Our screening this week was ‘Holy Motors’ (Leos Carax, 2012, 1h55m) and our required reading this week was page 43 – 60 which discusses ‘Experimental Film’.
The reading basically spelled out what an experimental film is.
Experimental or avant garde: meaning to challenge to sterotypical expectations of movies and what it contains, often theses filmmakers work independently.
The motivation to create an experimental film may be for a Filmmaker to express their ideas or representations of their experiences. They may not tell a story, it may just be visuals with no real intended link. It may conjure images, meanings and possibilities or be a way for audiences to challenge and question what they see.
A range of technical choices can include:
- found footage
- staging
- non narrative and narrative
Abstract Form: the whole films patterning will be determined by qualities such as frame composition, editing and miss en scene, rhythm and parallels. uses objects that we recognises then juxtaposes how they are portrayed (e.g. colour, movement, shape) which pushes us to create new meaning in unusual way.
Associational form: suggests ideas and emotions to the viewer by assembling images and sounds that may not have nay logical connection, however because they are together we look for an association and connection that pairs them together. If footage of a bird eating a chip is paired next to footage of a comet in space we could pair together that the bird is about to be hit by a comet, yet if they were not pair together we would never look for any sort of link.
Basic principles of an experimental film often include:
- gather images into distinct sections
- variations from part to part (e.g. tempo)
- repeated motifs to reinforce associations
- interpretations, general meaning to the film
“art for art’s sake” vs. “art for life’s sake”
Often critics believe experimental film’s have no serious purpose or value. They may believe it is pointless and just presents audiences with a series of patterns with no intended connection or meaning. In contrast, artist’s see experimental films as an enhancement to our lives where we perceive things in new ways and refine our definition of what’s around us. I think it’s pretty incredible to be able to change the perception of viewer expectations. It has the ability to take mundane object’s and mundane activities, it takes them out of context and makes them abstract, for the viewer to produce their own individual meaning. So often these films play with ambiguity, for example in Holy Motors the limo could be an important motif of the film. Is it a representation of his journey to death? a symbol for movement and instability? Is it part of a larger picture? Is it just a limo? Maybe it is his only place of safety and home? The point is I will never really know but can spend countless hours pondering what it could mean.