As an art form, film has a special quality that music, painting, sculpture, poetry, and literature don't share: it incorporates these other art forms into itself. With experimental film, the filmmaker takes the film ur-form and tries to bend it into... [more]

As an art form, film has a special quality that music, painting, sculpture, poetry, and literature don't share: it incorporates these other art forms into itself. With experimental film, the filmmaker takes the film ur-form and tries to bend it into a new shape by stressing and straining any and all of the various sub-disciplines. Experimental films explicitly embark on an exploration of new presentation methods, developing innovative techniques for combining sight and sound, light and word. Continually struggling to challenge the audience's preconceptions and expectations, experimental filmmakers invite viewers to see the world in a new way, to think differently about reality. The drive to experiment with film has been widespread from the earliest days of filmmaking. In fact, we can say that all early films were by definition experimental, as filmmakers first explored the opportunities that this synergistic art form presents. In the first film made, the Lumiere brothers recorded a train pulling into a station. The audience, having never experienced anything like a moving picture and not comprehending that what they were seeing wasn't real, nearly fled the theater in panic -- they thought they were going to be run down by a locomotive. Filmmakers have striven to achieve such reactions from their audiences ever since. But film, even documentary, is inherently fictional: it is a representation of reality, not reality itself. Filmmakers make many decisions -- regarding lighting, editing, position, music, dialogue, movement, camera angle, and so much more -- that significantly affect the ensuing representation of reality. Experimental filmmakers make these decisions in such a way that reality itself is brought into question and we are forced to look into ourselves and explore the ways that our own internal "directors" organize our perceptions. [show less]