Short Answer Questions

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1. What are some of the primary ways in which experimental film and video differ from narrative and documentary film?
While narrative films relate to the human desire for stories, and documentaries address the desire to see and understand the material world, experimental films and videos use non-narrative, non-realist techniques to examine other aspects of human experience—such as sensory states, intellectual puzzles, emotions, memories, and dreams. Two unique characteristics of experimental films are their use of abstract imagery and their reflections on the material specificity of the film medium. Experimental work is often made by individuals rather than by large crews or studios, and its audiences are smaller and more specialized than those of narrative films.

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2. What is the relationship between experimental film and video and modernity?
The technology of experimental films and the visions they express have their roots in the wider technological and social changes associated with modernity. The rapid industrial and cultural changes of the early twentieth century, during which time motion picture technology was perfected, inspired new developments in painting, music, design, and architecture, which captured new experiences of accelerated and disjunctive time, spatial juxtaposition, and fragmentation enabled by such technologies as the railroad, the telegraph, and electricity. As cinema is literally made with machines and explores both space and time, the medium was considered a central art of modernism.

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3. What role does formalism play in experimental films and videos?
Many experimental films are formalist, emphasizing problems of form over issues of content. For instance, the formal exploration of the qualities of light, the poetry of motion, the juxtaposition of sound and image, and the way in which audiences view a film serve as inspiration to experimental filmmakers. The most extreme manifestations of formalism can be seen in non-representational abstract films, which use colors, shapes, and lines to create form-based patterns and rhythms.

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4. Within experimental film practices, what are associative organizations?
Associative organizations create psychological or formal resonances, giving films dreamlike qualities and thus engaging viewers’ emotions and curiosities. Associative organizations can be abstract, such as in films that relate shapes in succession or juxtapose objects and shapes or colors, but they can also be representational, such as in music videos, whose narratives follow a dreamlike logic of imagistic or psychological association.

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5. What is surrealist cinema? Describe some of its main features or qualities.
Surrealist films use familiar images in unfamiliar contexts, rejecting the narrative logic and realism of mainstream cinema, yet embracing the mainstream ideas of photographic reproduction and chronology. By using the powers of film to manipulate time, space, and material objects, surrealist filmmakers challenge middle-class assumptions about normalcy and create dream worlds driven by dark desires.