To me, the summation of this first week’s topic is the way in which the many mediums we utilise to express oursleves are constsntly challenged reworked and experimented with, to create entirely new artworks we never thought to exist before. Experimental film is one such explorative art that challenges the very meaning of media every day and causes us to re-learn and challenge what we know about media.
Stan Brakhage is one such experementalist, creating pieces of art described as music without sound, created only through the moving image. He does this by painting directly onto film stock. The funnt thing about this technique, besides how painstaking it is to create even a minute with 24 frames a second to paint, but beneath the paint there is always an underlying image, which at times Brakhage allows to come momentarily to the surface. This technique allows Brakhage to combine two very different techniques for incredible effect in ‘the Dante Quartet’:
Another form of experimental film is one which utilises found footage. ‘Alone: Life Wastes Andy Hardy’, is a short experimental film by Martin Arnold and it uses only footage from Andy Hardy films. Arnold takes apart each film to find footage which, when slowed down or quickened, reversed or played forward, creates an entirely different meaning. One not necessarily PG. Through ‘remixing’ the footage, Arnold creates an entirely different plot, one that creates quite the oedipal complex:
One of the earliest forms of experimental cinema came out of Dadaism and post-Cubism in the 1920’s (Tohline, 2013). This form of experimental cinema often had an anti-establishment bend to it, and this film follows that genre through its contratsing of the human form and static, mechanical objects, emphasisng the now mechanical nature of humanity (as is evident through the title). “Ballet mécanique constitutes one of the most famous and most successful examples surviving this brief-lived but highly innovative, highly influential period of experimental production.” (Small, 2015):
As you can see through the examples above, experimental films reshape our understanding of exactly what ‘media’ is, and reminds us that there really are no limitations within it, only those we put on oursleves.
– Small, Edward S. “Le Ballet Mecanique.”
– Tohline, Max. “On Ballet mécanique (Fernand Léger, 1924).“