The Defy Film Festival returns to Studio 615 in East Nashville this weekend. With that in mind I wrote this primer on experimental film for this week’s The Contributor. Pick up a paper from your neighborhood vendor!

What we talk about when we talk about experimental film

In the most general sense the term “experimental film” might apply to any movie lacking narrative. Cinematic storytelling is so ingrained in movie culture that even loose plots or slow scenes can find critics reaching for the “e” word. Of course, most experimental films ditch storytelling along with accepted limits on length and/or a radical re-imagining of editing, performance or use of effects etc.

If you want to watch experimental films in a theater setting they usually garner a few slots in film festivals where they can be divided up into categories like “experimental shorts” or “experimental animation.” The third annual Defy Film Festival happening this weekend in Nashville is like those weird little subcategories of movie programming blown-up into an entire two-day event all its own. This year’s festival includes movies by filmmakers from around the world, and it’s a great chance to see what’s happening at the far edges of cinema across the globe.

Anticipating this weekend’s festival I wrote these notes about what experimental cinema can be, and why you should care about it if you care about movies:

Size Matters

One of the biggest differences between experimental and narrative films can be length. Of course, many director’s early works are narrative shorts, but there are a number of reasons – including budgets and subject matter – why experimental movies are often short films. For example, Stan Brakhage created his “The Dante Quartet” (1987) by hand-painting every individual frame of his film. It took 6 years to create the movie which has a running time of 8 minutes. That said, experimental movies might also be extremely long: Andy Warhol’s “Empire” (1965) features one uninterrupted shot of the top of the Empire State Building. The movie runs for 8 hours and 5 minutes. You can expect 70 shorts screening at the Defy fest this weekend, but you’ll also find the chance to deep dive into 8 full length features as well.

Subjecting Cinema

When a filmmaker isn’t bound to storytelling there is nearly no limit to which subjects they might choose to film. Experimental moviemakers who are interested in exploring new techniques and effects might pick nearly anything or anyone to point their cameras at. Michael Snow’s “Wavelength” (1967) starts as a wide shot of a loft apartment that almost imperceptibly zooms-in over the course of 45 minutes on a photograph of the sea hanging on a wall. There’s more to it than that, but this movie is admired more for what it is more than what it’s about. Experimental films like “Wavelength” can make viewers call into question whether a film even has to have a traditional subject at all. This is one way that experimental films can open our eyes to the dogmas and assumptions that may inform mainstream narrative filmmaking. The result is that experimental film audiences are more literate viewers of moving images of all kinds.

Boundary Breaking

When filmmakers push their frames to the accepted edges of cinema they often find their efforts spilling over into other disciplines, resulting in works that are half movie and half something else. Chris Marker’s classic “La Jetée” (1962) was the inspiration behind 12 Monkeys (1995). Marker’s movie is almost entirely made-up of black-and-white still photographs, and I’d imagine it’s inspired just as many shutterbugs as movie directors. Hugh Welchman’s Loving Vincent (2017) is the first feature length film composed entirely of animated oil paintings. Audiences who’ve seen this Vincent van Goh biopic might leave the theater feeling they’ve spent the evening at an art museum. William K.L. Dickson and William Heise’s “Annabelle Serpentine Dance” (1895) is an early American silent short featuring a performer engaging in the eponymous dance wearing a voluminous, flowing skirt that shifts through a palette of colors thanks to the filmmakers’ pioneering hand-tinting effects. The film made for a thrilling theater experience before the 20th century, but today it reads like the kind of performance art document you’d find in a video installation in a gallery space. Watching experimental films often results in being exposed to the wider spectrum of the arts, and becoming more aware of the landscape of a culture as a whole.

The Defy Film Festival happens August 24 and 25 at Studio 615 in East Nashville. Go to www.defyfilmfest.com for a full schedule and tickets.

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If you love experimental cinema and you live in Nashville then you’re in luck: the second annual Defy Film Fest starts on Friday night and the event includes screenings of 64 experimental films through Saturday. Here’s a bit from my Critics’ Pick in this week’s Nashville Scene…

I was only able to screen a couple of films ahead of the fest. Here are a couple of capsule reviews of two selections I definitely recommend…

This year’s program boasts seven features, including MA, which sets a modern-day version of the Nativity in the American Southwest, and Midwestern teenage 1970s dramedy Knowing Nothing Cold. The fest’s 57 shorts include the Appalachian horror flick “Blood Letting,” the culty creepfest “Color Field,” and the conspiracy thriller “Appellation.” Don’t miss the silent events or the looping projection of the metaphysical science-fiction film Hermetica Komhata HK320 in 615’s back hall. Visit defyfilmfestival.com for a full schedule and tickets.

Knowing Nothing Cold reminded me of Richard Linklater’s films like Dazed and Confused and Everybody Wants Some — the movie follows the daily lives of a group of Midwestern teenagers in the 1970′s. The kids smoke and eat candy and steal records and get high. The boys get in fights and the girls talk about how dumb they are even if they’re really cute. The one way this movie differs from Linklater’s retro teen flicks is that writer/director Jeff Kao’s screenplay only has about a quarter of the words Linklater packs into his chatty films. Knowing Nothing Cold is an impressionistic film that slowly unfolds in a series of loosely connected scenes that don’t constitute a typical forward driving plot. This is the kind of film formula that can only work with interesting characters brought to life with great performances. Luckily, for Knowing Nothing Cold‘s audiences Kao and his cast fill this film with scene after scene of sincere, affecting, haunting moments.

Appellation is set in Britain decades in the future. A super bug has decimated crops and only commercial agriculture is allowed in the wake of the tragedy — small organic farmers use secret grow rooms to cultivate healthy fruits and vegetables even though this makes them terrorists in the eyes of the government agency charged with hunting them down. Appellation is like a 10-minute-long Black Mirror episode, and even though the short ultimately feels like the first few scenes in a much longer film, Appellation left me wanting to see that film.

I’ll be heading over on Friday afternoon to pick up some laminates and prepare myself for a weekend of weird and wonderful films. Hope to see you there!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts

Experimental filmmaker Lynne Sachs will be coming to Nashville from her New York home next week to screen a selection of experimental films from her 30 years in cinema. Originally from Memphis, one of Sachs’s earliest movies was a music video of a kind that she made for her pal, Memphis musician Randy Brand. The Randy Brand Film is a charming short featuring a fun melody and live footage of the band. The editing and experimental marking of the actual film all point to Sach’s work to come. The Light and Sound Machine will present Yes/No: The Cinema of Lynne Sachs on Thursday, September 17 at 8 P.M. in the Blue Room at Third Man Records. Sachs will be presenting a selection of films from her 30 year career followed by a Q&A event.

In the meantime, here’s The Randy Brand Film which is not on the schedule for next Thursday night. You’re welcome…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts.

45 years ago, in the summer of 1969, Jim Morrison shot his experimental film HWY in Los Angeles and in the Mojave Desert. Morrison had hitchhiked hundreds of miles in his younger days as a college student and the thumbs-up locomotion of the protagonist (played by Morrison) at the center of HWY finds the director/actor in familiar territory — waiting by the side of the titular roadway, taking a dip in a desert lake, walking alone, catching a ride and eventually making a phone call to a friend where he reveals the dark secret at the movie’s core.

Here’s HWY…

Stay Awake!

Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts.

Wallace Berman was born in Staten Island, New York in 1926. While he was still a child, he correctly predicted that he would die on his 50th birthday. He was hit by a car in 1976.

During those five decades, Berman became a pioneering assemblage artist as well as one of the cornerstones of the post WWII California art scene. Berman became associated with the Beats and his self-published magazine Semina combined his own collage imagery with writing by luminaries like Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, David Meltzer, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Cocteau. In addition to his groundbreaking, multimedia assemblages, Berman made the short film Aleph. The artist’s only experiment with moving pictures,Aleph reveals both Berman’s love of collage as well as his interest in the Kabbalah.

Here is what www.jewishmuseum.org has to say about the film:

Aleph is an artist’s meditation on life, death, mysticism, politics, and pop culture. In an eight-minute loop of film, Wallace Berman uses Hebrew letters to frame a hypnotic, rapid-fire montage that captures the go-go energy of the 1960s. Aleph includes stills of collages created using a Verifax machine, Eastman Kodak’s precursor to the photocopier. These collages depict a hand-held radio that seems to broadcast or receive popular and esoteric icons. Signs, symbols, and diverse mass-media images (e.g., Flash Gordon, John F. Kennedy, Mick Jagger) flow like a deck of tarot cards, infinitely shuffled in order that the viewer may construct his or her own set of personal interpretations. The transistor radio, the most ubiquitous portable form of mass communication in the 1960s, exemplifies the democratic potential of electronic culture and serves as a metaphor for Jewish mysticism. The Hebrew term kabbalah translates as “reception” for knowledge, enlightenment, and divinity.

Check out Joe Nolan’s Insomnia to find out more about another West Coast artist with an eye for the surreal.

Stay awake!

J

Babble on...

Pioneering esoteric film maker Kenneth Anger gets interviewed by pioneering esoteric film maker Gaspar Noe in this match-made-in-heaven (hell?) tete-a-tete:

Kenneth Anger, the octogenarian American underground filmmaker, has largely been heralded as one of the founders of experimental film, with his role in inspiring directors such as Martin Scorsese and David Lynch. He pioneered queer, cult and psychedelic film without ever imagining himself in a gere, and this year he crossed over into fashion and created a piece (with longtime collaborator Brian Butler) for the Italian fashion house Missoni.

Gaspar Noé, director of the recent film Enter the Void and creator of the controversial film Irreversible, has long been a vocal supporter of Kenneth Anger, telling Interview that Anger was the only person he wanted to see Enter the Void. Noé recently caught up with Anger by phone, while the former was in Paris and the latter in Boston. They discussed the essence of cinema, his experience with alien spacecrafts, and why you should not direct movies under the influence of LSD.—Kristina Benns

NOÉ: Do you remember we met a few years ago? You were in Paris doing a retrospective at the Cinémathèque…

ANGER: I remember, vaguely, but I do so many interviews, they seem to all blend together.

NOÉ: I think the reason why they asked me if I wanted to have a conversation with you is because in other interviews I have talked about you, about how when I think about the best psychedelic movies ever, one of the first things that comes to my mind is Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome.

Do you think you’d be a director today, if you hadn’t been in Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935)?

ANGER: Well, It’s a long story. I began making movies at home, with a 16-millimeter camera that belonged to the family. Before that, I worked a little, I did a little part in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Director Max Reinhardt was a friend of my grandmother’s, and that’s how that happened.

NOÉ: That movie reminds me of your movie Rabbit’s Moon (1950).

ANGER: I loved the artificial set of the forest at Warner Brothers, this huge set that they made in two connecting soundstages. So that influenced me. But also, I’m influenced by director Georges Méliès, and the simplicity of his magical painted steps, and so forth.

NOÉ: What are your favorite movies directed by other people?

ANGER: Well in the classic French tradition, I love Robert Bresson and I met Georges Franju, and I love his films. And Ann Levy, and of course, Jean Cocteau. And I like some of the films of Marcel Carné very much. I love Arlette Langmann.

NOÉ: Do you often cry when you see movies?

ANGER: I don’t. I’m not a tear-shedder. But I feel it emotionally.

NOÉ: I have a heavy question… What is the essence of cinema for you? Is it reproducing the language of dreams, or creating a shamanistic trance?

ANGER: I think it’s basically quite different from dreams. If only cinema was that easy. Because dreams, all you have to do is fall asleep, and you can have fantastic vision. I know Baudelaire and people like that enhance their dreams with opium or something. But films are very constructed—they’re like architecture. They’re pieced together, glued together. To me, it’s a craft. It’s like making a tapestry. And I prefer to think of it—you know, um, the sweat is supposed to be invisible. But a lot of sweat can go into making a film. But of course, if you enjoy doing it, you enjoy doing it. I will go on cutting for three days without sleeping. You can have everything from a realistic story with recognizable people, or…

I actually love the Italian neo-realist films, and in some ways they seem very dreamlike. You know, the early Rossellini and so forth… But you can have a very expensive dream, which is quite beautifully done, which is like Cameron’s Avatar, which you probably saw. Did you see it?

NOÉ: Yes.

ANGER: Well, that can be considered like a dream, a very expensive dream. I prefer simpler things.

NOÉ: Do you think the language of dreams is universal? Do you think people in other countries have their own culturally specific way of dreaming? People in China, Africa…

ANGER: I think people dream in their own way, dreams are extremely personal, even from person to person. They are completely individual.

NOÉ: I don’t dream in 3-D, they aren’t very bright in color and there isn’t much dialogue. I don’t know about yours…

ANGER: Sometimes I dream in black and white. And actually, I love black and white films, even though it’s been a while since I made any myself. Do you work in color or black and white?

NOÉ: My last movie is extremely colorful. What is a dream you have had that was over-the-top, or really strange?

ANGER: When I was a teenager or a boy, I used to collect tin soldiers. And I had hundreds of them—I had a navy with a ship and the Marines. And I had a dream when I was about 15 of these soldiers coming alive and it was a fight with the Muslims, which is very sort of prophetic. So it was a fight against the Arabs—I remember the crescent on the flags. And the little toys came alive in my dream. They were still toys—they weren’t people. They were battling an invasion of the desert people under a crescent flag. It was the American flag against the crescent flag, which may be prophetic for something to come.

Find the full interview here.

Kenneth Anger’s The Complete Magick Lantern Cycle – including Kustom Kar Kommandos – is now available from The Sleepless Bookstore!

Joe Nolan <3