract. Others play with the formal qualities of film itself – speed, sound, image etc – and explore the aesthetic nature of the medium. Many avant-garde filmmakers have been largely associated with art and social movements. There have been numerous such movements during the twentieth century including surrealism, cubism, modernism, abstract expressionism and so forth. Political and social movements such as feminism and gay and lesbian liberation have also influenced the work of many avant-garde filmmakers.

Viewers who are not familiar with trends in international visual arts may find experimental films difficult to relate to or understand. These films need to be seen and appreciated for qualities other than narrative ones. Filmmakers here are largely using the medium to explore aesthetic, artistic, philosophical or political modes of expression. They may focus on an isolated area of filmmaking and explore it – sound, editing, cinematography and so forth. Avant-garde filmmakers often deliberately try to shock their audience and to provoke them visually and intellectually. Abstract shapes and colours may be utilized to evoke emotions and feelings. The films may be deliberately poetic – and be full of metaphors and allusions. Avant-garde filmmakers deliberately attempt to break new ground in both film aesthetics and the broader politics of culture.

This lecture will focus on three major and important historical movements in the avant-garde – surrealism, abstraction and structuralism. It will also briefly look at the style of film often called City Symphony – which is a fusion of documentary and experimental practices and the tradition of compilation films.

Surrealist Cinema

Before we commence a look at surrealist cinema it is important to note that many films have or utilize surreal characteristics – that does not however make them a part of surrealist cinema per se. Surrealist cinema grew out of the artistic movements of Dada and Surrealism that had great influence in the early twentieth century in Europe. Both movements were centered in Paris. Surrealism influenced theatre, literature, painting, photography, sculpture and films. Surrealists were deliberately rebelling against conventional narrative forms – and politically they wished to mock and attack middle class complacency (bourgeois) and values. They sought to reveal the irrational unconscious mind that is hidden below the surface of what is assumed to be reality.

Surrealism as it challenged the certainties of a rising middle class employed a number of devices to shock and provoke – the works were filled with humor, sexuality and deliberately alarming images. The surrealists rejected conventional morality and capitalist values. The films subverted chronological time and narrative causality. Three very famous examples of surrealist cinema are Entr’Act( Rene Clair, 1924), Ballet Mecanique (Fernand Leger, Man Ray and Dudley Murphy, 1924) and Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog, Dir: Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, 1929).

The Bunuel and Dali film deliberately subverts narrative forms – the sequence of events is incoherent and plays with our desire for cause and effect. The time sequences are alerted by the placement of intertitles that have little to no correlation with the image events on screen. Characters that appear have little relationship to what could be termed a broader narrative and the music is used in an ironic fashion (great romantic pieces where no romance takes place etc). Whole scenes are shot in slow motion for no apparent reason at all.

During the second world war a large number of surrealist and avant-garde filmmakers left Europe and settled in the United States – thus helping to foster the creation of an American avant-garde movement – in art, literature, music and film.

Abstract Film

Abstract films abandon largely the human figure as a subject and rather pay attention to graphic form and editing processes. Filmmaking was seen as painting in motion. This movement was developed by artists such as Man Ray and Hans Richter.

Stan Brackhage, the great American experimental filmmaker made a number of abstract films. He believed in open receptive seeing as the tool for experiencing the creative potential of film. He in his abstract films painted, bleached and scratched the film surface. Film scholar David Curtis described Brackhage’s films as having “no story, no symbolism, no acting, no posed photographic beauty; the drama is…the drama of vision, a vision that implies a belief that the first priority is to see and record, the second to structure and interpret.”

Brackhage did not just make abstract films – he is rather more noted for his poetic films – films that are often self-referential and autobiographical. He has made over 300 films in his career and his work is as diverse as the avant-garde itself.

Blending experimental film with a sense of documentary were films often called the ‘City Symphony’ films. These films started emerging in the 1920s as a celebration of the industrial and human achievements of urban life and urban landscapes. The series gets its name from a film by Walter Ruttmann called Berlin, Symphony of a Great City (1927). Essentially these films explore the happenings and day to day life of a city captured in a chronological sequence. Editing was employed in these films in order to juxtapose images to create subtle meanings and feelings in the viewer. Self-reflexive techniques that highlight the processes of filmmaking itself were also employed by filmmakers in these films. These films continued to be made up until the 1960s.

Structuralist Films

During the 1960s many filmmakers began to explore the material properties of the medium itself – what could they do visually and artistically to create works of film and art that explored the nature of the medium? How could they manipulate and command the technical opportunities of film and filmmaking to make arresting artistic statements?

Some filmmakers explored multiple viewpoint takes on a single shot and then blended them together in interesting effects to recreate meaning. Zoom lenses were also manipulated, and the manner in which tracking shots were utilized revolutionized the way film could make visual statements that were not on a par with our preconceived notions of narrative cinema. A great many of these films were a reflection on cinematic form without reference at all to narrative – or character and action.

At the same time we see the emergence of something called the compilation film – simply put, these films reused pre-existing footage and collaged it (or montaged it) into entirely new contexts. Many of these films were highly ironic in the manner in which they created new meanings out of ‘found footage’. Sequencing and juxtaposition were essential ingredients in these films and therefore the art of editing played a great role.

Bordwell and Thompson describe experimental films as “willfully nonconformist”. They go on to categorize these films into certain broad theoretical modes of understanding.

“Impossible to define in a capsule formula, avant-garde cinema is recognizable by its efforts at self-expression or experimentation outside mainstream cinema. Yet the boundary lines can be breached. Techniques associated with the avant-garde have been deployed in music videos; Conner, Anger, Derek Jarman, and other experimentalists were early pioneers of the format. And mainstream features have been continually drawing on the avant-garde for ideas and techniques. Over the history of film, the basic types have cross-fertilized each other constantly.”