Maya Deren (1917-1961)was one of the most important American experimental filmmaker and promoters of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. She was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer and photographer. She believed that the function of film is like most art forms to create an experience. She found that Hollywood has been a major obstacle to the definition and development of motion pictures as a creative fine-art form.” She opposited to the Hollywood film industry’s standards and practices. Therefore, she tried to make film in abstration, surrealism and symbolisim as the experimental film that differed from other mainsteam cinema. She combined her interests in dance, voodoo and subjective psychology in a series of surreal, perceptual, black and white short films with her advantage of camera techniques.
She had been making her films as the poetic psychodrama film. Her representative work is "Meshes of the Afternoon". Thomas Schatz points to Meshes as the best known experimental film of the decade. He thought that the poetic psychodrama “emphasized a dreamlike quality, tackled questions of sexual identity, featured taboo or shocking images, and used editing to liberate spatio-temporal logic from the conventions of Hollywood realism.”
She was mostly interested in temporal and spatial experimentation. The rhythm of the sound,
movement and editing are the main elements in all her films. In 1953 Deren presented a paper entitled “Poetry and the Film” which argued that film works on two axes: the horizontal, including narrative, character and action, and the vertical, characterized by the more ephemeral elements of mood, tone and rhythm. In the "Meshes of the Afternoon, we always see the shifing of times and spaces with varied and diverse rhythm.
She also made many efforts on mise-en scene like multiple exposures, jump cutting, superimposition, slow-motion, etc. For example, she created continued motion through discontinued space, while abandoning the established notions of physical space and time, with the ability to turn her vision into a stream of consciousness.In the film of "A Study in Choreography for the Cinema" the compositions and varying speeds of movement within the frame inform and interact with Deren's meticulous edits and varying film speeds and motions to create a dance that Deren said could only exist on film. Excited by the way the dynamic of movement is greater than anything else within the film, Maya established a completely new sense of the word "geography" as the movement of the dancer transcends and manipulates the ideas of both time and space.
Her films are not only a narration or a story, they are also including symbolic meanings and full if meterphors and implications. The repetition and variation of timelines and spaces are the most special features in her experimental films. her films are very like written poems that has repeated sentences with abtrasted and symbolic meanings for exploring some philosophic issues.
Sources and References:
Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Deren#Cinema
Sense of cinema:
http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/deren-2/
Menggang
http://www.menggang.com/movie/experiment/usa/mayaderen/mayaderen.html
Stan Brakhage
Stan Brakhage was an American non-narrative filmmaker who is considered to be one of the most important figures in 20th-century experimental cinema. He explored a variety of formats, approaches and techniques that included handheld camerawork, fast cutting, in camera editing, scratching on film, collage film, the use of multiple exposures, etc.
"He was a painter or poet in cinema,not a novelist like everybody else." said P. Adams Sitney, a film historian at Princeton University. Brakhage had very much interest in making films by painting directly on culluloid, he had even experimented with softening the emulsion on pieces of celluloid and scratching it with his fingernail. Therefore, he made the hand-painted film named "The Dante Quarta".It took six years to produce. This is a silent film that created by painting images directly onto the film, the paint was applied very thickly that is up to half an inch thick.Besides, Brakhagewas pretty much interested in mythology which inspired by music, poetry, and visual phenomena, Brakhage sought to reveal the universal in the particular, exploring themes of birth, mortality, sexuality, and innocence. He preferred to think of his films as metaphorical, abstract and highly subjective, as a kind of poetic film.
He also interested in visual explorations of landscape and the nature of light. He took light as his great subject. He said:
"Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, and eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the ‘beginning was the word."
Light influences what we see. Brakhage tried to show us the world without the man-made description based on language throught images of film. Hence, he made films with no narrative, which were often not representational and at times even dispensed with photography altogether. A narrative film creates an arc of expectation that sets up conflicts and tensions the viewer expects to have resolved or at least, lead to some form of conclusion. He organized his films around unpredictable changes in composition, subject-matter, and rhythm: each small pattern that a film sets up is violated just at the moment when you think you have finally apprehended it.
Brakhage's films were also made without sound because he felt thay sound might spoil the intensity of the visual experience.
"I now no longer photograph, but rather paint upon clear strips of film – essentially freeing myself from the dilemmas of re-presentation. I aspire to a visual music, a ‘music’ for the eyes (as my films are entirely without sound-tracks these days). Just as a composer can be said to work primarily with ‘musical ideas,’ I can be said to work with the ideas intrinsic to film, which is the only medium capable of making paradigmatic ‘closure’ apropos Primal Sight. A composer most usually creates parallels to the surroundings of the inner ear–the primary thoughts of sounds. I, similarly, now work with the electric synapses of thought to achieve overall cathexis paradigms separate from but ‘at one’ with the inner lights, the Light, at source, of being human. "
Sources and References:
Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/By_Brakhage
Fred camper:
http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/Brakhage4.html
Senses of cinema:
http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/brakhage/
The New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/12/obituaries/12BRAK.html
Michael Snow
Michael Snow (born December 10, 1929) is a Canadian artist and experimental filmmaker who is working in painting, sculpture, video, films, photography, holography, drawing, books and music.
Michael Snow is a structuralist filmmaker. His work takes as its main subject matter the physical aspects of film: camera, light, projection, celluloid. His experiential works require the viewer's active collaboration — repetitive, often abstract imagery and dissonant sound reconfigure and test the elements of perception. "The two basic components that one has to work with in making cinema are duration and light. This, to me, is essential. I try to work with things that are specific to the medium so that the spectator has an experience that can only come from that particular means."
Take Wavelength as an example: Wavelength's intermittent forward zoom have been taken at slightly altered camera positions in a loft. Briefly men and women enter and exit the frame, triggering the pretense of a narrative. But in reality, the viewer becomes increasingly absorbed in the purpose of the zoom and where it's heading. It ends on a photograph of the sea that has been placed flat on a wall between two windows. On the soundtrack we hear, among other things, a sine wave. The sound begins as a low buzzing, increasing in volume until the wave reaches its highest note of 1,200 cycles per second, the aural equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. Textural changes also occur, including radical and subtle color shifts, black-and-white shots, visible splices, and turns from day to night.
His best known work:Wavelength(1966).
Sources and References:
Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Snow
Art and Popular Culture
http://www.artandpopularculture.com/Michael_Snow
Brightlightsfilm.com(Cleo Cacoulidis)
http://brightlightsfilm.com/44/mikesnow.php
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