Check out the Ann Arbor Film Festival this week. The AAFF is one of the premiere experimental film festivals in the Northwest.
Experimental cinema, unlike Narrative or Art film, lacks a consistent set of artistic practices. By nature, experimental film eschews coherent meaning, lengths, times. It is far easier, therefore, to define experimental cinema by what it is not than by what it is.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YhmrD7J7ZI
In Europe, post world war one, Surrealists such as Salvador Dalà and Luis Buñuel argued used the ability to jump across varying imagery and soundscapes to explore the dreamlike and ephemeral quality of film. Un Chien Andalou is a classic Surrealist film which delves into the Oedipal complex, social anxiety towards violence.
In the US, Stan Brakhage, a reclusive filmmaker refusing to engage in the dominant narrative practices of Hollywood, worked with film reels by hand – adding ink drawings or even moth wings onto the film strips to explore how abstract imagery could be interpolated over elapsed time – literally decorating time and space with his creative vision.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaGh0D2NXCA
The Canadian film board subsidized work for many talented animators. Norman McLaren is a particularly prolific figure in Canadian experimental and animated film, working for over 30 years with hand-drawn film strips.
I highly recommend attending the Ann Arbor Film Festival this week to see how these early experimental artists’ legacies have continued to influence a broad-based and versatile form of self-expression!
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