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’.
