Experimental film

Experimental film also goes by the names avant-garde film, underground film and personal film; Japan’s Nipponica encyclopedia treats avant-garde film as almost the same thing. Artists’ experiments with the new medium grew into a movement in Berlin and Paris in the 1920s. Walter Ruttmann made the abstract animation Opus I (1921); Man Ray’s Return to Reason (1923) and Ballet mécanique (1924), by Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, took apart real scenery through experiments with camera technique and collage-like editing. From the 1960s a group of works called structural films emerged: Andy Warhol’s Empire (1964) keeps the camera fixed and lets a single reel run uncut, and Michael Snow’s Wavelength (1967) spends 45 minutes zooming in on a room. Tate says the term expanded cinema was coined in the mid-1960s by Stan VanDerBeek; such work was shown not in cinemas but in galleries, warehouses and the open air, on several screens at once. Nipponica notes that from the late 1990s, video works shown by projector grew sharply in contemporary art.

Give it a few minutes before looking for a story; notice what the film repeats, holds or cuts off, and what it asks of your eyes and ears.