Okay so ‘mental’ is the political incorrect way to describe the short films for this week, but at least it was punny. This week’s Cinema Studies was a little different. Instead of a 2 hour film, we watched a bunch of experimental short films. It’s interesting to watch something with variety, each film different from the one before it, and even more so interesting to find out what my peers felt about it. My personal favourite (I’m using ‘favourite’ loosely, considering I wasn’t a fan of the other shorts showed) was the third, ‘La Jetee’ by Chris Marker. I thought it was both incredibly absurd and clever to use only photographs and a narrator to tell a story.

The readings spoke a little bit about why a film maker might use experimental themes to create their film. The most obvious being of course, to tell no specific story, instead to create something abstract – like the first short we watched ‘Ballet Mécanique’. Although that was very interesting cinematic wise and historically (considering how far it dates back for the genre), I never find it the most engaging. I’m a fan of the story-telling type of film making, even in something so eccentric as experimental film.

The form of Avant Garde films is an interesting concept, considering things like narrative are often abandoned. The function, too, is hard to pin point in many of the films we watched today. What I did notice a lot across the board though, was the use of repetition and similarity. For ‘La Jetee’ it was the bookending both in plot and cinematically of the Dock scene and the character’s death. For ‘Ballet Mécanique’ it was simply repeated footage of things like the lipstick wearing smile and so forth. The other films included these themes a lot, too, which I thought was interesting. I think it definitely added to my feeling as a viewer, of disorientation and confusion – dream like almost.