Response to Film Experiments outside the Mainstream Industry

It’s always interesting to read about past innovations in art and the controversy of their time. Each of the trends described by Thompson and Bordwell seem almost a given to me in terms of films and moving images which we see today.

While reading, I tried to think of contemporary examples of works that incorporate aspects of the trends in the early days of film experimentation.

The first thing that came to mind when I read about abstract animation was an artist I recently stumbled upon on Instagram, David McLeod. Viewing Walter Ruttmann’s Lichtspiel Opus 1 furthered the connection I had in my mind between McLeod and the concept of early abstract animation. In Opus 1, different colored shapes move across the screen and in some cases seem to interact with one another. Ruttmann’s manual process is evident; one can occasionally glimpse the evidence of paint strokes, and the movement is not always fluid. Regardless, one is drawn into the abstract world that Ruttmann projects on screen.

If it were not for artists such as Ruttmann leading the way in the early 20^th century, we may not have artists such as contemporary 3D artist David McLeod, who expands upon the idea of abstract shapes in movement, but makes them three dimensional and increasingly sophisticated and refined.

https://vimeo.com/131654511

https://vimeo.com/151245965

In terms of Dada filmmaking, it was a bit more difficult for me to connect with this trend. I chose to watch Man Ray’s Retour à la raison and some of René Clair’s Entr’acte. Man Ray’s film made no sense to me and I was not sure I would consider it art. Entr’acte seemed somewhat more familiar somehow, maybe given that there were people in it and something like a narrative was suggested (even though it still made no real sense). However, I think even elements of Dadaism make their way in films today. Sometimes images with seemingly no relevance are flashed across the screen and the viewer must make sense of them. The same would apply to surrealism – we are surrounded by surrealist imagery and video all the time.

This may be a stretch but Zayn Malik's music video for "Pillowtalk" that came out recently had me considering some of these trends as I watched it. There were various shots that seemingly had no relevance to the message of the video, such as a model with studs coming out of her face (see below), two models boxing, or animations of red liquid dripping down the screen.

one wonders what the relevance of this model with studs on her face was

surrealist imagery

Image credit: Cosmopolitan

All of the trends from the early experimental films days, even those that supposedly died out like Dadaism, have an effect on the films we view today - whether they are the traditional cinematic films, music videos, YouTube videos, or animations.