IFCO's TRIM BIN: Discussions on Contemporary Celluloid Practices
“EXPERIMENTAL CINEMATIC EXPRESSION: TO BE OR NOT TO BE NARRATIVE”
What If? by Irina Lyubchenko
What does the word “experimental” mean? To me, an experimental approach in film is similar to an experimental approach in science. The difference is that there is no need to prove or disprove any hypothesis or agenda. Or, I guess, the hypothesis in experimental film is that there is no agenda. Genre films employ strategies that are traditionally used in telling a story; Love triangle, for example, has often served as a structural buttress for romantic drama films. Placing characters in scary settings from which they can’t get out creates a sense of the unfolding doom and is a common background in suspense/thriller/horror type films. Themes of drugs and alcoholism are almost a requirement for a classic drama story. Genre films aim at a particular part of the human brain, a certain neurotransmitter, such as adrenaline, responsible for feelings of fear, or dopamine, the chemical of love. For instance, horror films attempt to scare us; a detective story – puzzles and, melodramas – play a sort of tug of war with our hearts and minds. These genres all include some form of explanation; whereas as to me – to experiment is not knowing the outcome of the experiment ahead of a time; not making any attempts at manipulating the viewer’s reaction. To experiment is to ask the question, “What if?”
So, could or should an experimental film be narrative? If being narrative means telling a story, then aren’t all good films, experimental or not, narrative? Story means experience. Some stories are born to be told with words, some with pictures. Traditional narration in film cannot live without the use of words; it heavily relies on logos; words serve as tools of persuasion and reasoning. It seems to me that the more the structure of the visual experience is detached from the sign systems that are used in daily life, the more experimental it becomes; the more difficult it is to re-tell the film’s events if asked what the film is about. However, I would argue, the story is still there, the narration is still taking place since a new and unusual experience is being shared with the viewer. I believe this experience to be more subjective and personal since it comes from a place where words are not necessary, and cannot penetrate the psyche of the observer.
Music + Editing = Narrative by Stephanie Conkie
Experimental films are like an improvisation of music: unique, spontaneous, but still require an educated skill. To say there is no narrative, agenda or set plan to experimental films is like saying there is no purpose in artistic audio or visual expression.
It would be easy to rule out the experimental when discussing broad and mainstream films as the prototypical way of expressing narrative and set cinematic storytelling techniques. However, what we fail to recognize are the number of other approaches to storytelling that experimental filmmakers use in their films.
For this approach I would like to suggest that narrative could be found in experimental films, through the expression of music that accompanies the image.
Would it be wrong to state that a number of experimental films depict what music looks like, if it were an image?
Take for instance Norman McLaren’s short film Begone Dull Care (1949). An example of an early animation film, it can also be seen as experimental for the music that accompanies the image, which consists of coloured and scratched celluloid.
As a graduate student and teaching assistant in the film studies program at Carleton University, a screening of Begone Dull Care in a first year film course proved that music could depict narrative in experimental films.
Upon completion of the film, a student replied to me, “That short film, that is what jazz looks like”. Having no prior knowledge of the film the student was able to find the purpose of the film without ever knowing that Norman McLaren was doing just that, creating a visual representation of Oscar Peterson’s jazz music. Therefore, it was the music that appealed to this student, the process in which he made a connection to the abstract images on screen and the story they were trying to tell.
In Begone Dull Care and other experimental films it is the composition that determines the exact images as they appear on screen, through a rhythmic editing process.
Therefore, would it be wrong to state that the tone and rhythmic impulses the audience hears determine what is seen on screen?
Rhythmic editing, a process that is often attributed to experimental filmmaking tends to downplay temporal and spatial relations, which often serve as pillars in continuity editing and provide signs of a narrative. However, there is still a narrative through the images and the rhythmic way they are shown on screen.
The majority of film viewers who are only familiar with continuity editing may automatically see experimental films as abstract and suggest that there is no narrative. However, instead experimental films ask more from its viewers, to dig deeper. Therefore, I am suggesting that experimental films contain a narrative, whether through music, rhythmic editing or projected images, the challenge is to look beyond the surface of the film and find a story for yourself.
Like this writer, who tends to prefer open ended conclusions to fiction filmmaking, the narrative in experimental films are often always open ended, and allow the individual viewer to find meaning in a variety of different ways.
There is no "story" in the word "experiment"
by Dave Johnson
by Dave Johnson
Experimental film/filmmaking/cinema, not to sound glib, is just that...an experiment with film/cinema. This experimentation is to explore the meaning of filmmaking/cinema through light, time and space. It is the unfortunate curse of mainstream cinephiles who need to be spoon- fed a story, therefore consider experimental cinema “shit”, “pretentious” , or “a waste of time”( during the premiere screening of Michael l Snow’s film “Wavelength” the audience members threw their chairs at the screen!). I’m not trying to sound elitist, I too enjoy watching mainstream cinema...even cinema which would turn some people green, blue and purple... I’m CRAZY about the television series River Monsters! ... But I digress.
The point I’m trying to make is that experimental cinema is a work of art in which a story doesn’t need to be told. The more “successful” experimental films are those which convey an idea, or take the viewer to a sense of enlightenment in a new or different way. The way in which this is achieved, in my opinion, is through timing and rhythm. In academia, film/cinema has been referred to as a form of poetry (this can contain either visual or include both image and sound). If one refers to this idea, not all poetry tells a story, but expresses a thought or idea rhythmically...think iambic pentameter...haiku...etc.
Stan Brakhage, one of the most important figures of experimental cinema, taught and inspired two filmmakers who went on to create one of television’s most successful and crass television series...we all know who they are...Matt Stone and Trey Parker of South Park fame....or David Fincher (of Fight Club and Seven fame), where Brakhage was a family friend. One of my most memorable introductions to Brakhage’s films was his silent film Mothlight. This is a film where he collected blades of grass, flower petals, and moth wings, glued them to Mylar tape and re-photographed it to the timing of a Bach Fugue. The result is literally a visual poem created through light, time and space....and it doesn’t tell a story! In conclusion, experimental cinema should be just as it quite literally states...an experiment with film. It is then up to the filmmaker to be responsible for determining the “story”, “message”, “rhythm”, etc.
Free-Shoot by Matt Joyce
As I sat in the library, trying to wrap my brain around how I was going to write a 10-page paper on Jeremy Bailey’s film, Full Effect (2005), I said to myself, ‘This is impossible…I can’t do this. This film doesn’t speak to me … in fact, how could this film speak to anyone? It’s not saying a thing … AHHHHHHH!’ … Then I reviewed the syllabus and made a decision. I would move on to Arthur Lipsett and that would be the end of it. I would never have to study experimental film. ever. again.
As it happens, time went on and I started to feel differently about experimental film. I started to understand where such films were coming from, began to recognize where the creative impulse was coming from – the inherent need, the longing to be heard, maybe even understood. It all made sense, especially in relation to my own difficulties as a filmmaker, an artist trying to find the means to express myself. There was a kind of reassurance in the concept of avant-garde, both in what it represented and offered to its creators. I realized there is something incredibly special about this cinematic mode of representation that we call “experimental film”.
I read something interesting the other day. Stephen Katz was talking about how out of all the different art forms, filmmaking is the longest process. (Sounds obvious, I know.) There is the longest gap between the moment of creative inception and the completion of the final ‘fleshed-out’ product. Just think about all the different stages, details, factors … the sheer time it takes even to write the script, not to mention the inevitable distraction, frustration, discouragement, the overall loss of creative potency during the grueling process of turning idea into picture. The musician on the other hand simply has to sit down and start playing and BOOM – there’s something to work with. Their act of creation manifests itself in an instant and with the gift of improvisation there’s nothing to prevent them from producing their best work off the top of the dome. The same goes for dancers and to a lesser degree, writers and visual artists. Regardless of whether the final product coalesces later, they are off to the races, so to speak, with a stroke of the brush or pen.
This is the magic of experimental film – that running parallel to the study of film theory and the application of film practice (those narrative conventions we’ve embraced since Griffith) here is something else entirely, something that breaks down those beloved syntaxes. A pure work of unmediated expression, unmediated in the sense that such a film is a work of art, which does not pander to the expectation that it be a coherent whole; experimental film ignores the notion that movies must be products shaped to be passively viewed and absorbed by an audience. It is a self narrative, an individual narrative of the self. What do I mean by this? Human beings make sense of the world through story. Our lives are just one big story. We all have a continuous narrative going on inside of us every day. For some of us, it needs to be released. What experimental film does is it allows us to grasp and express a little of that story, a holographic fragment of ourselves. Bit by bit, little by little, film by film, we come clear.
Experimental film is not by any means a narrative in the classical sense. It does not require a three-act structure; potential spectators are not spoon-fed a cooked paradigm of beginning, middle and end. It’s raw. It does not concern itself with ‘Who am I sending this text to?’ It’s a form of expression that is actually a process of discovery, of pure perception playing with often disjunctive variables as it delves beneath exterior reality to get at something almost out of range. By giving liquid thought a home on the screen, it incarnates a mystery.
The way experimental film approaches narrative is similar to the way ‘free-writes’ operate in creative writing. They aren’t meant to be perfect works of art. It’s more like eavesdropping on someone else’s craft. I may not enjoy watching the results but now, coming full circle in my understanding of the medium, I truly respect it. And I don’t have to enjoy it. Who am I? Armchair critics in experimental film are irrelevant. I just love the fact that there is a free stream of cinema which acts – it’s raw, it’s pure, it’s momentary. It’s not bound to anything or anyone except the mind that put it on the screen. So when André Bazin wrote sixty years ago “that the director [now] writes directly in film” …surely today, given the feeling that it has all been done before, all I can say is, ‘Please, feel free to write whatever you’d like’.
As I sat in the library, trying to wrap my brain around how I was going to write a 10-page paper on Jeremy Bailey’s film, Full Effect (2005), I said to myself, ‘This is impossible…I can’t do this. This film doesn’t speak to me … in fact, how could this film speak to anyone? It’s not saying a thing … AHHHHHHH!’ … Then I reviewed the syllabus and made a decision. I would move on to Arthur Lipsett and that would be the end of it. I would never have to study experimental film. ever. again.
As it happens, time went on and I started to feel differently about experimental film. I started to understand where such films were coming from, began to recognize where the creative impulse was coming from – the inherent need, the longing to be heard, maybe even understood. It all made sense, especially in relation to my own difficulties as a filmmaker, an artist trying to find the means to express myself. There was a kind of reassurance in the concept of avant-garde, both in what it represented and offered to its creators. I realized there is something incredibly special about this cinematic mode of representation that we call “experimental film”.
I read something interesting the other day. Stephen Katz was talking about how out of all the different art forms, filmmaking is the longest process. (Sounds obvious, I know.) There is the longest gap between the moment of creative inception and the completion of the final ‘fleshed-out’ product. Just think about all the different stages, details, factors … the sheer time it takes even to write the script, not to mention the inevitable distraction, frustration, discouragement, the overall loss of creative potency during the grueling process of turning idea into picture. The musician on the other hand simply has to sit down and start playing and BOOM – there’s something to work with. Their act of creation manifests itself in an instant and with the gift of improvisation there’s nothing to prevent them from producing their best work off the top of the dome. The same goes for dancers and to a lesser degree, writers and visual artists. Regardless of whether the final product coalesces later, they are off to the races, so to speak, with a stroke of the brush or pen.
This is the magic of experimental film – that running parallel to the study of film theory and the application of film practice (those narrative conventions we’ve embraced since Griffith) here is something else entirely, something that breaks down those beloved syntaxes. A pure work of unmediated expression, unmediated in the sense that such a film is a work of art, which does not pander to the expectation that it be a coherent whole; experimental film ignores the notion that movies must be products shaped to be passively viewed and absorbed by an audience. It is a self narrative, an individual narrative of the self. What do I mean by this? Human beings make sense of the world through story. Our lives are just one big story. We all have a continuous narrative going on inside of us every day. For some of us, it needs to be released. What experimental film does is it allows us to grasp and express a little of that story, a holographic fragment of ourselves. Bit by bit, little by little, film by film, we come clear.
Experimental film is not by any means a narrative in the classical sense. It does not require a three-act structure; potential spectators are not spoon-fed a cooked paradigm of beginning, middle and end. It’s raw. It does not concern itself with ‘Who am I sending this text to?’ It’s a form of expression that is actually a process of discovery, of pure perception playing with often disjunctive variables as it delves beneath exterior reality to get at something almost out of range. By giving liquid thought a home on the screen, it incarnates a mystery.
The way experimental film approaches narrative is similar to the way ‘free-writes’ operate in creative writing. They aren’t meant to be perfect works of art. It’s more like eavesdropping on someone else’s craft. I may not enjoy watching the results but now, coming full circle in my understanding of the medium, I truly respect it. And I don’t have to enjoy it. Who am I? Armchair critics in experimental film are irrelevant. I just love the fact that there is a free stream of cinema which acts – it’s raw, it’s pure, it’s momentary. It’s not bound to anything or anyone except the mind that put it on the screen. So when André Bazin wrote sixty years ago “that the director [now] writes directly in film” …surely today, given the feeling that it has all been done before, all I can say is, ‘Please, feel free to write whatever you’d like’.
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