I just found this unpublished from the 24th Feb. My new annotations are in blue.

Kuleshov is a famous name in film studies, and it's hard not to talk about him. He cut together a short film - a man with a neutral expression, a crying woman, same man same expression, an empty bowl of soup, same man, a folorn child, and so on. Audiences praised the actor's ability to express paternal pride and sorrow. But his expression never changed. It was the audience imposing their own narrative on the images.

Avant-garde cinema knows about this, so it deliberately seeks to be "indeterminate", the keyword of the lecture. In other words, they're tricky just to wind you up - you get no clues, you have to make your own meaning, and interpretations have the habit of disintigrating.

Because it's art which makes you think. Not necessarily because there's something deeper going on, but because of the human urge to assign meaning to meaninglessness and see patterns when they're not there.

So when my mum, say, who freely admits to being artistically low-brow, a fan of landscapes and flowerbowls - when she says it's pointless because it's complicated, perhaps she's wrong. There's nothing complicated about the Pony Glass, just repeated images. But we ask why it's being shown to us - we can't handle the simplicity. And there's the dichotomy of avant-garde cinema, using something which is on the surface very simple (say, repeated black and white screens), yet the artist or audience overlaying onto it their own complicated understandings.

This hit me with a flash of light during The Flicker, and instantly converted me from a hater of experimental movies into a passionate fan. I've always thought them pretentious, in a word - but presented as we watched them tonight, not backed up by artistic rhetoric, they can be enjoyed as beauty for beauty's sake. Like any other artform, we can see it as honest or ironic, as allegorical - or, and this is a massive leap for film which has always been a narrative art - we can see it as just beauty.

It's an idea I've always loved. A lot of people gave up on LOST because they didn't understand why there was a polar bear on the island. "I don't like this because it doesn't make sense". I loved the concept on it's own merits, and the same goes for the Prisoner - I think "this is cool!" first, and rarely consider why or how something works. I never notice plot holes either.

I've even come close to expressing this about film before. You might recall when I discussed genre how I defended Pride and Prejudice against a collegue who hated the artificial setting, neat framing and general cleanliness of line and colour. I like looking at beautiful people, in beautiful places and beautiful costumes, while they amble about to beautiful music. This in itself is a pleasure, never mind whether or not they serve the narrative. People arranging themselves into paintings is pleasing to me.

So experimental films, as I understand them (remember what I said about us providing our own meanings...?), are as complicated as you make them - and if you choose to reject meaning entirely, they can be purely sensory experiences. Just as it doesn't necessarily* matter what a song is about, but that the melody alone can still move you, nor do you have to recongnise and understand the subject matter of a painting to admire the skill of the artist. Art for art's sake. Film can be like this - it can stimulate all the senses, without actually making sense. It can be as primal and pointless as modern "blotches on a canvas and a can of baked beans" art, and can still mean something when detatched from meaning.



*I say "necessarily" because Friend 2 has always strongly disagreed with me about this. She doesn't understand how I can not pay attention to the lyrics, and I do see where she's coming from - the meaning, if it has words, or the intention, if it doesn't, can be vital to your appreciation of music. On the other hand, I maintain you can get an equally valid appreciation without them. For example, "Trains to Brazil" is an uplifting song about the train bombings, and how wonderful today is as you could be dead tomorrow. Yet those soaring trumpets at the end are also uplifting on their own, even without being twinned to the lyrics.


You can, if you wish, now point out that that's the most pretentious attack on pretention and most complex defence of simplicity you've ever seen. Whatever. I'm an academic now. I even wax lyrical about how I conform conventions of gender identity in the way I make breakfast*



*(cereal, the fruit of human labour and derived from fertility goddess Ceres, milk and empty bowls waiting to be filled being three examples of strongly feminine-charged iconography, yet it is consumed with a spoon, an obviously phallic symbol, and then if you relate that to the work of five long-winded French feminists, dream analysists and sports commentators, add paprika to taste and leave to stand for thirty minutes, you have the beginnings of an excellent PhD...)






I wonder what would be the effect of showing Experimental Film to babies and toddlers, before they've got a grasp of stereotypes, narrative expectations and filmmaking cliches? Because once I grasped that there didn't have to be a meaning, it was like being a child again - just colours and sounds and pretty things.

This was certainly the case for the first film, Our Lady of the Sphere. Made of Terry Gilliam-Monty Python style cutouts, there was maybe a story of sorts going on - repeated imagery of clocks and luggage, something about a baby in a well, fish in space. But really it was that sensory experience I'm talking about. Why does the lady have a bubble on her head? I don't know, and furthermore, don't care. But I am enjoying looking at it, both from the aesthetic "this looks good" and the anarchic incorrectness of the image. Probably my favourite, too, for the whimsy of the imagery.

The second one, Pony Glass, had more of a story - though no clear resolution - and also, apparently, an agenda. You don't turn squeaky clean Superman sidekick Jimmy Olsen into a cross-dressing homosexual without inferring some definite subtext. Made entirely from comic book cutouts, it was a cheeky and good natured story (apparently) about love. Jimmy is tormented because his old girlfriend is dating some new guy. He goes to a magician who reveals the only way to get over her is to dress up as a girl, which after some angst Jimmy embraces enthusiastically and shags anything which passes his way. This goes on for some while, presumably saying something about America's loss of innocence, and it's sufficiently long that you assume there's going to be a plot twist or resolution. But there isn't. Then it ends.

Passage a l'acte wins the artistic Stockholm Syndrome award of the night. An 18-second shot from To Kill a Mockingbird, stretched out over an interminable 12 minutes, by repeating every minescule movement over, and over, and over again, so the whole thing judders forward in pain. If you've seen our Lord of the Rings, there's a bit where Friend 2 leaps towards the mushrooms, crying "mushrooms!", which seems OK when viewed as part of the film. But on the gag reel, we looped it - now, she's trapped leaping and leaping and leaping, the soundtrack stutters "shroomshroomshroomshrooms", and we've put a rabbit-style boing effect in time too. Which is pretty funny, for fifteen seconds. Passage is 12 minutes long. It repeatorepeats the first syllable, then the next, then the next, in a very irritating frustrating manner. But soon you abandon the conventional narrative of the scene (why are they arguing, where is he going et al) and understand your own. The repeated movements are sometimes hilarious - at one point the girl appears to repeatedly spank the boy, and the slammingslammingslamming door is also neat. You read dance into the jilting movements and sometimes, the stuttering text takes on almost musical qualities. Again, you make your own meaning, and although sitting through this was often agony, I can't deny it was good. It made something of cinematic "dead time", forced you to focus on every little action and movement and expression. But it still made me want to die.

At times it reminded me of Mr Brightside - yes, the Killers song. Didn't like it at first. Then they played it a million times on the radio and I loathed it. Got sick of hearing it. In my last four weeks of school I was constantly bombarded with it on a daily basis, and now it's among my favourites. The point is, anything endured for long enough will seem like a good idea. Artistic Stockholm Syndrome.

The same goes for some Experimental Film, and this one in particlar. Stage one: this is boring. Stage two: this is really boring. Stage three: right, I've had enough now. Once it's over: bloody genius!


I have since watched some more Martin Arnold films, in the same style. One was 15 minutes of a man coming into a room and kissing Rita Hayworth. It was very boring. However, Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy was just wonderful - he uses that style of repeat-o cinema to read a deliberate narrative where none is there into some innocent Hollywood movies, reinserting sex and Oedipus where surely it was unintentional. For example, there is an image of a son kissing his mother. But looped, looped, stretched, repeated, it becomes increasingly downright twisted, as you are forced to take account of every facet of the scene, such as nods of the head and closing eyes.

While Passage was torture for the audience, Tscherkassky was torture for the film itself. Not much to say about Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine, except that it was intense - imagine Good the Bad and the Ugly, in black and white and given the Planet Terror treatment. He'd ripped out some bits of that movie, and literally tortured the actual film. Very loud, very trippy, and it gave me a headache. But again, there was a wonderful sense of pace. There was no story, true, but the violent bits were violent, the running away was exciting, even though you had no idea why these things were happening. For example, the "hanging scene" - which any GBU fan can tell you is hardly intense - when repeated again and again over two minutes becomes truly horrific. Then, when it falls to the ground it cuts straight to him lying by the graves; and then again, his run through the graveyard which is originally sweeping and exciting, is turned into a nightmarish desperate dash running away from something appalling.

According to the lecture, in the early 1920s it was believed avant-garde was the future of cinema, and these things would be adopted into the mainstream. And indeed these films were the future, when compared to films of parades or daily life which made up the other half of cinema. The advent of sound killed the dream - because only major companies could afford the new technology. Amateur experimentors were still producing silents, and so naturally they fell by the wayside. Seeing Instructions has made me want to revive that dream - that avant-garde filmmaking can be readopted into the mainstream, and that the experimentation integrated into everyday film. A whole movie, with narrative and character, with elements shot like this would be stunning.

I've since seen more of his films in the Maughan, and they absolutely terrify me. Dreamwork was one, and Outer Space was the other. I almost had to switch Dreamwork off. Can't define his style without showing you - but fortunately, someone has uploaded my favourite to youtube. Hurrah! The uploader notes "its supposed to look like it was put through a meat grinder then fed into a pain amplifier."

So put up the volume, and watch the whole thing - preferably with the lights off - and prepare to have your mind expanded.

And then there was The Flicker. At the start of the lecture, the guest lecturer said she always insists on taking this lecture because every year there are three or four converts, and she likes to be there as it happens. Her enthusiasm was obvious, and I warmed to her at once. There was an obvious catch in her voice, a tremor of emotion, when she informed us that The Flicker had not come. She explained it was a half hour long succession of flashing black and white plain screens, and conceded that we were probably all breathing a sigh of relief (I was, for my part, because I was missing an interesting lecture about 50s pulp fiction on the floor above and wanted to be there for the second half).

And then, she explained what we were missing out on, and conducted the lecture referring it to it often, and her enthusiasm for it was irresistable. Some people even saw it in colour, apparently. But before the lecture was over, the tape was discovered after all - my film studies friend suggested this mysterious absence means the orignal had been replaced by the Master, and we were about to be hypnotised.

They were both right. The former that the Flicker was actually a film well worth going through. The latter that perhaps we've all been turned into sleeper agents.

I could see the vortex - you know the rushing 10th Doctor title sequence? Staring at the screen was like swooping down that tunnel. Which might just prove that I can read Doctor Who into anything, even a completely blank screen. It reminded me a little of Donnie Darko, the cinema scene - "have you ever seen a portal?", and then the screen ripples open to reveal...I was expecting some enlightenment at any moment. Because the subject matter wasn't instantly interesting, I became more aware of the cinema and the people around me - appreciating the way the flickering white coloured the people and room that lovely garish gray. "The cinema glow", as Al Stewart would doubtless say, is as much a part of the cinematic experience as the popcorn, the single tear running down the flawless cheek, the nostalgic stories and the bastard in the row in front who won't stop explaining the plot to Marge Simpson and the Pope who are blocking your view. You really appreciated the experience of "being at the cinema" more, because you weren't being distracted by narrative.

That must have been the first few minutes, and I was internally impressed that somehow I wasn't bored. It operated just as the earlier narrative-less films had, in which the lack of solid things to process allowed my mind to wander, but always with reference to what was on screen.

And that was when things started getting weird. Out of the blue, the white screen widened first sideways, making it a stretched rectangle instead of a square. And then it started getting taller as well, and for a moment I felt as if it was going to break off the screen entirely and tower over the room. I felt sick, like I was sinking backwards. I'm sure you must have had this experience too - you're sitting or lying down, then out of the blue you suddenly feel a falling sensation, which after a terrifying instant you rationalise and come back to reality. Well it felt like that - and after coping with the swooping shock of this, my logical mind kicked back in and ensured me it was an optical illusion - after which any visual weirdness ended for the rest of the show.

I said "visual", not "weirdness". I was still enjoying the film when I started falling asleep. The screen was naturally very bright, and we'd already been informed that while viewing, audiences tended to blink less frequently. This seemed to be true - and at this point, whenever I blinked or closed my eyes, I fell asleep. My theory on this is that maybe the pulsing on the screen hit the right frequency to send me to sleep, or something - like accidental hypnotism. But every time I pulled myself and woke up. In retrospect, I should have just gone with it and seen what happened. I had some very weird, brief dreams which won't be repeated.

The only explanation can be that I experienced the final twenty minutes as a series of micronaps, because it didn't seem half an hour long. Half an hour is the length of a Doctor Who episode, so I'm almost a perfect judge of how long 25 minutes is now. Seemed like only ten or so. I suppose the lack of identifyable points of reference also made it seem more timeless than it actually was.

The moment the screen went black, I lost all my tiredness and was totally conscious, confirming my suspicion my drowsniness was a result of the Ipcress experience. Bit of a headache though. Also, an inexplicable urge to assassinate the president of Malaysia.


Oh, I want to be an avant-garde filmmaker when I'm grown!

I thought about the short films I'd almost made a few years back, one called Spider. My animating and illustrating talents weren't quite up to it, but it still plays in my head sometimes. I drew all the key shots, but linking them together was insurmountably huge. The story, and warning, do not read this if you don't like spiders, because it's a bit grossifying:

This all takes place in shades of grey, brown and scratchy black. A miserable author is trying to write, but the camera isn't interested in him. Instead, there is a spider - one of the long legged ones - gliding down a thread. It stops near his ear and, after a moment, crawls inside.

The author doesn't notice, so he goes outside for a walk, and walks morosely down the street. Suddenly, he feels a yank inside, then another - he falls to the ground, in pain and choking. Close up, and you see his eyes widen as, slowly, a huge hairy black leg winds out of his mouth, then another, then another. He struggles and panics, but the Spider keeps coming - until finally he coughs up the whole thing, in a ball of mucus and pus.

He just stays there on the ground, watching in freaky wonderment as this thing jerks around on the pavement (it's a little larger than an average computer monitor), escaping it's mucus-y
prison - and then, once it has struggled and scrambled up, it rushes away down the street, skittering off on it's slippery newborn legs.

The end

God knows how I came up with that one, but there you go. Don't psychoanalyse me. It's far from avantgarde either, with a fixed narrative. The point is, I came up with a short idea, and intended to film it, either animated or with stopmotion cutouts. Never had the time. The other idea is far less organic, far simpler to achieve. I think I'll try it once I get home.