SOME CHARACTERISTICS OF EXPERIMENTAL (OR AVANT-GARDE) FILMS

–> Deliberately reject the conventions of mainstream films and seek to explore the intrinsic nature of the film medium.

–> Question, challenge, and critique dominant ideologies, including a society’s dominant political assumptions and sexual mores.

–> Often made by individual or smaller collaborative groups with smaller budgets and less expensive equipment than mainstream commercial films.   Also, often independently funded, at least to a significant degree, versus conventional funding sources that tend to exercise greater influence, and control over, film content, form, style, and purpose.

–> Deliberately work to frustrate expectations of viewers brought up on classic Hollywood cinema conventions and deliberately aim as well as to startle, if not shock.

–> Frequently use most recent advances in filmmaking technique/artistry or apply advances in other forms of human expression to filmmaking.   Experiment extensively with innovations in production and post-production means and media.

–> Often challenge conventional understandings as well as modes of representing time, space, and movements over time and across space.  

–> Often extensively incorporate material from other, prior sources and make extensive references/allusions to other cultural texts.

–> Often far more lyrical than narrative, and focus on subjects not as easily or readily addressed and conveyed by narrative means.  

–> Often considerable emphasis on exploration of issues of mind, of memory, of perception, of dream, of fantasy, of desire, of imagination.  Focus on representation of reality beyond/beneath immediate empirical surface–or focus on actually attending to this surface closely and meticulously.   Work to defamiliarize the familiar.
        
–> With the camera may use distorting lenses, extensive and varied filters/screens/gels, shooting at variable (frequently changing) speeds, and film/crank back/and film again to produce multiple exposures.   Possibly also deliberately flash film, or underexpose/overexpose.

–> With the film stock may record mostly clear frames, perhaps resulting in a strobe effect, may paint frame, and may scratch frames.  May also tint and tone the film stock in the process of its development.

–> In editing, may reject it altogether, may assiduously avoid/challenge/undermine continuity, may make compilations from multiple sources and represent multiple yet not conventionally parallel or seamlessly/obviously interconnected scenes of action, and will hyper-edit, especially according to aesthetic rather than narrative principles.

–> Sound often abstract/non-melodic, or signal element/force in own right: not mere support for image.   Often counterpoint to image.  Often discordant or excessive.   Speech sometimes turned into abstraction, or represented so as to call attention to tonal quality, or highly, even hyper-stylized.  Often use of unusual kinds and combination of instruments or of instrumental styles–or bizarrely anachronistic.  

–> Mise-en-scène may well be either intensely minimalistic or extremely stylized.  Movement and interaction of human figures also deliberately non-naturalistic, often theatricalized or akin to experimental music and dance performance.   Costumes and props often seem anachronistic or bizarrely juxtaposed to ostensible setting–and often frequent changed or shed altogether.  Human figures transformed to resemble pre-, counter-, or post-human figures.  Lots of overt artificiality and excess on locations and to call attention to sets.  Intense focus on aesthetic–and mathematical--principles in organization of subjects and objects within the frame.  

–> In exhibition may project images upside down, backward, or both to create multiple images, superimposed images, or both; may project through an intervening substance; may project onto a person’s body or inanimate object; may depict discontinuous fragments of time, action, or both; and may shut off audience members from each other by erecting panels between seats.  And will also combine exhibition with multiple media displays and performances, as well as direct interaction or surrounding/engulfing of the spectator-auditor within the production.