Experimental cinema is an artistic practice in both the visual arts and classical cinema .
Trial By Media is an art in itself, which is developed outside the industry and the commercial system. Often aesthetically outside the norm, it does not obey predefined rules, but promotes its own expressive codes, its aesthetics and, often, its modes of distribution. Since the 1920s, it has forged a specific history.
It seems difficult to define exactly what experimental cinema is. The notion of experimentation, if important, is insufficient for its definition. Many terms have been used to designate it, depending on its different tendencies (“pure cinema”, “absolute cinema”, “art cinema”, “underground cinema”, etc.). We could say that a film is experimental. The process is located, essentially, at the level of form. This often implies that it is conceived, if not entirely outside the film industry, then very often at least on its fringes, and without regard to industrial, economic, commercial, screenwriting, narrative, etc. concerns. Experimental cinema often goes against the usual film standards: in terms of length,Four Stars (en) , by Andy Warhol ) or 1/24 of a second ( The Most court du monde , by Erwin Huppert , and VII (Image very important) , by Manuel Gómez ) or narration ( Empire , by Warhol, is a film eight-hour long film composed of reels placed end-to-end and framed in a still shot Empire State Building ).
It can be abstract or figurative, but it often rests on the primacy of sensations, especially when, through processes such as the abundance of superimpositions or rapid editing, it is directed directly at the eye rather than at the thought. For this reason, in his expressive practices, he will rely on techniques or modes of representation typical of music (such as the lyrical cinema of Isidore Isou , Maurice Lemaître and Roland Sabatier or painting (such as the films of Stan Brakhage , Len Lye or Leighton-Pierce) The experimental filmmaker commonly works on the projected image in a more plastic than narrative way, questioning its material identity by showing the phenomena of appearance and existence (enhancement of the film through erasures or signs drawn on the frames , playing with the projection screen or the darkness of the room, working on the projector whose speed of displacement is frustrated, etc. That is why the cinematographer Jimmy Glasberg wrote in 2002 that this type of cinema appeals “to the very origin of the image with the Leonardo da Vinci ‘s camera obscura ( dark room ) or perhaps even with the allegory of the caveof Plato ” . For the academic Nicole Brenez : “an experimental film considers cinema starting, not from its uses, but from its powers; and it makes an effort to remember them, deploy them, renew them, as well as contradict them, block them or limit them. “
Under the name of experimental cinema, we finally regroup currents and schools, among which abstract cinema stands out , which tends towards pure graphic cinema, oneiric or surrealist cinema , underground cinema, structural cinema , and perhaps belatedly. And anecdotal is the Oucippus that, with the usual humorous look at potentiality, can rightly consider all experimental cinema as plagiarism by anticipation. political cinemacontemporary often uses the principles of experimental cinema, and can be achieved by both the mode of production and the formal approach. To a lesser extent, documentary cinema does the same, especially when it creates a poetic image tending towards abstraction, or when it renews its own rules in direct cinema or free cinema .
The history of experimental cinema, theorized in particular by P. Adams Sitney in the United States in the 1970s (see note 22), begins with pre -cinema and continues until today, thus constituting a complete cinema seen as experimental. This parallel cinema, this “second cinema”, still relatively little known, was, since its split from commercial and industrial cinema, but also from the historical and multidisciplinary avant -gardes (at the time when it did not have a lasting and unifying epithet, and where it was linked with these avant-gardes), around the 1930s , almost completely absent from the official “histories” of cinema. In the eighties and nineties, the work of historians and critics incorporated it into the Larousse Dictionary of Cinema and the Encyclopædia Universalis , while specialized works multiplied. The arrival of digital technology , in the 2000s , gave greater visibility to experimental cinema, thanks, in particular, to new live production and exhibition technologies that allow extensive collaboration with other disciplines, first of all, music and the dance.
Historical
Experimental cinema is a continuation of the artistic works made within the framework of the historical avant-gardes of the 1920s, such as Futurism , Dadaism or Surrealism, which were multidisciplinary movements.
origins
The words “experimental” and “cinema” are directly linked, for the first time, in 1930 with the publication of the American magazine Experimental Cinema (1930-1934). The appearance of sound films and the end of patronage mark the end of the first avant-garde movements in cinema ( Dadaism , Surrealism or the like in the producing countries. Érik Bullotwrites: “1929 marks a decline of the avant-gardes in France and Germany, partly due to the appearance of sound films and higher production costs. Many filmmakers and artists have turned to documentary or advertising forms. But it is above all the political climate that worries his future.” But, immediately, outside the founding places (France, Germany, Italy), informal currents appear, alien to any doxa, and that are often the work of activists, fans or critics, like this one. This is the case of the United States: Lewis Jacobs (en) , Robert Florey , James Sibley Watson (en) or Melville Folson Webber. This American trend will be reassessed in the early 2000s. Under the title Unseen Cinema, early american avant- Film Guard 1894-1941 , which met with a strong critical and public echo. Spontaneous currents were also born in the 1930s in Poland , Czechoslovakia, Switzerland and Belgium. It was in the latter country that in 1949, in Knokke-le-Zoute , the first international festival of its kind was created, also called EXPRMNTL , which only saw five editions: in 1949 , in 1958 – the latter moved to Brussels -. , in 1963 , in 1967 and in 1974, and it will be an unmissable date for lovers of the genre.
In 1952, Hans Richter wrote: “Thus a tradition, temporarily interrupted by European political storms, was taken up by a young generation scattered here and there. It is certain, today, that it will no longer break but will expand. »Already in 1951, the lyricist films of Isidore Isou ( Treatise on slime and eternity ), Maurice Lemaître (Has the film already begun? ), Gil J Wolman ( L’Anticoncept ) revive a certain post- Dadaist tradition(work on scratched, torn film stock; disjunction of image track and soundtrack), while in the United States in the 1940s a cinema emerged that was first described as surrealist post-production (for Jean Mitry in particular: see biblio) with the works of Maya Deren , Kenneth Anger or Gregory Markopoulos ; the last two will become great figures of underground cinema . In 1958, Stan Brakhage filmed Anticipation of the Night, a film where the montage was taken, inside the camera, of the various solarizations, creating a visual and lyrical material that broke with previous works of experimental cinema. In the 1960s, categories or genres multiplied: underground , lyrical, structural cinema. P. Adams Sitney will make a cartography of it in his book The Visionary Cinema (note 22).
Creation of a specific environment
The medium was organized on a practical level (a necessary condition for the development of distribution and the emergence of critics linked to the movement, and therefore knowing them from within) when Jonas Mekas and his friends founded it in 1962 in New York. , The Film-Makers’ Cooperative (en) , the first non-capitalist broadcaster of independent and experimental cinema: in fact, the filmmakers themselves manage the rental and distribution of their films; a percentage goes to the artist, the rest allows the structure to exist. In France, three cooperatives were created with this model: the Collectif Jeune Cinéma in 1971, the Paris Films Coop. in 1974, (today Cinédoc Paris Films Coop.) and the Light Cone association in 1982 . Cooperatives are born in many countries: Great Britain, Germany, Italy, Canada, Australia… In the collective work written by international specialists, Avant-garde Cinemas (experimental and militant) ( CinémAction No. 10-11 , spring-summer 1980), for all the countries studied (United States, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Federal Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Arab world, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Latin America, South, Japan, Eastern Europe and France), a list of addresses of experimental and activist collectives followed each text.
Diversity achievements come together as Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney travel the world in the late 1960s to present a selection from New American Cinema . English, Danish, German, French directors, etc., realize that they are not isolated. The idea of an international experimental cinema took shape when numerous works appeared in the 1970s. P. Adams Sitney published, in 1974, Visionary Film. The American Avant-garde (translated into French and updated in 2002 under the title Le Cinéma visionnaire: the American Avant-garde 1943-2000), which endows this cinema with history, trends and schools. Starting in the 1970s, critics and historians such as Scott MacDonald, David Curtis , Dominique Noguez , Paolo Bertetto , Xavier García Bardon , Dominique Païni , Yann Beauvais , Raphaël Bassan and Nicole Brenez, among others, incorporatedthe “national schools” to the historical avant-garde and the categories of contemporary American cinema described or theorized by Sitney (lyrical cinema, graphic cinema, structural cinema…). But other tendencies (the School of the Body, post-structural, abstract cinema, cinema without a camera, extended cinema, etc.) appear in various countries. Starting in the 1980s, a dialogue with video art and digital art begins, as it is developed at the end of the text.
artist labs
At the post-production level , professional laboratories that are reluctant to develop films that do not use standard data on lighting, developing, artisanal laboratories, which recover editing tables, viewfinders, etc., abandoned by the large laboratories that are gradually turning to video and digital – will form. As early as 1966 , the newly formed London Film-Makers’ Co-op set up a craft laboratory within its walls that enabled filmmakers to master most stages of film making and finishing. plays. However, it was not until the 1990s that a truly international network of independent laboratories was established. In 1992, members of the Metamkine group establishedthe Atelier MTK in Grenoble, in order to introduce filmmakers in transit to the handling of editing or development tools. In France a large number of artists’ laboratories are formed; for example: L’Abominable in 1996 and L’Etna(1997) for Paris and its region, Mire (1996) for Nantes, Ad libitum Atelier cinématographique (1999) in Isère, Burstscratch in Strasbourg (1995) and more recently the Bioskop Laboratory in Aveyron. Many such structures now practice both film and digital (Light Cone’s Atelier 105 (2014)). International meetings between laboratories take place on irregular dates. The 2015 university work takes stock of the thought of experimental cinema, yesterday and today, through the words and actions of a good number of its current representatives (broadcasting groups, critics, laboratories), their definitions, the functioning of their structures , or the way to turn.
The Filmlabs network now includes 27 independent laboratories, including 9 in France.
Documentation
In 2000, the largest retrospective of its kind ever held in France was held at the Cinémathèque française : “Young, tough and pure! A history of experimental and avant-garde cinema in France”, under the direction of Nicole Brenez and Christian Lebrat, who, the following year, produced a nearly 600-page book of the same name (co-published by La Cinémathèque française and Éditions Mazzotta ). A large number of collaborators participate, rare texts from the twenties and thirties are reissued, all aspects of this cinema are examined and analyzed from its origins (pre-cinema) to the dawn of the 21st century . Since 1985, there has been a specialized book publisher ( Experimental Paris), founded and directed by Christian Lebrat (who published essential books translated into French for the first time), and experimental video and DVD publishers, such as the company Re: Voir Vidéo , created in 1994 by the American Pip Chodorov , or the Lowave label , founded in 2002 by Marc Horchler and Silke Schmickl and both based in Paris: these structures facilitate the knowledge of this cinema in the national territory but also in the world. In parallel, Frédérique Devauxand Michel Amarger have been working since 2000 to produce a documentary series Cinexperimental, a kind of monograph on contemporary artists (Hanoun, Dwoskin, Rousset, Ostrovsky, Karabache, etc.) after having completed in 2010 a feature film on the practices of cinema experimental on four continents (Crossroads Cinemas) In March 2011, the François-Truffaut Cinemathequepublished under the title Experimental Cinema and Video Art, a bibliographical catalog of 114 pages, which lists by genre or subgenre (experimental cinema, avant-garde films, film essays, abstract films), countries, filmmakers and artists, books, articles, press reviews, an important part of his collection around the subject. The dossier ends with a selection of DVDs of films by some of the filmmakers mentioned above and documentaries on artists. The Light Cone Documentation Center offers an exceptional collection of reference documents and films on avant-garde classics and contemporary filmmaking practices. Since 1999, it has been part of the Archives du Film Experimental d’Avignon (Afea) collection.
Education
Theoretical teaching of cinema in general made a late appearance in France: after 1968. Within it, the specific teaching of experimental cinema developed there, starting in the 1970s, with the pioneers Dominique Noguez ( Paris 1 – UFR Saint-Charles), Claudine Eizykman and Guy Fihman ( Paris VIII , Vincennes and then Saint-Denis). Today scholars such as Nicole Brenez (Paris 1 then Paris 3 ), Philippe Dubois, Christa Blümlinger , Dominique Willoughby , Yann Beauvais , Frédérique Devaux , Katerina Thomadaki( Paris 1 – UFR Saint-Charles), Prosper Hillairet , Stéphane Marti , Patrick de Haas , Éric Thouvenel at Rennes-II University , Grégoire Quenault at Picardy University , Jean-Philippe Trias at Montpellier 3 University or Dario Marchiori at the Lumière-Lyon-II University they teach, among others, experimental cinema.
As Vincent Deville writes, on the occasion of the program for the cycle Young, hard and pure! , programmed by the French Cinémathèque in 2000: “This programming work is directly linked to a new conception of teaching, which complements a classic cinephilia by opening up to the experimental. In this way, some academics are now managing to renew the interest that we can show for cinema. The end of the 1990s seems to herald a turning point in the perception of images. Aesthetic choices would no longer be made according to a classical and standardized order, but rather would succumb more to a thirst for protean images enriched with intertextual contributions. Thus, the reflection on the cinema can feed on both Saint Augustineas well as contemporary advertising such as Jean Mitry or Georges Sadoul . This returns cinema to the continuity of a discourse on the history of art, pictorial or not, while linking it to its time. “.
Diffusion
In France, the Center Pompidou and the Cinémathèque française regularly program experimental cinema. Other institutions also do it, but more sporadically. The field is wide, encompassing the occasional program of monographs on filmmakers (for example, Guy Maddin , in 2009, at Beaubourg or Paolo Gioli , in 2010, at the Cinémathèque), presentations of outstanding works, preceded by conferences or even on the basis for collaborations with events such as the Paris / Berlin / Madrid International Meetings dedicated to new media, experimental films, video art, documentary essays, installations that the Center Pompidou hosts each year, for the French part of the event.
Short film festivals , such as the Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival , Côté Court in Pantin, or the short All Festival d’Aix ( Aixpérimental section ) have laboratory or experimental sections . The proliferation of short film festivals has boosted the visibility of experimental cinema in recent years, mainly made up of short films, as they are less expensive to produce.
The pioneering event in France was the Hyères International Young Film Festival (1965-1983) which originally scheduled works from all formats of emerging cinematographies (Czech and Brazilian new waves, first essays by Philippe Garrel ). Experimental films are shown there from the beginning. In 1973, a special section, called Cinema Diferent , was created, in which, for a decade, a wide variety of experimental films (also called different ) from all over the world were shown each year. Marcel Mazé , general delegate of the different sections of Cinema de Hyères, and president of the Young Cinema Collective, initiates, in 1999, with other filmmakers and cinephiles, theFestival of different and experimental cinemas in Paris , directed by different directors each chosen. year during a vote at the association’s General Assembly. Sarah Darmon, Bernard Cerf and Laurence Reboullion, Angélica Cuevas Portilla and Gabrielle Reiner and Frédéric Tachou have continued like this; Bernard Cerf presents, for its twelfth edition (in December 2010), a competitive section and adds the word experimental in its name. This festival is an emanation of the Young Cinema Collective, an organization that also schedules regular screenings and publishes the starsquarterly. The Light Cone cooperative organizes regular sessions through its programming branch Scratch and Scratch Collection (2019) and every two years it offers a night of the so-called “expanded” cinema: Scratch Expanded. Light Cone organizes an annual Preview show of the new acquisitions of its catalog for international programmers. The association also participates in the programming of numerous events (Le Bal, cinemas, galleries and museums…) and offers access to its catalog on its site . The Braquage / Aménagements experimentalaux association programs screenings of experimental films, as well as other distribution structures, such as Le 102 in Grenoble, or the Mire association in Nantes.
Perspectives of experimental cinema
In the last years of the 20th century , the French museum space was reorganized and most of the museums (the Louvre , the Musée d’Orsay , the Jeu de Paume National Gallery …) have been equipped with auditoriums that allowed the projection of films, whether or not related to temporary exhibitions. These films were often old films (silent for Orsay), documentaries, or experimental films. The pioneering institution in this field was the Center Pompidou which, since 1975 (two years before its opening to the public), advocated the conservation and presentation of cinema as well as works of plastic art. According to the law n ° 75-1 of January 3, 1975:“(this establishment) ensures the operation and animation, in relation to public or private organizations associated with it, of a cultural unit dedicated to all forms of artistic creation, particularly in the field of plastic arts, acoustic research and music, industrial aesthetics, cinematographic art, as well as public reading. ” .
Today, a possible opening can be found in contemporary art in the form of video or film installation, or even direct investment of the projection room as a symbolic device for cinema. We can cite the artists Pierre Huyghe , Philippe Parreno , Matthew Barney , Isaac Julien , Douglas Gordon … In 2006 and 2007, Philippe-Alain Michaud , director of the MNAM at the Center Pompidou , organized an exhibition, Le Mouvement des images, in which experimental films, videos of artists and plastic works dialogued. This event is part of a school of thought called “exposed cinema”, which advocates the release of (experimental) films from theaters to join the walls of galleries and museums. Theory supported, in particular, by Dominique Païni.
Advocates of experimental film, video art , and digital art join forces in the late 2000s on the crucial issue of cultural and heritage preservation of what is now called, for lack of better, Time Based Media . Art Press magazine dedicates a special issue, in January 2009, to this issue.
The 24/25 Collective, named in reference to the scrolling speeds of silver films and videos, was formed in 2007. This working group brings together representatives of public institutions responsible for audiovisual collections ( French Cinema Archive / CNC , BNF , National Center of Plastic Arts , INA , MAC / VAL , MAMVP , MNAM / Collections of Cinema and New Media of the Center Pompidou ) and associations whose purpose is the dissemination and safeguarding of experimental cinema and videos of ‘artists: Light Cone, the broadcaster Le Peuple qui inconnu, the circuit court association , the youth film collective , the exquise Heure! , the association pointligneplan, Instants video, Cinédoc, Videoformes . Their goal is to pool their respective databases and put them online through a comprehensive portal.
In 2009, Light Cone put this project to the test and designed, with the help of its partners, the 24/25 portal. It is a research tool in seven (but soon thirteen) French audiovisual archives and collections dedicated to the moving image: experimental and avant-garde cinema, artists’ films, video art, exhibition cinema, creative documentaries, film essays… These sets , which are perfectly complementary, cover an immense body of unique works that represent all the main avant-garde movements from the 1920s to the most recent contemporary creation. The international nature of the works represented constitutes a federated body of works that is totally exceptional in Europe. The French Ministry of Culture has granted aid for the digitization of the collections of each structure.