Notes on Experiment-al Film-making
When discussing experiment-al film-making, one possible entry point is to ask: What is an experiment? A question is posed, in the form of a hypothesis, and that question is investigated.
The methods used to investigate that question are selected on the basis of their utility in discovering the answer
(or frequently discovering the additional clue leading to the next question).
As artists, as performers of such experiments, equipped with our own questions, we also select our methods of operations, our mediums most valuable (hopefully helpful) in pursuing answers to these questions.
What, then, can cinema offer us in our time?
Is there potential for an experimental cinema which operates within the domain of cinema, using its history and contextual placement, to operate as a methodology for performing experiments to explore ideas and questions meaningful to the human endeavor?
When thinking of what cinema may offer, it is helpful to remember what cinema is. Cinema is many things, but it is certainly personal.
Through the history of cinema, one value it has certainly gained (with exponential speed) through the democratization of production and viewing systems is the quality of being “personal,” both in its creation and subsequent re-creations upon readings (“viewings”). The definition of “cinema” is still being debated (“Is Marvel cinema? Is Vimeo cinema?” - a debate whose presence illuminated the power dynamics present in modern film-making).
The struggle to wrestle cinema out of the hands of a narrow, controlling class is a long and often forgotten history.
And this struggle is clearly still at hand. And this struggle to define the inclusion/exclusion borderlines of what works, which artifacts and films get to constitute as real “cinema” has real consequences.
In this time of struggle, what does experimental cinema offer us (as both artists and audience)? If experimental cinema can be understood as a utility to investigate and pursue a question, and if the “answers” to those questions continues to reveal both additional insights as well as additional mysteries, leading to further exploration, then this process of creation, this specifically experimental process of production, would inherently be in continual flux,
adapting to new information, not an unstable platform but rather a continual feedback loop of discovery, curiosity, exploration, investigation, discovery, etc.
While this experimental film-making methodology may appear simple (and rather traditional when viewed from this perspective), this process of production works in direct opposition to the traditional, formal modes of creating “cinema.” For example, the concept of script, a written boundary which formalizes and totalizes a (hopefully) investigative thought, as utilized by the traditional “cinema” production process, is potentially restrictive and necessarily reductive.
If cinema is capable of expressing a thought only made possible through the mechanics of cinema,
then how could that idea be fully captured in a script, written word?
A script may very be extremely valuable in the creation of some experiment-al films. Just as some specific experimental procedures are critical when called for, so a script may be an important component in a given filmmaker(s) experience in producing a work.
The opportunity that experimental filmmaking offers however, in contrast to traditional modes of film production, is the freedom to fully deconstruct such an artifact (as the script) in the face of the (pursuit of) truth.
What holds primary then, even above the script, is a calling, a mystery which caught the “eye in the head of a (poet)” the filmmakers. So at any given moment, when the investigation no longer requires, or perhaps becomes restrained by, the script, a new vision is cast in whatever form is necessary to move the process of production, a process of discovery, further along its course.
As many would point out, the artifact of the script is only a beginning point, and films always evolve through the process of their creation into a final artifact which is definitely different from the original script. But that difference, that artistic “drift” from script to screen, is an undesirable byproduct of the process of production by those who operate the mechanisms of production within the traditional film industry.
This sort of “drift” (exploration) within the context of experimental cinema is not only approved but encouraged, and regarded not as an accident to be avoided but an evolution to be pursued.
For each honest adjustment, each earnest re-calculation of trajectory, each evolutionary step of the artifact through its production would serve as a reflection of the development, the formation, of the performers themselves. This would necessitate, at its best, a personal cinema.
One critique levied against experimental cinema is that it is a personal cinema, mere personal expression (navel gazing) best left to bedrooms. Is there a possibility that the personal nature of cinema can be used within the context of experimental cinema in an inherently alternative way that separates itself as different-than personal expression?
Is experiment-al film-making inherently (and desirably) “person-al”?
Experiment-al film is an investigator tool, grounded in experimentation. Each performance, each expression is (and must be) personal in so that the methodology of experimental filmmaking requires and recognize the performer, the creator, as subject themselves. So certainly the outcome, in various ways, accounts for the person-hood, the becoming, of the performer.
The methodology of experiment-al film-making is grounded in this becoming and is therefore always in constant development, a process, continually be-com-ing itself.
The artifact, the “finished work,” reflects this becoming and therefore transforms through the process of production.
The process of production itself has blurry boundaries, undefined beginnings and endings, as the origin of any given artifact is a conglomeration of an infinite number of variables offered from the shared creators’ histories, the person-hood of each performer.
And where could one mark the definitive end of an artifact’s "production"?
If indeed each reading of the "artifact" (in whatever form it may be presented to this theoretical viewer) produces a new thought, a new perspective, a new life, well then does the production process end at the moment of "upload" (to whatever streaming platform you may prefer)?
Would not each reading produce a new artifact (at the very least "in the mind of the viewer") and therefore create an infinite possibility of becoming?
The "artifact" therefore is never complete, never a fixed or static point but, just as the performers themselves, is always becoming.
And in the beautiful vision of a fundamentally collaborative experimental cinema, each performer may share their desired weight in navigating the artifact along its developmental path.
This move deconstructs the hierarchical mode of production inherited from the origins of cinema,
the history of capitalist interests creating ever more “economical” modes of film production within an organized (studio) system, a system reliant on hierarchy to commodify this art form in a fundamentally coercive relationship between producer/consumer.
The vision, the potential, of experimental cinema therefore is also to work in direct opposition to these inherited hierarchical structures, especially within its mode of production.
The struggle to (re)define cinema provides an opportunity.
If we can decenter the definition of cinema away from the traditional gold-standard of the “mystical” (and poorly remembered) history of cinema,
away from DW Griffith, the “golden era” of the studio system,
away from the requirement for participants to sell their time and wage labour into an inherently exploitative market blind to the interests of those who construct these “dreams;”
if we can press away from a cinema founded on the “male gaze” which actively seeks to exploit the efforts of the oppressed to peddle a neoliberal ideal funded by corporate interests;
if we can move our understanding of what cinema is and can be,
then we can create a possibility for cinema to function as a tool for liberation.
This would require experimental cinema to not only be personal but also to be fundamentally collaborative and cooperative if it were to operate in such a unfettering way.
Experimental cinema teaches and grows the subjects, the performers, throughout production in ways more valuable than only physical or intellectual labor offer,
requiring investment and investigation by all willing performers, outside a hierarchical structure.
Experimental cinema offers an opportunity to create outside a capitalist system of production/consumption, valuing each performer and each reader out of mutual respect in direct opposition to the traditional producer/consumer relations.
