More so than other forms of cinema, experimental film and video often ask viewers to reflect actively on the experience of watching and listening to moving-image media, thereby challenging and expanding how viewers see, feel, and hear.

While all experimental works challenge audiences and are innovative in some way, there are two identifiable historical traditions – expressive and confrontational. In the expressive tradition, films are often poetic narratives emphasizing aesthetics and imagination. Expressive traditions emphasize personal expression and communication with an audience and are tied to longstanding notions of artistic originality, authenticity, and interiority. Experimental organizations are often informed by specific styles and perspectives, including surrealism, lyricism, and critical positions. More than any other kind of film, experimental films are driven by the efforts and points of view of individual filmmakers.

Surrealist styles use recognizable imagery in strange contexts – simultaneously defying the realist tendencies and narrative logic of mainstream film, and building on the medium’s basis in photographic reproduction and the idea of unfolding images in time. One example, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un chien andalou (1928), begins with a shocking assault on a woman’s eye and then presents a stream of unexplained objects and actions in the manner of a dream state.

Lyrical styles express emotions, beliefs, and other personal positions in film, much like the voice of a lyric poet does in literature. Lyrical films may emphasize a personal voice or vision through the singularity of the imagery or through such techniques as voiceovers or handheld camera movements.

Confrontational traditions seek specifically to shock or disturb an audience, often with an underlying political or social purpose. Instead of primarily exploring personal expression, confrontational films actively situate themselves in the context of a wider social, political, or aesthetic critique.

In such works, experimental modes may overlap with documentary and narrative ones. Many critical techniques are associated with political or theoretical positions that take apart the assumed natural relationship between a word or image and the thing it represents. Critical filmmakers encourage audiences to take up similar critical positions by exposing them to formal experiments.