Why It's Called 'Experimental' Film

story © Michael Betancourt | published June 5, 2011 | permalink |  |  

The origins of the idea that films made by artists are "experimental" can be traced to a magazine from the 1930s, and an exhibition in the 1940s.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published May 1, 2011 | permalink |  |  

Len Lye (1901 – 1980) worked as an animator, then as a director of newsreels for the March of Time from 1946 to 51, and finally as a kinetic artist; within the history of motion graphics he occupies an unusual position: even though he had informal training as a painter and worked with various types of sound-image synchronization in abstract film, these works exhibit a distinct conception of abstraction as a kinetic art, rather than an art constructed upon a musical analogy as was typical for the other artists drawn to create abstract motion pictures during the first phase of their history. This emphasis appears in his theorizing shortly after his first hand painted film had achieved a wide-spread critical success in Europe. Writing with a collaborator, Laura Riding, in 1935 for the essay “Film-making,” Lye proposes a tentative framework to think about motion as form:

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story © Michael Betancourt | published April 10, 2011 | permalink |  |  

Sergei Eisenstein (1898 – 1948) proposed a series of techniques in his montage theory that provide a complete system for motion pictures. As optical sound became the dominant technology, his theories became concerned with the organization and relationship between sound and image. Concerned more with the editing of sequences than the graphic animation of imagery, montage nevertheless does have a direct relevance to the synchronization of sound and image. Eisenstein proposed a special type of montage form, chromo-phonic montage. This conception emerges from his critical engagement with the color-sound relationships surveyed in his article The Synchronization of the Senses, a fact that reflects the pervasive influence of synaesthesia on art before World War II.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published April 3, 2011 | permalink |  |  

Marcel Duchamp (1887 – 1968) produced only one film, Anémic Cinéma (1926). It shares some of the concerns with creating an abstract visual language, but stands apart from the translation of the implied movement shown in abstract painting to the apparent motion of cinema. This film, shot by Man Ray, creates a visual comparison between a series of risqué French puns and a number of kinetic optical illusions that oscillate between convex and concave when spun. The relationship between the visual and verbal elements of this film is intricate; the complexity of meaning contained by this formulation is belied by the simplicity of the film itself. Understanding it requires a consideration of how this film and its subjects can be related to the rest of Duchamp’s oeuvre. This process reveals the abstract language Duchamp proposed in this film and his other works.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published March 27, 2011 | permalink |  |  

Hans Richter (1888 – 1976) and Viking Eggeling’s collaboration was predicated on similar interests, and developed, at least initially, from Richter’s desire to work together. In the summer of 1919, he invited Eggeling to visit his family’s estate in Klein-Kölzig, Nieder Laustiz, Brandenburg in Germany. This marks the beginning of their formal collaboration, and art historian Martin Norden has noted the parallels and connections between the abstract language Eggeling and Richter produced, and similar attempt to create a formal language by other artists. After 1920, Richter worked to promote their Universelle Sprache using his relationships with other abstract artists: the De Stijl artists in the Netherlands, the Dada/Constructivists in Berlin and the Russian artist Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematism. Norden’s recognition of the formal relationship between Suprematism, the geometric painting of De Stijl artists Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesberg, and the Universelle Sprache created by Eggeling and Richter is not simply a coincidence. Their collaboration developed because of Richter’s associations with these groups and mutual friends they shared in them.

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