The Experimental Film List Project

[therewillbeblus]

Perestroika was a very powerful film, and a particularly resonant example of an artist grappling with the life-affirming awe and fundamental frustrations in not being able to make a supremely emotional experience tangible through any kind of recording medium. I love what the film demonstrates in real time about Turner's life for us, affirming it with every frame while recognizing that we can only have our experience of hers, and then going further to also track her own dissatisfaction with her version of that. So we're watching that frustration which in and of itself becomes beautiful as something we cannot specifically relate to but can all broadly relate to. Cool stuff, thanks for the rec zedz

[zedz]

I watched Sarah Turner's Perestroika: Reconstructed (2013) last night. As advertised, it's a redux of the original film, with new material added. The first section is pretty much as-is from the original work, while the new section, running about an hour, reuses footage from the second journey while accompanied by the narration of an anecdote that happened after the first one. It's a good anecdote (one could imagine it forming the basis of a grim cringe comedy by Joanna Hogg), but it's a shaggy dog story that feels quite inessential appended to the tightly constructed original film, and might have been stronger as the basis for a work in its own right.

I've also checked out some of the experimental films recommended in that Sight & Sound 'Hidden Gems' list - with very mixed results.

Mouth to Mouth (Therese Hak Kyung Cha, 1975): A very early video work that - like a few of the films I sampled - would presumably have had a lot more impact at the time than they do now. Here we have an abstracted mouth engulfed in swarming static, accompanied by a soundtrack that makes you want to pee. Looking backwards through the telescope of cinema history this looks less like a formal breakthrough than it does like B-Roll footage from some J-Horror sequel.

6 et 12 (Ahmed Bouanani, 1968): This is more a traditional city symphony than it is an experimental film, as it doesn't even use many of the avant garde formal devices found in various 1920s examples of the subgenre. For the most part it's a cool associative montage of a day in Casablanca, accompanied by diverse music, but when it stoops to facile and vague social critique (people eating = monkeys eating!) it goes off the boil.

Measures of Distance (Mona Hatoum, 1988): More formally dated video art, but this film has a conceptual core that still puts up a fight and makes it the strongest film in this group. Grainy still photos, mostly nudes of the filmmaker's mother, are superimposed over images of the mother's handwritten letters, while they are read out on the soundtrack. The two strands of superimposed imagery are dissolving slideshows, tending to abstraction. If you were there at the time, the vintage video textures can be quite nostalgic. At times photos are inset within the larger image. Greenaway would be aping this visual language within a few years.

The content of the film is more pungent than the form, atmospheric as it is. The candid letters cross the boundaries of exile (the mother remains in war-torn Lebanon; the daughter has fled to the UK) and are frank about sex and oppression. The film is an intimate interrogation of women's sexuality and the threat it poses to patriarchy as well as a more specific political chronicle.

Dreaming Rivers (Martina Atille, 1988): Another British feminist short from the same year, but nowhere near as interesting or accomplished. A self-consciously glacial, post-colonial 'poetic drama,' but it was very much a precocious student film, with portentous declarative dialogue stiffly delivered. I don't know if this even counts as experimental so much as "mediocre arthouse calling card." The photography is nice and moody, however, thanks to budgetary constraints.

Imagens (Luiz Rosemberg Filho, 1972): Silent, feature-length Cinema Novo guerilla whatsit that's reminiscent of Glauber Rocha's contemporaneous Cancer (though I presume there's no way Rosemberg could have seen that film). The film is predicated on contrasts and reversals around the human body - e.g. intimacy / nudity vs. stylized violence (there is a lot of fake blood); commercially manufactured images of bodies vs. bodies being used as countercultural billboards. When it's free-associating it's cool, with the strongest imagery taking the form of extreme close-ups of dramatically made-up faces, but it also finds too much time for tiresome revolutionary skits (e.g. man being tortured with a crucifix, then forced to fellate a baton, while a guy in an American flag shirt holds him down). The more allegorical it gets, the less mysterious and interesting, but it's a bold film worth an hour of your time.

The version linked from that helpful Google doc includes a noisy guitar improv soundtrack that's totally inauthentic and overdetermined. The imagery is loud enough without it.

[zedz]

I finally worked my way through Lux's two-disc New Contemporaries collection, and was underwhelmed. It's a collection of dozens of short experimental works from 1968 through 2010. Some are extracts from longer works and hard to assess, but mostly they're short one idea (and often one shot) films that don't manage to go anywhere interesting (e.g. straight footage of George W. Bush giving a warmongering speech with bouncing ball karaoke subtitles underneath - and that's it (air kisses, polite applause)). An awful lot of the latter day shorts on disc two seem like the kind of thing that would nowadays be uploaded to Tik Tok. One of the better examples of this was Baywatch, a shot of a woman in a swimsuit on a British street corner on a miserable wet day getting splashed by passing cars and looking more ecstatic the wetter she gets.

Two films I really liked, one for formal and one for conceptual reasons:
Hold (Dryden Goodwin, 1996): Fluttery pixillation of people about town, but with the twist that basic compositions remain standardized as different people occupy positions within that composition, so that, for instance, we accompany somebody as they move along a high street, but their face keeps changing. Well-executed, ingenious and effective.

In Ictu Oculi (Greta Alfaro, 2009): Another one-shot film, but with an outre surrealist subject. The film opens on a banquet table set up in a desert, loaded with a feast, awaiting the guests. Then the vultures descend, in daunting numbers, and the camera watches unblinkingly until they're finished. A real-time nature morte.

You can see it here.

[swo17]

So this project ends in a few weeks...

[denti alligator]

Damn. I need to get a move on!

[therewillbeblus]

Wow, had no idea. I may just have to run through a few choice Re:Voir discs and give a very skewed, sampled list.

I'll try to recall and post favorites sometime soon, and hopefully others can do the same. I'd love to prioritize specific films on discs if there are key recommendations (i.e. Everyone check out Thorax on the Siegfried A. Fruhauf blu-ray) rather than burn-out in the midst of a binge, collect a handful of films and then call it

[denti alligator]

I just left town for a week, so I won’t be able to catch up much, unfortunately. If there’s a general agreement that more time would help, perhaps zedz would be amenable to a postponement. I would only want that if there were a concerted effort by those who plan to contribute to post fairly regularly with recommendations in the time granted us.

[zedz]

I think it would be pretty pointless to have a vote without much discussion, so I’m happy to postpone it indefinitely until enough participants feel like they’ve seen enough films to make the project worthwhile.

[swo17]

Psychologically it would help me anyway to not have it be too open ended. Like maybe push the deadline to April or May now, with the understanding that if at that point any active participant still feels they need more time, the deadline can be extended further

[denti alligator]

I’ll aim to post something once a week, starting the week after next. Probably with a focus on a director. I’ve returned to the Jeff Keen set recently, so I’ll make that my first one.

[denti alligator]

I've been writing up a lot of experimental films, just not in this thread. And of course, any recommendation from zedz is worth its weight in gold

Maybe you could add some links or repost here?

[Red Screamer]

I can writeup recent viewings in due time, but for now, I'll collect some scattered praise for films and filmmakers that will probably make my list from elsewhere on the board.

Jodie Mack is one of the ten or so filmmakers who define [the 2010s] in my opinion....I'll definitely vote for The Grand Bizarre in my revised list—a great film and the abstract animated-musical-comedy-essay you never knew you wanted—though I prefer her shorts. Wasteland No. 2: Hardy, Hearty, my highest-placed orphan, belongs on the shortlist of the greatest flicker films ever made. Mack's mastery of the form creates some incredibly vivid 3D effects simply through careful compositions and editing, and its concept is as simple as it is ingenious: combining, through cinema, the last signs of life from one year's garden with the first growths of the next year's. In the tradition of feminist gallery artists, she fuses the categories of high art and the so-called domestic arts. And the results are euphoric. I have nothing to say about her Glistening Thrills, a ballet of light play and colors blooming, except that its beauty makes me weep.

Un Chant d’amour (Jean Genet, 1950) The immortal French writer Jean Genet’s only film is this wonderful brew of lyrical pornography, frenzied dance film, and acidic allegory that’s even more relevant in a world where many of us are inventing new ways to express and adapt our desires in isolation. Like A Man Escaped, this is a prison film by someone who’s actually been imprisoned, and Genet’s vision of a lonely delirium in which all senses are heightened and everything tangible becomes erotic is, in its own way, as powerful and distinctive as Bresson’s. The climax of the film, where Genet crosscuts between two different fantasies (1. the prison guard’s: sadomasochistic flashes of tangled, faceless limbs + 2. the prisoner’s: daydreams of a Hollywood romance, frolicking with the man in the neighboring cell) is exhilarating in the lucidity and daring of both its concept and its execution. This sequence is unforgettable, as is the film’s opening and closing images and the shots of cigarette smoke passed through a wall between prisoners, impersonal and intimate—all of which must be among the most memorable images in cinema.

Pixillation (Lillian F. Schwartz, 1970) 38

Thanks for the Schwartz recommendation, swo. Her movies are so fun and inventive, work that searches to find the language and poetry in emerging kinds of imagery, in this case, coming from new technologies. In addition to the ones you've mentioned, I loved Googolplex—which is something like a Free Radicals for the computer age, stripping animation down to its minimal elements in black-and-white to focus on rhythm and 2D/3D interplay—and Enigma, which is some sort of color perception experiment in stroboscopic plaids and what looks like video water spills. I had the chance them at an experimental animation program hosted by the archivist working on restorations of her films, so hopefully some of that work comes to fruition soon.

Since it's on thread topic, I'll add that the program also introduced me to another animator whose work is so tailor-made for my taste it's a scandal that I haven't been recommended it before: Robert Russett, co-author with Cecile Starr of Experimental Animation: An Illustrated Anthology. His Primary Stimulus is the punkish blitz of a twin to McLaren's Synchromy, featuring a series of horizontal lines that are simultaneously the film's images and its soundtrack. While McLaren goes symphonic, dazzling you with his intricacy and precision, Russett sets up musical expectations and structure only to send them spinning out of control. His lines vibrate and wobble, the soundtrack sputters and shakes, and it seems like the images are going to explode off the screen, ripping the film right out of the projector. On a similar note, Neuron reminds me of what zedz (I think) said about Fruhauf's Fuddy Duddy, a film whose structuralism and segmentation are at war with its anarchic, disobedient content. It starts with a handful of square boxes and inside each box appears rolling, optical illusion-type animation. The combination of these animations that your brain can't quite process correctly and the strong in-frame boundaries and scientific approach creates a pretty wonderful dissonance. Clever variations and esclations ensue. Russett's films aren't available digitally as far as I can tell but there are some images of Neuron here that give you some idea.

I picked up the Clémenti set out of sheer curiosity as well, and I was immediately taken with the first film, Visa de censure no. X. It's like watching Anger and Mekas projected on top of each other, but it's more inspired than that sounds because the everyday, documentary setting grounds the psychedelic freakout, and the psychedelia brings a fresh attention and intensity to the diary material. So strobing lights and bizarre imagery are revealed to be neon storefronts and knickknacks on a friend's wall, while scenes of smoking cigarettes and casual goofing around become curious glimpses into alien rituals. I thought it was a short film when I pressed play so I was amazed for multiple reasons when the film kept ramping up and kept getting more ambitious stylistically (as well as more self-assured). A major reason why the film has that great sense of escalation is the music, which seems to be a collage cut together from some droney jam sessions. It coheres remarkably well even as the bands switch up styles and speeds, and the synthesis between the frenzied music and the rapid-fire double imagery creates a really effective "come up."

Which, speaking of, if you're allergic to anything hippie-adjacent, I don't think this will be a film that changes your mind—I feared the worst when it began with a nude Clémenti emerging from a cave to attend a witch's fireside ceremony, but the film quickly leaves these allegorical scenes behind and gets to the good stuff. But I loved it, impressed with Clémenti's filmmaking chops from the get-go...

La révolution n'est qu'un début. Continuons le combat (Clémenti) This one kinda feels like it’s channeling Len Lye, if Lye made political home movies. Its layered imagery that fuses unwieldy documentary footage with poster-style text and makeshift icons is something like the radical 60s equivalent of Trade Tattoo. It's pretty great. From what I gather, the film's original version was silent, with this soundtrack of music, voiceover, and (non-diegetic) sound effects added for the new restoration. Normally I would prefer to leave silent films silent, but I found the addition here worthwhile. Sure, the voiceover might be aping Godard to some degree but it’s well done, and they brought back one of Clémenti’s original collaborators to compose the music, which turned out perfect. I am curious where the text of the voiceover is coming from though and haven’t been able to figure out who wrote it or who’s performing it. I don't discount the possibility that I'm overlooking something obvious.

Antoine Barraud says in the booklet that all of Clémenti’s superimpositions were done in-camera. I'd guessed that from how they looked, and from Clémenti’s rowdy artistic ethos, but still: that’s kind of astonishing given the range of effects he gets out of the technique. Especially if you’ve ever tried to do one on a 16mm camera yourself. There's a great one in this film where the superimposition creates a swirling orb effect on a portrait of a woman standing in a garden in the bottom corner of the frame while above that, there's another juxtaposition taking over the focal point of the shot. I'm not able to do it justice in words, but it was a really cool moment that had me asking myself the rest of the night afterward, "How did he do that?" Now it's even more magical.

[Also the booklet basically begins with a comparison combining Anger and Mekas similar to the one I made above, i.e. so much for my brilliant originality.]

I also love Clémenti's other work, with a special shout out for his New Old, which combines every kind of filmmaking he tried (diary, abstraction, flicker film, making-of documentary, city symphony, genre film, erotic love letter) into one beguiling, slippery feature.

Plus here's a guide on Len Lye from our 50s project, though all of his films are worth seeing, including his last film, the underrated Particles in Space, which takes the minimal 3D animation of Free Radicals to its furthest conclusion.

[swo17]

I've been writing up a lot of experimental films, just not in this thread. And of course, any recommendation from zedz is worth its weight in gold

Maybe you could add some links or repost here?

I was primarily referring to the lists project threads. So like:

Fuego en Castilla/Acariño galaico (de barro) (José Val del Omar)
Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage)
Cosmic Ray (Bruce Conner)
Death + Transfiguration (Jim Davis)
Mood Mondrian (Marie Menken)
Allures (Jordan Belson)
Blazes (Robert Breer)
Kommunikation (Edgar Reitz)
Sun in Your Head (Wolf Vostell)
Fathomless (Jim Davis)
Song 14/Two: Creeley/McClure (Stan Brakhage)
Castro Street/Tung (Bruce Baillie)
Lights (Marie Menken)
Word Movie (Paul Sharits)
Cineblatz (Jeff Keen)
Little Dog for Roger (Malcolm Le Grice)
The Point of Noon (Don Levy)
7362 (Pat O'Neill)
Travel Songs (Jonas Mekas)
White Calligraphy (Takahiko Iimura)
Rat Life and Diet in North America (Joyce Wieland)
Pas de deux (Norman McLaren)
La révolution n'est qu'un début. Continuons le combat (Pierre Clémenti)
Oh (Stan Vanderbeek)
Pixillation (Lillian F. Schwartz)
Berlin Horse (Malcolm Le Grice)
Rom 70/71 (Werner von Muzenbecher)
Sea Rhythms (Jim Davis)
Encyclopædia Britannica (John Latham)
Mutations (Lillian F. Schwartz)
Newsprint (Guy Sherwin)
Threshold (Malcolm Le Grice)
The Art of Mirrors (Derek Jarman)
Figure instabili nella vegetazione (Paolo Gioli)
In the Shadow of the Sun (Derek Jarman)
Seven Days (Chris Welsby)
Look Park (Ralph Steiner)
The Stars Are Beautiful (Stan Brakhage)
Associations (John Smith)
31/75 Asyl (Kurt Kren)
Ātman (Toshio Matsumoto)
Couleurs délicieuses sur fond bleu (Christian Lebrat)
Sloan Square: A Room of One's Own (Derek Jarman & Guy Ford)
Railings (Guy Sherwin)
Riddles of the Sphinx (Laura Mulvey & Peter Wollen)
Bagatelles (Lillian F. Schwartz)
Analogies: Studies in the Movement of Time (Peter Rose)
Trans (Shirley Clarke)
Cycle/Clock & Train (Guy Sherwin)
Beach Fragments (John Woodman)
Matrix [First Dream] (Hollis Frampton)
Bridge (John Woodman)

Perhaps a case could be made that some of the other films I mentioned in those posts also qualify as experimental

[denti alligator]

Wonderful, thanks!