This guide is intended as an introduction to the variety of resources the library has to offer on the subject area of 'Experimental Film'. It also contains some more general information & links relating to this area of research. For a more comprehensive overview on this subject, see the 'Library Books' tab for a broad selection of academic studies. If you have any feedback or suggestions for this guide, feel free to contact kenrickb@staff.ncad.ie.
Man Ray, Film Still from “L’étoile de mer”, 1928 © Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society
Introduction: What is 'Experimental Film'?
The term 'Experimental Film' is a generalised description often used to refer to moving-image based artworks. Its origins can be traced back to the 1920s avant-garde movements, as well as to the early 'silent' era of cinema when the conventions of film-making were still being established. Various labels such as 'Artist Films', 'Underground Film', 'Expanded Cinema', 'Structuralist Film', 'Video Art', 'Durational Cinema', 'Surrealist Cinema' are also often used, sometimes interchangeably. In Key Concepts in Cinema Studies, Susan Hayward uses the terms 'counter-cinema' & 'oppositional cinema' to refer to
[...] a cinema that, through its own cinematic practices, questions and subverts existing cinematic codes and conventions. In its aesthetic and often political concerns with the how and why of film-making, it is a cinema that can be quite formalist and materialist and, therefore, very discontinuous in its look. (Hayward, 1996, p. 58)
The formative era of so-called experimental film is often said to be from around the 1950s to the 1970s, coinciding with global counter-cultural movements, the sudden widespread availability of film & photographic equipment, as well as the emergence of post-modernism. It could be argued that the ground-breaking 'experiments' of this era, although radical at the time, went on to influence & inform much of the language of contemporary cinema.
Film criticism also emerged as a serious discourse in tandem with these movements, at a time when print journals & magazines flourished. Many contemporary intellectuals & filmmakers wrote extensively about the medium, debating the significance of film as an emergent art form. Cahiers du Cinéma (founded 1951, France), Sight & Sound (founded 1932, Britain) & Filmkritik (founded 1957, Germany) are examples of long-running publications that specialised in debate & film criticism, as cinema entered the mainstream.
What distinguishes experimental film throughout all of this is its position on the margin of mainstream film movements. British filmmaker and writer Malcolm Le Grice in his 1972 essay Thoughts on Recent 'Underground Film', rather than attempting a definition, outlines 'a range of specific areas of concern' that pertain to experimental film:
1. Concerns which derive from the camera: its limitations and extensive capacities as a time-based photographic recording apparatus.
2. Concerns which derive from the editing process and its abstraction into conceptual, concrete relationships of elements.
3. Concerns which derive from the mechanism of the eye and particularities of perception.
4. Concerns which derive from printing, processing, refilming and recopying procedures; exploration of transformations possible in selective copying and modification of the material.
5. Concerns which derive from the physical nature of film; awareness of the reality of the material itself and its possible transformation into experience and language; celluloid, scratches, sprockets, frame lines, dirt, grain.
6. Concerns which derive from the properties of the projection apparatus and the fundamental components of sequential image projection; lamp, lens, gate (frame), shutter, claw and the screen.
7. Concern with duration as a concrete dimension.
8. Concern with the semantics of image and with the construction of meaning through ‘language’ systems.
(Le Grice, 1972, pp. 14-17)
This gives a good idea of the scope & depth of the theoretical & artistic preoccupations during this time period. It also illustrates how an investigative approach to the materiality & mechanics of film technology, as well as the nature of perception, lies at the core of experimental filmmaking. This is perhaps as suitably broad & useful a definition as any.
Although the nature of this technology was to change greatly in the coming decades, many of the above concerns persist in the digital era. Kim Knowles, in her book Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices, provides an in-depth study of the significance of analogue media in film-making at a time when the 'cinematic experience' is less rarefied & permeates every aspect of our lives:
Through its counter-cultural embrace of outmoded technologies and slower working practices, photochemical film culture emerges as a gesture of resistance to modern society’s emphasis on speed and efficiency, rejecting the imperative to update and upgrade in favour of an ecology of recuperation and restoration. As an antidote to our throwaway society, the value placed on film as an ongoing creative endeavour rather than cultural garbage must be viewed as more than mere nostalgic fetishism or another retro fad, as some writers have suggested.
(Knowles, 2020, p. 14)
In a more recent overview of experimental cinema, Knowles elaborates on the status of contemporary filmmakers who - despite whatever variances might exist regarding labels and genres - work according to a shared 'ethic', central to which 'is a resistance to the facile and uncritical consumption of moving image media, and the unwitting and passive acceptance of the very modes of such consumption, which are given to us by corporate producers of moving image technologies and commercial film and video products.' (2024, p. 6)
References
Hayward, S. (1997) Key concepts in cinema studies. London: Routledge.
Knowles, K. (2021) Experimental film and photochemical practices. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (Experimental film and artists’ moving image).
Knowles, K. and Walley, J. (eds) (2024) The Palgrave Handbook of Experimental Cinema. 1st ed. 2024. Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Le Grice, M. (2009) Experimental cinema in the digital age. London: BFI.