Night of the Experimental Film 2023

Larry Gottheim’s Fog Line is a minimalist short film described by Jonas Mekas as ​“a small but perfect film.” Throughout a static shot of a landscape with a few lone trees and prominent power lines, real and cinematic duration become entangled. As the fog slowly lifts along the sloping horizon line, the viewer is invited to pay attention to subtle changes and details that would otherwise go unnoticed. Gottheim reflects on how we read, perceive and cultivate nature, and how film thereby directs our viewing experience, navigating between the abstract and the concrete, the apprehensible and the mysterious, the analytical and the synthetic, the still and the kinetic. His film is situated within 1970s structural cinema, an avant-garde movement that focused on the fundamental building stones of cinema, such as time, space and the material nature of the medium. Each frame in Fog Line is the same and yet different from the previous one, allowing the natural elements of the landscape — the vegetation, the sky, the horizon line – to establish new relationships with the tonality, grain and composition of the film image as an artificial construct, resulting in a fluid reality that can be characterized both as slightly ridiculous and as heavily sublime.

Bouquets 21 – 30 by Rose Lowder celebrates the natural splendor of flowers. Her symphony of colors and shapes, created between 2001 and 2005, is a masterpiece of visual poetry that manages to capture the growth and blooming of flowers in a dynamic play of light, color and movement. By editing in-camera and re-exposing the same photogram over and over again, a cinematic layer is added to the images of nature that creates a rhythmic dance between the blooming flowers and the filmmaker’s technical interventions. The title ​“Bouquets 21 – 30″ indicates that the film is a collection, a bouquet of different floral motifs. Each bouquet seems to tell its own story, to represent a different choreography of colors that invites the viewer to delve deeper into the aesthetic and symbolic meanings of flowers. The film is not merely a recording of nature, but above all an ode to its endless diversity that leads the viewer, eye to eye with the beauty and poetry of the everyday, through the contemplation of a bouquet of flowers to the amazement over a cinematically orchestrated bouquet of images.

Teo Hernandez’s Corps Aboli is a cinematic poem in which the human body, by means of color filters, fragmented close-ups and dynamic camera movements, becomes a living canvas on which emotions and ideas can be projected. The result is a collage of visual impressions that present the body not only as a physical entity, but also as a poetic and symbolic expression of the human soul. The spectator is made part of an psychological expedition, a voyage into the hidden layers of our condition humaine. As Hernandez delves deep into the human anatomy, he creates an atmosphere that is both intimately erotic and mysteriously abstract. The naked body becomes a sculpture in an inky black space where time seems to freeze, thereby revealing something about the dark core of our being.

Meshes of the Afternoon is a mesmerizing masterpiece of experimental film in which Maya Deren and her then-husband Alexander Hammid explore the depths of the human psyche through a hypnotic trip of surreal dreamscapes. The viewer is immersed in the alienating reality of a woman, played by Maya Deren herself, struggling with hidden desires and inner demons. The film opens quietly with Deren wandering through a garden with a flower in her hand, but soon abrupt transitions and expressive camera angles give way to a world between reality and imagination in which keys open mysterious doors and a figure with a mirror as a face appears and reappears. This so-called ​“trance film” abandons a classical narrative to prioritize repetitiveness and symbolism, leading us to absorb the emotional intensity of the images and inviting us to embrace rather than seek to unravel the mystery of our subjective identities. Deren often resisted overly symbolic and Freudian readings that turned the bread knife or the telephone into something other than what they were to her, being ​“objects whose value and meaning is defined and confirmed by their actual function in the context of the film as a whole.”

Philippe Cote’s Des nuages aux fêlures de la terre begins as a dreamy symphony of clouds, with the camera following the dancing clouds as they take shape, gradually transform and dissolve again. As the film progresses, the focus shifts to the earth itself. Cote’s film explores the physical elements of nature, from majestic mountains to meandering rivers, capturing the unique textures and contours of the landscape with an almost painterly eye. Cote’s approach to the natural world is not merely documentary, but rather lyrical in its embrace of the earth’s physical beauty. By interweaving the primary elements of air and earth, the film is an ode to the complex fragility of our ecosystem. Itrenders the cinematic journey through the clouds and deep into cracks of the earth into a meditative experience that reminds us that nature, in all its apparent simplicity and inexplicable beauty, is a constant source of inspiration and wonder.

Jean Painlevé’s La Pieuvre has recently been restored making this cinematic dive into the depths of the ocean even more fresh, colorful and corporeal. The octopus, as an infinitely fascinating protagonist, becomes not only an object of study but also a source of admiration and wonder. The film opens with intriguing black-and-white images in which the octopus seems to dance like an alien in its natural habitat. The camera then captures its graceful movements, its sucking tentacles and its ability to change color, and all this with a meticulous eye for composition and framing. Painlevé not only catches the octopus’ unique appearance and behavior on pellicule, but also manages to evoke the spirit of early experimental film. To watch La Pieuvre is to rediscover an era when filmmakers explored the limits of technology and cinematic imagination and laid the groundwork for the cinematography of the future. The film is botha cinematic masterpiece and a historical document that reflects the evolution of film as an art form and testifies to the fascination with the unknown — both in terms of the mystery of the octopus and the infinite possibilities of the medium of film.