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Vanja Obad
HOW TO UNDERSTAND EXPERIMENTAL FILM (A cognitive approach)?1
Summary:
Very often experimental film puts our standard communicational
expectations to test (it suffices
to remember Stan Brakhages visions, Mihovil Pansinis
coincidences or the abstract dance of
shapes and colours of Len Lye) and explores perceptional
potentials of a viewer who has to cope
with the break from standard relations. However, this does not
mean that our understanding of
experimental film is different from our understanding of any
other type of film or other genres.
The cognitive approach understands that everything must be based
on our cognitive capacities. In
the cognitive film theory the basis is the perception of the
film so, on the example of experimental
film, I will try to define some cognitive problems which are
dealt with by way of specific
standardized film procedures. I will also try and clarify the
specific perceptive purpose to be
achieved by way of these procedures. As an example, I will use
the films by Ivan Martinac
(Rondo, 1962), fixation films from 1960s (term coined by Duan
Stojanovi) such as Tomislav
Gotovac The Straight Line (1964), structural film (Larry
Gottheims Four Shadows, 1978) and
materialistic films (Vladimir Peteks Encounters, 1963; Peter
Gidals Clouds, 1969).
1. Introduction
There is an example given by David Bordwell on his internet
blog
(http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=2004), which I will borrow
from him in order to
illustrate what psychologists call the primacy effect - the
likelihood that the first items
of information have a greater influence on the impressions we
form: Here is the example:
8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = ?
1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 x 6 x 7 x 8 = ?
What happens when we ask for a quick, rough estimate of the
result, the product of the
sequences, without calculating. People given the first sequence
tend to give bigger
estimates than those given by people who see the second
sequence, and it is the first
number that is to blame for this. Although the product of the
sequence is exactly the
1 The following paper was originally published in the Croatian
Film Chronicles, 15, 60 (Winter, 2009): 34-48.; summary:
http://www.hfs.hr/hfs/ljetopis_clanak_detail_e.asp?sif=32638
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same, the order in which we have received the information
greatly influences the
impressions we create.
There is also an experimental film by the Canadian Michael Snow,
not his best known
Wavelength from 1976, but a film he made six years later, called
So Is This (1982). The
film consists entirely of words, appearing in succession on a
black screen, making up
sentences, while Snow, amongst other things, explicitly comments
(by means of word-
shots) on what is coming up in the film, thus taking control of
the natural process of
film viewing.
What is Snow doing? I will try and visually present a succession
of ten shots: 1. The 2.
rest 3. of 4. this 5. film 6. will 7. look 8. just 9. like 10.
this.
The rest of this film will look just like this. After the first
few sentences, Snow directly
informs the viewer that the film will consist of words that fill
follow each other on the
screen according to the same principle. Besides thanking people
who helped make the
film (also by means of words shots) and the remark that a word
film such as this is
often unsatisfying for those who dislike to read over other
peoples shoulders, Snow will
soon play with the viewers predictions arising from the
preceding sentences. We read
that this film will be about 2 hours long. Does that seem like a
frightening prospect?
Well, look at it this way: how do you know this isnt lying?. In
this way, Snow
problematizes the situation with regard to the hypotheses formed
earlier on and confronts
viewers with their own responsibility in watching this film, as
well as films in general.
It is enough to recall the often cited example from Alfred
Hitchcocks Strangers on a
Train (1951) or any other example of a film that managed to
deceive us by previously
placing false leads: after Guy Haines frightened wife screams in
the tunnel of love, our
assumption that she was murdered by Bruno Anthony (Robert
Walker) is in fact based on
the information gleaned from previous shots (or story). Still,
things will not be quite that
simple, the viewer sighs with relief although he has been
deceived (the unfortunate Mrs
Haines will not meet her end until the following shot).
The films of Alfred Hitchcock and those of Michael Snow are not,
of course, of the same
kind. According to a conditional classification, Hitchcocks film
would belong to the
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crime film genre and Snows would be classified as a structural
experimental film, but
both rely on activating the viewers existing cognitive
capacities (Turkovi, 1999: 50),
both make use of the fact that it is from the relationship of
the earlier material with the
later details that the viewer infers his most logical
explanations (Carroll, 2001: 4). 2
I will now return to my initial question how do we understand
experimental film? and
try to deal with it. Experimental film often tests our standard
communicational
expectations (it suffices to recall Brakhages visions, Pansinis
coincidences or Len
Lyes abstract dance of shapes and colours) and explores the
perceptional potential that
opens up when viewers must cope with a disruption of the
standard relationship
(Turkovi, 1999: 52). This, however, certainly does not mean that
understanding
experimental film differs from understanding any other kind of
film (romantic comedies,
horror films, TV soap operas or the Die Hard series).
The cognitivist approach implies that everything must be based
on our cognitive
capacities, the perception of the film is the starting point,
so, using the example of
experimental film I will attempt to ascertain the cognitive
problems that are resolved by
means of certain standardized film procedures and will try to
clarify the specific
perceptual purpose these procedures seek to achieve (Turkovi,
1999: 55).
2. An Example of Poetic Discourse (Ivan Martinac)
To begin with, I will take the example of the poetic
experimental film by Ivan Martinac
Rondo (1962), because it seems it can be sufficiently and easily
grasped for presenting
poetic discourse (we can also call to mind music videos or
emotionally heightened scenes
such as those from the film Die Hard). The young men and women
we encounter in this
film, although connected in terms of space, are preoccupied with
themselves, immersed
2 Generally speaking, the example I have chosen using the
primacy effect need not apply primarily to conclusions based on
editing connections, as dealt with in detail by Carroll (2001) in
his text Toward a Theory of Film Editing, but can, like in social
situations, refer to the spectators forming impressions
(hypotheses) of the characters, based on the information first
received, later confirmed as correct or incorrect. Bordwell, for
instance, takes the characterization of Marty McFly (Michael J.
Fox) based on the opening scene of Back to the Future (1985)
(http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/?p=2004).
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in their own story, their own world playing the piano, drawing,
staring through the
window and the like and this is basically all that happens in
the film.
I will ilustrate a few of the films opening shots (linked by
Beethovens music off-screen).
Figure 1. Rondo (1962) by Ivan Martinac
I will stop here to avoid exaggerating after all, the example
was chosen for being simple
and typical, and also because its perceptual purpose is familiar
from experience. I should
nevertheless point out that the static shots in close-up (medium
close-up) are repeated (10,
11, 12, 13, 14, 15), as are also the two shots of a woman
playing the piano (16, 17). The
mentioned sequence of shots (10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15) is repeated
one more time, as is shot
7, with our attention in the new round being directed toward the
details (e.g. a close-up of
the girls nails, the drawing that reveals that the young man is
not drawing the girl or
perhaps sees in her a monstrous being, the girls fingers tapping
the book etc).
The shots are recognizably linked in terms of setting we find
the young men and
women in the same environment - although this is something that
poetic films often avoid
by means of discontinuity editing (Turkovi, 2006: 17) for
example, a shot sequence
from Fernand Lgers classic film Ballet Mecanique, (1924), or the
way Bruce Conner
plays with different film reels. Just as in the mentioned films,
here we are also dealing
with non-narrative discourse.
If we were to ask a volunteer to edit the sequence of shots in
Rondo and mix it up, to
begin, for example, with the medium long shot (a more
encompassing view) because, it
seems that according to an established and cognitively grounded
filmic consideration,
when faced with a new space we first take an overall view
(Turkovi, 2004: 10) we
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would find ourselves in the living room, see the young men and
women and only then
would we direct our attention to the details, gradually
constructing the film (e.g.
medium close-up of a young man drawing, a girl with a book on
her knees, piano keys
etc). This would follow the usual logic of observing events in a
setting and this kind of
sequence, the most favourable in descriptive terms, would
evidently provide us with more
information value, but the emotional (rhetorical) value, the one
the film relies on,
would probably be weakened.
Here, certain regularities are disrupted: we are not immediately
acquainted with the
setting; in other words, there is no encompassing view (long
shot/medium long shot) that
would create the most favourable conditions for us to observe
the situation in the scene
(the standardised procedure of the establishing shot)3, but
rather we are quickly faced
with the heroes, and this is done only with obtrusive shots such
as close-up and
medium close-up. Static shots of faces in close-up (medium
close-up) recur, while their
pensive and vacant expressions do not change significantly. To
be precise, nothing
really changes until the end of the film one of the heroes
shifts from one armchair to
another, another comes closer and lifts the telephone receiver
and that is about all the
potential action there is.4
We could say that the film also has descriptive elements5,
although description is far from
the main goals of its discourse. The purpose of the mentioned
stylization procedures is to
show the specific atmosphere of an emotional state and mood, a
feeling of immobility,
aimlessness, perhaps also resignation on part of the heroes, the
impossibility of
communication6. What dominates the content are characters
dedicated to their own story
3 Of course, this procedure with a detail shot of the setting at
the beginning of the scene is not unusual and often appears in
narrative film, but is considered a stylistic feature because it
always lends special emphasis to the scene (cf. Turkovi, 2000:
130). 4 The film in fact ends in the moment when potential
narration occurs: the young man with the dark glasses goes to the
telephone, lifts the receiver and dials a number. Something that
may signal the beginning of a story for instance, someone answers
the phone, tells him that they are fed up with existentialist films
and throws them out of the flat is not developed any further, the
film ends there. 5 The descriptive discourse used, for example, in
poetic documentaries is very close to poetic experimental films.
Nevertheless, the difference should be sought precisely in the
accentuated disruption of the descriptive function it is up to the
viewer to discover sufficient indicators of a different fundamental
purpose (goal) of the discourse (cf. Turkovi 2004: 3-12). 6
Although everything in Rondo takes place in the same space, poetic
films often take sequences of shots that do not share the same
setting, as for example in Fernand Lger's classic film Ballet
Mecanique (1924). In this film, however, the viewer takes movement
as the key focal point, while Carroll speaks of a shift
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immersed in their own thoughts playing the piano, doing their
nails, staring out the
window, drawing a portrait etc. They do not communicate with
each other using words,
nor do they try to establish communication. They are connected
by the shared space and a
similar absence, and, of course, by the music off-screen.
One of Martinacs heroes (from shot no. 3) wears dark glasses,
probably sunglasses,
and is standing by the window, even though in the evenings it is
almost impossible to see
anything through the window with such glasses. This would
suggest a certain
absentmindedness. What he is (or may be) watching or whether he
sees anything at all is
insignificant. The situation is similar with the others. For
example, the young woman
with glasses (shot no. 15) is staring wistfully into space, and
her gaze is never returned
with a counter-shot. It seems she is looking at nothing in
particular. This evidently
suggests that the important things are happening in her head (or
there is actually
nothing happening at all). The facial expressions do not change
much, they are obviously
mere mediators between the author and what is being shown and
they suggest the
authors understanding.
A face in close-up always enables the viewer to become close and
intimate with the
people he is watching, that is, to form a hypothesis about their
thoughts and feelings
(Persson, 2002: 64). The viewer of Rondo detects emotional
states, infers a depressing
mood (an existential crisis, resignation, boredom), and all this
is heightened, and
confirmed, by the other mentioned stylistic means - cyclical
repetition of identical shots,
marginalisation of eventivity etc. In explaining close-ups,
Persson uses a pattern of the
spectator's behaviour familiar in social psychology as personal
space behaviour (Persson,
2002: 63). Although the function of a close-up depends on the
context for example,
threatening and frightening when we are assaulted by the sudden
close up of a living
corpse in Evil Dead (1981) its function here is clear in the
given context and the other
expressive means that create a unique impression (mood). It
enables the viewer to
from the narrative to the sensuous basis (Carroll, 2001: 7).
Compilation films, made up of different strips, such as the
well-known example of Bruce Conner's A Movie (1958), in which there
are no firm connections within the scenes, require a similar kind
of strategy for understanding. In this sense, they all emphatically
stress the author's specific (non-standard) choice.
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enter the character's personal space and, as in real life,
entering the zone of intimate
distance implies greater intimacy (Persson, 2002: 67)7 and
allows better understanding.
If the activity of feature film protagonists is grounded in
clear goal-orientation, activated
by a problem (cf. Bordwell in Smith, 2002: 30), here, the
immobility of the heroes is
motivated by the atmosphere, the state that is being depicted,
and no problems have been
placed before them. The hypotheses on the basic mood, formed by
analyzing the
stylistic procedures, can be experienced suggestively by the
viewer as he follows the
content of the scenes, especially the close-ups (medium
close-ups) of the faces of the
young men and women.8 Style and content obviously serve to
depict the atmosphere.
3. Fixation Films
Fixation films emerged in the 1960ies in Croatia as a
reductionist, minimalist current of
experimental film (as an anticipation but also a variant of the
international currents of
structuralist cinema). They typically involved long static
filming of mostly static scenes
or the constant use of a single visual procedure.
Film theorist Duan Stojanovi, who noticed this kind of presence
in the films of the
Zagreb experimentalists, gave them the name fixation films
(Stojanovi, in Pansini,
1987: 26, Turkovi, 2004: 44). According to Stojanovi, fixation
films use dynamic
means because a film is essentially a moving picture to suggest
something static,
while the action dwells on a seemingly insignificant moment in
life (Stojanovi, in
Pansini, 1987: 27). Obviously, the foundation of such films is
their pronounced
7 If we wanted a clearer illustration of the meaning and the
perceptual effects of different types of shots in relation to
everyday behaviour in personal space, we need only to look to
television programmes that establish distance very precisely. We
could, perhaps, imagine a TV anchor, such as a news presenter, who
would speak to us about daily issues in close-up. The viewer would
probably find such unnecessary intimacy unacceptable, and may even
experience it as truly hostile. When he is in medium close-up, the
distance is sufficient but he is also close enough, and this, after
all, is what it is like with people in everyday real life
communication. Therefore, here we are not dealing with an arbitrary
convention of television programmes the distance has a
psychological, cognitive grounding (cf. Persson, 2002), so that its
perceptual purpose may be used this way. 8 Smith states that it is
difficult to create brief, strong emotions, so film structures
attempt to create the conditions for the experience of emotions
(Smith, 2002: 35). Narrative film is stronger in this because it
has a higher level of contextual preparedness, while in examples
like this the viewer is alone, cues are missing - for example, why
are the people sad and immobile so that it is difficult to achieve
emotions and it is rather moods that are created.
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conceptual aspect most of them were in fact films with an
initial inventive concept and
did not aim toward a fully completed work (Turkovi, 2007: 8). In
addition, they were
also somewhat inclined toward a critique of subjective and
spontaneous expression.
I will take a well-known example, an experimental film by
Tomislav Gotovac Pravac
(Stevens-Duke) [The Straight Line], part of a 1964 trilogy,
together with Krunica
(Jutkevitch-Count) [Circle] and Plavi jaha (Godard-Art) [Blue
Rider], to try and
elucidate viewer strategies in understanding and perceiving the
film.
In Pravac, a camera is fixed beside a tram driver and there is
uninterrupted movement
forward (one rail is centred through the trams front window).
The viewer unmistakably
notices this procedure.9 Even though the camera is fixed (it is
placed in a certain position),
the frame of the film always selectively singles out a certain
scene, giving it preference
over other, mostly endless, possibilities; second, the choice of
scene as, in fact, is the
case in all the examples we have discussed is not motivated by
any internal narrative
logic of the film and as the authors choice it gains additional
significance, becomes an
end to itself as we can also discern from the temporal flow,
that is, the uninterrupted
continuity of the ride.
Clearly, these two components significantly alter our
relationship to the recorded scene.
Narrative, cause-effect logic has no bearing here and any
practical side of the
viewers/passengers journey is eliminated we are not rushing to
work or to any other
chosen destination, so that this shot, arranged by the author,
requires the viewer to take
a different stance, it requires us to discover its special
significance. Within the
experimentalist tradition, but often also that of modernist
narrative cinema, this kind of
poetics of seemingly insignificant detail is based on the belief
that if we direct our
attention to the marginal details of life, we may discover
extraordinary nuances.
(Turkovi, 2003: 12).
The author chooses (arranges) the shot (that often carries
personal significance), and it is
up to the viewer to develop a sensitivity to that which is
presented, a sensitivity to
9 The planned continuity was disrupted only by the strip winding
mechanism which had time limitations so that the author inserted
subtitles into the breaks.
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insignificant things and to discover extraordinary qualities
that she often does not
notice in everyday life, whereas here they demand attention (cf.
Bordwell Thompson,
150, Turkovi on one shot films, 2004: 36). The viewer, of
course, need not be aware of
all the circumstances of the making of Pravac, his attention is
automatically directed at
the movements of the pedestrians, the changes in setting as the
tram drives through
different areas of the city and everything new that he sees and
watches in the shot.
What we are dealing with here is a concept, chosen in advance
and devised in order to
methodically explore chance. Naturally, films inclined toward
experimenting with chance
rely on uncertainty and the unpredictability of the outcome
(Turkovi, 2003: 12), which
brings them onto slippery ground: inventively devised concepts
often do not have a
successful perceptual application.
In the same year (1963) Mihovil Pansini made his film experiment
Scusa Signorina in
which he explores the concept of chance in a far more radical
manner, but one, we might
also say, that also offers somewhat less for the
viewer/perception. Just as in Pravac,
Pansini's use of chance was thoroughly planned: it is a
combination of a procedure
determined in advance a running camera mounted onto the author's
back and chance
the unpredictability of what will happen, of what will be
filmed. The running camera was
only conditionally left to arbitrariness the author did not see
what it was filming, but he
chose the direction he would move in and later he edited the
material and added the
sounds of the tapping of people's steps to it. Experiments with
chance (or
automatism), a favourite of the avant-gardes from their very
beginnings, obviously
stem from a romantic view of unpredictable factors that are
often ascribed unusual
value (chance is preferred over strict planning).10
10 Of course, the idea of conceptual art lies partly in
dematerialising the object of artistic creation. The ideal content
that precedes the work or is contained within it is more important
than the product itself, the actual work. (cf. uvakovi, 2005:
309-312). An entire school of experimental film randomly put
together discarded film strips (waste becomes material) just as the
surrealists did with the words they drew out of a hat. Still,
earlier on I mentioned Bruce Conner who organised the material he
found not randomly but with the intention of providing a framework
for understanding a new whole. Conner puts together different film
strips but within the film we discover certain relational events
(shot, counter-shot) while on the global level he is dealing with a
basic theme (e.g. disasters, dangers, spectacles). Of course,
connecting shots in this way does not necessarily have to be
rounded off with a certain thematic meaning connecting the film
unexpected meanings could be generated, perceptually interesting
connections may be discovered, often comically intoned as it is.
The delight the surrealists found in randomly drawing words from a
hat was in fact the result of suddenly being able to understand a
combination.
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Fixation films, especially real-time ones, that rely on the time
that feature films as a rule
condense, such as Warhole's 1960ies films like Sleep (1963) or
Empire (1964), can have
a problem if they do not offer all that much perceptually (but
can also have conceptual
justification).11 It is enough to go to the cinema and watch
them in their entirety. It is in
this sense that experimental films that make use of pre-existing
material actually explore
and test different possibilities that are often tiresome for the
viewer but that often result
in interesting perceptual discoveries. The process of attention
consists in sensitising us
to certain phenomena in our perceptual environment, while
desensitising us to others or
even suppressing them entirely (Turkovi, 1994: 232). But because
the intensity of our
attention is short-lived and exhaustible (Turkovi, 1994: 232),
this way of selectively
singling out certain scenes (Pravac, Dvorite, Empire, etc) makes
these films ill-suited
for practical, viewing purposes after the initial orienting
reflex we may well soon
yawn and leave the cinema. Because their structure is
predetermined, with the
significance they aim at located within a frame, films focused
on a single shot require
of the viewer a patient, special sensitivity. For such
conceptual fixations, through
selection and the knowledge that there is also something outside
the frame, detail is
obviously significant, so that in fixation films such shots
often acquire a symbolic or
metaphoric meaning.12
Naturally, it is the characteristics of that which is being
viewed that will determine the
amount of attention the viewer will give them whether he will
get up and leave the
cinema, or remain interested or awed by the scene. It is,
however, most often changes
rather than something static that ties our attention to a shot.
This is also illustrated by
Pravac, and, for example, by a shot/scene from Tomislav Gotovacs
experimental film
Prijepodne jednog fauna [The Morning of a Faun] (1963). The
shot/scene filmed in long
shot, from a distance, from the window opposite it, shows the
movements of patients
11 For example, the film by Milan Bukovac and Milan Buni, Pore
Trg F. Supila oko 19 sati [Pore F. Supilo Square around 19:00
hours] (2003), which used a fixed camera to film a square in an old
town on the coast for three hours with mostly a minimum of human
activity was not included into the competitive programme of the
One-Take Film Festival in 2003. Evidently, the fact that a
procedure is good in principle does not always mean that its
concrete application will be effective (Turkovi, 2004: 37). 12 For
example Geography (1989), a film by Breda Beban and Hrvoje Horvati,
is made up of four scenes (a puddle into which raindrops are
falling, a man's face, a fish's head and granite blocks). Although
they are mutually connected by a certain state, each image induces
and requires a different perceptual stance (a narrative film, for
instance, instantly occupies us with a problem).
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on a balcony of Vinogradska Hospital, accompanied by the music
of Glenn Miller. Their
awkward movements, tapping with sticks, riding around on beds
with wheels, juxtaposed
with the music, remind the viewer of the experience of the very
first film gags and the
precursors of comedy, such as Louis Lumire's Arroseur Arros
(1896 or 1897).
4. Structural Film and Problem Solving
One of the tendencies of the American experimental (avant-garde)
film of the late
1960ies, to which experimental film historian and theorist Adams
P. Sitney gave the
name structural film after noticing similar tendencies in the
work of authors such as
Michael Snow, Hollis Frampton, George Landow (or Owen Land),
Paul Sharits and
others (Sitney, 2002: 347- 370) and for which he was later often
criticised especially by
the competing British school of structuralism was also present
to an extent in the
Croatian films I mentioned earlier.
The name structural film clearly underscores the importance of
structure. The authors of
such films play with structure and different organizational
combinations, aiming at
certain but also eliciting perceptually different outcomes. One
of the viewers tasks will
be to unravel the basic structure of the work because it is
these films that most directly
and most clearly call forth the viewers cognitive processes in
discerning the structure of
the work.
Let us take a look at an example cited by James Peterson
precisely because of its
schematic simplicity the film Four Shadows (1978) by Larry
Gottheim, otherwise
known for his so-called observational, real-time films. Four
Shadows (1978) uses what is
known as a permutational schema (Peterson, 1994: 103-104). In
simple terms, it consists
of four four-minute sets of images each representing a season,
and in addition to this
there are also four-minute passages of recorded sound. Each set
of images is repeated
four times so that every combination of sound passage and image
set is included once. As
with puzzles, there is no single obvious place to begin nor is
there an order that would
have to be followed in presenting (or putting together) the
different combinations. The
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appropriate ending, however, becomes self-evident after we
become aware of the system:
the film ends when all the combinations have been exhausted
(Peterson, 1994: 104).
Film viewers always fill in the gaps by activating innate
capacities (capacities that
viewers more or less use daily) and films, almost as a rule,
provide the instructions on
how to predict the organisation of their elements. Bordwell and
Thompson (Film Art: An
Introduction, 2004: 50-52) use combinations of words to
illustrate the form of narrative
film. For example, if the letter A is the first element of the
system we might assume that
the sequence (series) continues in alphabetical order with the
letter B. The hypothesis we
have formed regarding the imagined sequence can be further
tested for the next letter, so
that the question: What comes next? May be answered with C.
However, the system
could always meander away in another direction as in the earlier
example of Michael
Snow's film, and surprise us with a new combination, for
instance ABA, just as Alfred
Hitchcock, regardless of the cues, may spare his victim. Viewers
of structural films often
find themselves in the position of people solving intelligence
tests seeking to establish the
differences in cognitive functioning between individuals, for
instance questions of the
complete the sequence type:
A, D, G, J, ?
Experimental structural films mostly provide sufficient
information to serve as
orientation during viewing. Films with a complex organization,
such as Hollis Frampton's
Zorn's Lemma (1970) that also play with the alphabet as well as
structures that are
simple for the viewer such as Gottheim's films, function
according to their own internal,
strictly formal logic which the viewer gradually discerns.
Frampton, for example,
borrows his formal system from set theory, but the viewer need
not have an A in
mathematics or be familiar with set theory to be able to discern
that the film produces its
own patterns and rules of exchange which the audience infers not
only in order to
organise the numerous shots but also to predict the end of the
sequence (Carroll, 2001:
11). . Still, in some films, such as those of Austrians Kurt
Kren and Peter Kubelka,
organised according to serial rules, the viewer generally cannot
make out the composition
while seated in the cinema at a normal screening. Kren organises
the internal invisible
structure of frames according to strict mathematical rules, so
that the length of a frame is
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determined by the sum of the two preceding frames 1, 2, 3, 5, 8,
13, 21, 34 (Tscherkassky,
2008: 25). And while Kren's early films sought, in the
environment of Viennese
Actionism, to be subversive, both politically and with regard to
bourgeois values (e.g.
9/64 O Tannenbaum showing dirty and decorated naked bodies under
a Christmas tree),
Kubelka's metric film, named after the Viennese Actionist Arnulf
Reiner (1960) is not
mimetic but is made up of serially organised white and black
frames and evidently
inspired by similar pioneering innovations in Arnold Schnberg's
atonal music.13
However, structural films, especially the American ones, usually
supply sufficient cues to
help us discern the organisation just by watching, and to
recognise this we do not need to
go to Peter Kubelka's lectures but only use the skills we
normally use in our everyday life.
These can be schematically simple works like Gottheim's or
intricate combinations like
Zorns lemma. What both of these have in common, however, is that
they assume that the
viewer forms expectations: the viewer surmises the remaining
part precisely because he
has registered regularity in the permutation. However, as I have
said already, too much
simplification often means that the film is ineffectual in terms
of perception. If the
outcome is self-evident, the work usually cannot hold the
viewers attention or arouse
deeper interest (just as something too demanding can also be
unappealing). Peterson
states that in order to hold the viewers interest the film must
rely on a more frequent
generation of hypotheses that the viewer can test in the film
(Peterson, 1994: 107)14, but
for the authors of such films it is conceptual design that comes
first.
In narrative editing, the viewer fills in the gaps in the same
way. For instance, in the film
Jerry Maguire (1996), as Dorothy Boyd (Rene Zellweger) leaves
the office with Jerry
(Tom Cruise) and his fish, we conclude that she is obviously
fond of him (there will be a
love story). Or we could take Carroll's well-known example
(2001:3-4): a rifle fires,
followed by a close-up of a woman screaming and a shot of a man
on the ground in the
13 Kubelka exhibited film strips on a wall as an installation
and at his lecture-screenings he would ask the audience to develop
a print so that they may see the physical object that produced the
screening (Tscherkassky, 2008: 48). 14 Interpretations of
experimental film often draw correlations with other artistic
products of modernism. Structural films are often interpreted by
being placed into a wider artistic context as the film equivalent
of the minimalist current in art, whose main features were
precisely simplicity, geometrical forms, flat, uniformly coloured
surfaces, clean and solid colours etc). However the development of
this minimalist method is not a modernist novelty for example, it
was touched upon by Gombrich in his study of decorative art
(Peterson, 1994: 97).
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14
context of a murder mystery in which the preceding scenes
contain cues, that is, point to
an existing threat, and we interpret the shot chain as a murder
scene. It is such
assumptions about a resolution (hypotheses) that make deception
possible for example,
in the case of Hitchcock, it could be the amusement park scene
because in the process
of reasoning, we make assumptions, based on experience, about
the most probable (most
logical) outcomes.15
In order for the viewer to understand the film, he must be able
to incorporate the
presented information into a coherent framework together with
the information he has
previously been given in the film. Nol Carroll speaks of
engaging the viewer's inductive
capacities (Carroll, 2001: 3), that is, drawing conclusions
based on observing a number of
individual cases (which is what Michael Snow plays with in the
already mentioned
example of the film So Is This).
Experimental structural and narrative films share a basic common
trait - formal
(discipline) strictness, but they result in entirely different
perceptual outcomes. Just as
there are poems with a strictly defined form (e.g. the sonnet)
requiring that established
rules be respected in constructing the verses and stanzas or the
arrangement of rhyme, so
there are also rules for constructing a story (without these
rules there could be no
screenwriting handbooks such as Lew Hunters or Robert McKees).
Still, there is a
fundamental difference between them: structural films seek to
make the organisation
something that is authentically the author's (the authors have
taken it upon themselves to
come up with new organisational principles), while the
organisational structure of a
feature/narrative film is already given in advance (we might say
it is super-authorial), it
conforms to the established rules of the game, but this kind of
scheme is often more
complex and demanding than leaving the structure to one's own,
often unruly (poetic)
authorial perception.
15 As we saw with Alfred Hitchcock, the method of testing
hypotheses is at its most obvious in murder mystery films and
novels: the viewer/reader solves the murder mystery based on the
cues provided. The solutions he finds are, of course, not a
coincidence - we test them thanks to the information we have been
given. The viewer will probably be more inclined to find the
solution in a place where checking is simple although his film
experience may also teach him the following: wait a while with your
conclusions the most suspicious ones are generally not the
murderers. Another convention then says: the murderer is the one
that you least suspect (the one the director is least indicating),
which can also deceive.
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15
An experiment with the narrative organisation of a film such as
Nolans Memento (2000)
or Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994) which actually has some
schematic structuring
reveals the firm system of narrative film, so that the viewer is
more or less able to
organise into a narrative whole seemingly unconnected and
chronologically mixed-up
sequences (the last scene in Pulp Fiction, for instance, comes
well before what we would
call the ending). Just as in the first example of Four Shadows,
in narrative film, what the
viewer most often does is predict (recognise) the end, which
resembles what happens
with film inserts, sudden flashbacks within the narration, which
the viewer, sooner or
later, places in their proper chronological place.
5. Materialist Films
The films I have been discussing deal, amongst other things,
with certain specific traits of
films that are not typical for the so-called standard, dominant
cinema. Vladimir Petek,
who was in these parts a leading proponent of the so-called
materialist orientation films
that greatly emphasize the material aspect of film, for example,
and explore the
perceptual possibilities generated by physical interventions on
the film strip (Turkovi,
2007: 5) also anticipated the discussions about film during the
times when there was a
shortage of film equipment and material: he began making films
from old, discarded film
strips. Film procedures like this emphatically thematised the
material aspect and
experimented with the results of procedures that once would have
surely had them thrown
out of any serious film studio for good: scratching the emulsion
layer, scribbling and
painting on the film strip, creating sound manually, exposing
the strip to heat (as well as
publically burning it), and then trying to bring it back to life
by projecting it.
For now I will mention Petek's film Sretanje [Encounters]
(1963), and Clouds, a film by
Peter Gidal who coined the term structural/materialist film. In
the latter, there is no direct
intervention into the material but the film does thematise and
confront the viewer with a
paradoxical duality: we see two-dimensional objects as
three-dimensional. In this nine-
minute film from 1969, we see the sky, while in the bottom left
corner an airplane
occasionally protrudes slightly, so the viewer rightly asks:
what is moving - the camera,
the airplane, the clouds? (Curtis, 2007: 207). It is, of course,
true that when viewing any
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16
recorded film our general capacity for recognising people and
settings enables us to
detect scenes from everyday life, but we can also feel empathy,
be touched or cry at the
end of a film (cf. Turkovi, 1999: 50), and filmmakers obviously
count on this. However,
the experience of a film is definitely not the same thing as our
living experience and it
is precisely this fact that is the starting point for
materialist authors. With films, standard
cognitive reactions are induced in very non-standard conditions
of stimulation and
consequently film has opened up the possibilities for
specialised selection for
investigating and elaborating on particular cognitive potential
and reactions. Each
production move in a film that has some reception (perceptual)
effects reveals the
possibility of eliciting those very perceptual effects.
Historically speaking, this is part of the modernist story
according to which a work must
take into account the material and structure of its medium, the
most influential
formulation being that of the critic Clement Greenberg
(Bordwell, 2005: 113). Generally
speaking, texts on experimental film also often draw on
modernist views in the world of
visual arts (e.g. parallels are often drawn between the works of
Stan Brakhage and
abstract expressionism). Greenberg, who wrote that the artist
deliberately emphasizes
the illusoriness of the illusions which he pretends to create,
believed that the work of art
(a painting) should create a fruitful tension between illusion
and materiality,
representation and a critique of representation (Bordwell, 2005:
114) even though this
soon became kind of boring to proponents of pop-art who replaced
the dominant
fashion with alternating feelings of love and hate toward
abstract expressionism (e.g.
Lichtenstein's series Brushstrokes where the artist elaborates,
in minute detail, variations
of brushstrokes that abstract expressionism would complete in
one energetic stroke, in
Lucie-Smith, 2003: 260).
We might see and interpret the entire discipline of experimental
or avant-garde films as
an exploration of the perceptual potential that opens up when we
have to deal with
disruptions of the assumptions of our standard relationship
when, as viewers, we must
deal with non-standard tasks of coping (Turkovi: 1999).
Spectators of Petek's film observe its materiality, the coloured
intervention on the film
strip for example, a strong yellow covering the girl's face,
scribbles, artificial
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17
perforations, the exchange of negatives and sound negatives
uncharacteristic of standard
film, and at one point Petek combines different film strips
(16mm and 8mm) brought
together onto a larger one (35 mm). While Petek's film directly
reminds us of the material
aspect of films, Gidal confronts us with the flatness of the
film screen, draws our
attention to its two-dimensional nature, playing with the film
space within a shot16. The
issue of illusion is one of the central concerns in his
discussion of structural/materialist
film. In a polemic tone, Gidal insists on its non-illusionist
nature.
Structural/materialist film attempts to be non-illusionist. The
process of the film's
making deals with devices that result in demystification or
attempted demystification of
the film process (Gidal, 1987: 272).
Still, there are some principled differences between Petek's and
Gidal's film. If we jump
back to an earlier chapter where I discussed poetic cinema in
which there are, for
example, no spontaneously recognizable links between shots, and
this disruption of
meaning evokes a certain emotional state (Turkovi, 2006: 17-18)
and the technical
innovations in Sretanje, such as the mentioned colouring, gluing
of smaller strips onto a
larger one, perforating the strip, exchange of
positives/negatives and the like, are actually
stylization procedures no less so than the accentuated visual or
sound aspects, camera
angles or information transgressions in the film Rondo achieved
by means of external
interventions into the film material (film strip), in order for
the recorded scene to make
and impression or to heighten that impression. The author's
interventions on the strip
function as a kind of comment through which he places himself in
a specific emotional
relationship to the recorded scene of the girl, creating a very
specific film portrait.
16 Films that emphatically thematise film space and movement are
known as pixilation (flicker) films. When very brief shots from one
to several frames appear in succession, they create the impression
of a rapid, jerky succession of images. (Carroll, 1999: 8). An
example is Paul Sharits film T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (1969) where
photograms appear in succession. One shows a young man placing his
tongue between the blades of scissors and another shows a womans
hand scratching his face. The quick succession of photograms,
alternately as positives and negatives, is used by Sharits in an
attempt to demystify film movement that is made up of stills images
that can also stand on their own, as suggested by the films cut up
title. Sharits also deforms the sound in the film, the word
destroy! is the films soundtrack and here it dissolves, turning
into incomprehensible mumbling.
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18
Although films of the materialist orientation often treat the
recorded scene as secondary,
the actual materiality of film is not the only thing thematised
by the film. Peteks
undisciplined treatment of the film strip reveals some
interesting perceptual outcomes of
the procedure when the authors interventions are seen in
relation to the recorded film
material.
In Clouds, Gidal tries to draw the viewers attention to the
duality he is thematising: the
flatness of the film screen and the illusion of depth. Showing
living and inanimate
beings in motion also intensifies the illusion of seeing
three-dimensionality, because our
experience links the possibility of movement primarily with
three-dimensional space
(Peterli, 2000: 17). In Clouds, we can only assume the depth of
space (there is no clear
point of orientation/the whiteness of the clouds and the tiny
black airplane), so Gidal in a
way inverts Bazin and his calls for the use of the depth focus
shot as a stylistic procedure
(cf. Bordwell, 2005: 87). In contrast to this, Gidal warns us
that depth actually holds
nothing. But is this really so?
What such experimental films like to signalize and what they
draw our attention to, is
precisely non-standard perception. Naturally, when we are
watching a film we are always
faced with a paradoxical duality: film scenes seem to be
identical to scenes from real life,
even though they are merely two-dimensional reflections of light
on a screen we are
watching while seated in a cinema. Even if we were to get angry,
get up from our seat
and attempt to interfere in the scene, we would certainly not be
able to save the hero.
Peter Gidal actually criticised the mediums representational
qualities under the influence
of the growing political radicalization of the time. Such films
mostly focussed on the
specific traits and limitations of the medium 17 , while
illusion carried negative
connotations. Naturally, every film has its material side. Every
viewer knows this. Not
every film, however, takes this as the main subject of the film.
In his definition of
17 In his book Film as Art, Rudolf Arnheim speaks of moving
photographic images as an anti-naturalist phenomenon that
transforms the passive registering of an actual scene into a means
of expression, a special type of perception, by the projection of
three-dimensional objects onto a flat surface, in other words,
using means of limitation that in the process of perception become
a means of shaping with regard to the impression of reality
(Arnheim, 1997). He would no doubt find great joy in the mentioned
avant-garde films. Nowadays, however, there are numerous
discussions that challenge and point to the non-existence of a pure
film medium (cf. Nol Carroll).
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19
experimental film, Peterli, for instance, points to the
significance, or quantitative
dominance, of the factors of difference (Peterli, 2000: 239).
This is not necessarily
always the case: we find both factors of similarity and of
difference in every film, but
experimental films of the materialist orientation merely seek to
make the differences
more evident than the similarities.
It is widely known that the way in which we perceive something
static as something
dynamic: a recorded strip of film is made up of a series of
images, each of them showing
a static moment of a scene, as we see in Paul Sharits attempt at
dissolving them. It is
procedures like these that they tried to oppose, polemicising
with the dominant currents
of narrative film, even though this kind of playing with film,
emphasizing its artificial
nature, is often also present in dominant cinema (for example,
as far back as 1928,
Buster Keaton made a film about a cameraman, The Cameraman,
which is also auto-
reflexive). Acts of intervention on the film strip emphatically
draw attention to the
materiality of the film, but it is precisely examples from
dominant film that show us that
the material foundations of the film image and sound are always
implied.18
Films that play with our perception in fact suggest that we are
simultaneously grasping
the surface of the screen with its markings and the depth of the
scene, so that once again
we can look to psychology for help (examples of the so-called
figure-ground principle in
Gestalt psychology). A film always provides us with a sufficient
amount of meta-
communication signals that frame certain situations (Turkovi,
2000) and underscore
the film screening/presentation as a communication phenomenon
and this framing is
dictated by the very nature of the cognitive process: the
ability to clearly differentiate
between reality and fantasy (Anderson, 1998: 125).
Experimental filmmakers were not satisfied with merely drawing
attention to the
materiality of film and its internal limitations. They also
wanted to make the viewers
physically active, which gave rise to the idea of the expanded
film or direct interaction
with the viewer (what traditional forms used to achieve with
card games or social games, 18 For example, according to a norm of
classical narrative film, there is to be no intervention into the
events of the film. If in the middle of Casablanca (1942) Humphrey
Bogart were to look into the camera (that is, address the viewers)
and say about Victor Laszlo: What a pain in the neck!, this would,
in fact, change nothing in the viewer's perception of Casablanca as
a fictional film.
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20
and today is done with computer simulations, cf. Turkovi, 2005:
18), partly influenced
by how theatre performance was expanded by happenings and
performance art that
required direct participation from the viewer. Linked to this
were attempts to eliminate
traditional meta-communicational boundaries, and the
presentation area was no longer
restricted to the screen but could be someones body, a
skyscraper and the like, while
viewers (apart from being confronted with technology) could be
directly invited to
communicate. Tony Conrad, for example, used various extra-filmic
means and
preparation acts (a metaphor of the production and projection
process), where the
actual screening comes only at the end (Hanhardt, 1987: 333). He
made exhibitions
presenting rolls of film in jars and projected films that had
previously been cooked as part
of a recipe, something that can be seen as an extreme joke
stressing the materiality of
the film and its artificial nature. The viewers could look at
the film and inspect it, take
it into their hands, taste the meal prepared with it,
discovering film as celluloid material.
6. Conclusion
All that film explores and achieves must be based on perceptual
possibilities: if certain
effects and forms of the film experience were not perceptually
possible, in other words, if
the viewer did not possess the capacity for such perception,
this perception would not
occur (Turkovi, 1999).
During its history, film explored and later established
different models of the viewing
relationship in its various types and discourse styles. As we
have seen, experimental film
explored the perceptual possibilities of new, as well as old
procedures, it often
polemicised with the dominant film discourse, eschewing the kind
principles of what we
term cooperativeness. It is, however, precisely its pursuit of
experiment, novelty, the
unconventional, exploring the perceptual potential that opens
when the viewer must cope
with unusual, thwarted assumptions of the standard relationship
with the world or with
film (Turkovi, 1999: 52) that places it within a special area of
exploring the unimagined
possibilities of perceptual reactions.
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21
The search for connections between events, such as we find in
narrative film, is actually
an essential part of our mental life (discovering and organising
the world), so that our
understanding of experimental film is often based on the way
that we understand
narrative film, which we are more exposed to. On the other hand,
narrative conventions
were frequently an element of film experimentation just as
stylising aberrations, which
I have taken as an example, are often present also within
narrative discourse. The
difference is that within a narrative system, stylization is
employed functionally in other
words, its purpose is to underscore, emphasize a certain locus
of discourse, and is valid
only for the purpose of achieving certain perceptual effects
(Turkovi, 2000, 2006). In
non-narrative discourse, on the other hand (for instance, in
that which we call poetic),
they dominate the discourse. They can be identified precisely
owing to the norms of
dominant film and the regularities valid in it.
We have seen that while watching any film, and thus also the
experimental kind, we
activate already existing perceptual (cognitive) capacities
capacities that exist
irrespective of films in our everyday experience of the world
and our orientation in it and
without which we would be completely and utterly lost. However,
mans standard
cognitive reactions are called forth in the extremely
non-standard stimulative conditions
of viewing a (film) scene, while filmmakers come across as
experimental cognitivists of
the most varied research interests (Turkovi, 1999: 50).
Although there are attempts by some authors and critics to give
experimental film special
status, it can never really have cognitive preference over
narrative film, even if
conceivably it could achieve a higher status. It is also a fact
that narrative film often
engages the viewer in more complex ways than experimental
film.
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22
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