Film Genres | Experimental Films
Experimental Films can only be defined according to a vague, spiritual desire - to experiment.
In fact, films commonly accepted as experimental have told stories ("Blood of a poet," "Meshes of the afternoon"),
have documented real processes ("The man with the movie camera"), and have used animation.
"The movies are a Revolution" said Taylor Mead
Maya Deren
had proposed the poetic film as representing "an approach to experience in the sense that a poet i looking
at the same experience what a dramatist may be looking at."
Distinguishing it somewhat more specifically, she describes it as "vertical" in structure, "an investigation of a situation in that it probes the reifications of the moment, and is concerned with its qualities and its depth, so that you have poetry concerned,
in a sense not with what is occurring but with what it feels like or what it means.
A poem to my mind, creates visible or auditory form for something that is invisible, which is the feeling,
or the emotion or the metaphysical content of the statement.
Now it also may include action, but its attack is what i would call the vertical attack,
and this may be a little clearer if you will contrast it to what i would call the horizontal attack to drama
which is concerned with the development, let's say, within a very small situation from feeling to feeling.
Deren's concern with the lyric was essentially a step forward innovation.
at the same experience what a dramatist may be looking at."
Distinguishing it somewhat more specifically, she describes it as "vertical" in structure, "an investigation of a situation in that it probes the reifications of the moment, and is concerned with its qualities and its depth, so that you have poetry concerned,
in a sense not with what is occurring but with what it feels like or what it means.
A poem to my mind, creates visible or auditory form for something that is invisible, which is the feeling,
or the emotion or the metaphysical content of the statement.
Now it also may include action, but its attack is what i would call the vertical attack,
and this may be a little clearer if you will contrast it to what i would call the horizontal attack to drama
which is concerned with the development, let's say, within a very small situation from feeling to feeling.
Deren's concern with the lyric was essentially a step forward innovation.
Stan Brakhage
Then it came to Stan Brakhage to radicalize the revision of filmic temporality in positing the sense of a continuous present,
of a filmic time which devours memory and expectation in the presentation of presentness.
The assault of Brakhage upon the space of representation is the final and most radical break with the spatial integrity which
Cocteau had been in pains, neoclassicist that he was, to preserve.
It consummates the break with narrative structure, and Brakhage now moves into the climate of expressionism,
pushing the abstractive process, contracting the depth of the visual field to the point where he destroys the spatiality of narrative, redefining time as purely that of vision, the time of appearance.
of a filmic time which devours memory and expectation in the presentation of presentness.
The assault of Brakhage upon the space of representation is the final and most radical break with the spatial integrity which
Cocteau had been in pains, neoclassicist that he was, to preserve.
It consummates the break with narrative structure, and Brakhage now moves into the climate of expressionism,
pushing the abstractive process, contracting the depth of the visual field to the point where he destroys the spatiality of narrative, redefining time as purely that of vision, the time of appearance.