Experimental Filmmaking Research Articles

The Time of a Missing People: Elliptically Uncovering the Workday of the “Extra” in Bruno Varela’s Papeles Secundarios (2004) and Cuerpos Complementarios (2022)

This article examines some work by the Oaxaca-based Mexican experimental filmmaker and video artist Bruno Varela in order to explore the sense of Gilles Deleuze’s view that modern political cinema is characterized by a “missing” people, to which the adequate response is the people-sustaining or people-generating trance. I argue that the element missing from Deleuze’s discussion is how the typical way for a people to go “missing” under capitalism involves the obfuscation of their labor, an idea that sustains the materially grounded trance in Varela’s Papeles Secundarios (2004) and Cuerpos Complementarios (2022), drawn from the filmmaker’s experience as casting director of Iranian artist Shirin Neshat’s production of her video installation Tooba (2002) in Oaxaca. The article discusses the “baroque critique” involved in Varela’s elliptically representing the workday of the non-professional Oaxacan actors employed in Neshat’s production, understood here as a critique articulated using the detritus of that production. The result is a paradigm of trans-temporal playfulness on film that also challenges the claims to trans-temporal experience sought in Neshat’s work. Thus, the article also locates these arguments within debates about whether films can “do philosophy”, including a hypothesis about the obfuscations of labor lying behind why making-of documentaries—and their capacities to critique the philosophical pretensions of their original subjects—have not figured more centrally in those debates.

Identities and Methodologies of Doctoral Candidates Undertaking Audiovisual Research-by-Practice

“Identities and Methodologies of Doctoral Candidates Undertaking Audiovisual Research-by-Practice” comprises a triptych of video essays, crafted by the co-organisers of the inaugural B-Film Creative Practice Colloquium at the University of Birmingham. In each video, the creators reflect upon data collected during this event (including a videographic exercise, digital questionnaires, and filmed interviews). Through analysing how attendees described and executed their practice and methods, the three videos jointly and separately interrogate: • relationships of process and product in audiovisual research-by-practice; • the place of experimental filmmaking in academia; • opportunities for, and impediments to, the adoption and development of filmmaking in the academy. These works have a specific focus on postgraduate researchers and thus may provide guidance for both supervisors and future students working in creative practice research.

Professor-artist and professor-researcher

The foundation of the Universidad de las Artes inaugurated access to a public education in arts in Ecuador in 2015. As three professor-artist-researchers who have worked in different periods in this institution, we propose an article with two objectives in mind. First, we aim to share and examine the film-based artistic work that has formed part of our research practice within the university setting (and the experience of making these films in this particular context), including the experimental ethnographic documentary short Sour Lake (Dávila, 2019), the found footage essay film 1922 (Gills, 2023), and the expansive imagework design Dispositivo ORG (Terán Vargas, 2017-2024). Secondly, based on these experiences, we propose to discuss more broadly the entanglements of the professor-artist-researcher role (including how our artistic practice and research interweave with our teaching practice) and to reflect on the potential advantages of experimental filmmaking in the academic context.

‘May Our Egos Die So That the World May Live’

This image-based essay reflects upon the author’s experience of running an experimental filmmaking workshop titled Climate Futures, Cities Past in the spring of 2023 at MIT’s School of Architecture featuring stills from four student films set in Greece, Italy, Pakistan, and Syria. It explores how architectural pedagogy can intersect with filmmaking to offer a critical space outside the studio or seminar paper. Engaging eco-critical and narrative approaches of Stefanie K. Dunning, Jennifer Fay, Ursula K. Le Guin, Donna Harraway, Saidiya Hartman, Adrian J. Ivakhiv, and Ousmane Sembène, it explores how ‘cinema might teach us to die’ or rather, embrace a different eschatological paradigm that moves beyond individual authorship, accomplishment, and post-mortem legacy towards more mutualist, collectivist, and anarchic models of existence. It argues that filmmaking as inquiry can offer a way to collect different kinds of stories that help facilitate the messy, uncomfortable, and wildly creative processes of unworlding and reworlding.

The Brazilian Eisenstein (1961–1981)

ABSTRACT Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, Latin American filmmakers and filmgoers began to interpret and adapt early Soviet avant-garde cinema of the 1920s in an unprecedented fashion, extending its half-life in innovative ways. In this context, Brazil is a generative but seldom explored site. This article traces the Brazilian reception of Soviet cinematic poetics through the shifting approaches to Sergei Eisenstein in the filmography of Leon Hirszman (1937–1987). Eisenstein’s approaches to montage would shape Hirszman from his first student film to the workerist cinema that characterized his late filmography. Like his contemporary Glauber Rocha (1939–1981)—after Hirszman, the Brazilian filmmaker most marked by Eisenstein—Hirszman tranculturated the avant-garde postrevolutionary Soviet film for the truncated revolutionary context of Brazil. Changing and emphasizing different elements in Eisenstein’s understanding of montage, Hirszman consistently depicted it as a capacious opportunity for both capturing and transforming the world: registering justices and multiplying a cinematic off-screen where anti-capitalist solidarities might flourish. His experimental filmmaking praxis also suggests how Eisenstein’s montage method (activating disparate or contradictory contexts through juxtaposition) produces a paradoxical ground for comparison, a poetics of the urgent untimely, rather than either belated or diffusionist accounts of world cinema.

Experimental Filmmaking and Punk: Feminist Audio Visual Culture in the 1970s and 1980s, Rachel Garfield (2022)

Review of: Experimental Filmmaking and Punk: Feminist Audio Visual Culture in the 1970s and 1980s, Rachel Garfield (2022) London: Bloomsbury Academic, 274 pp., ISBN 978-1-78831-399-5, h/bk, £75 ISBN 978-1-35029-308-3, p/bk, £25.99 ISBN 978-1-35019-764-0, ebook, £23.39

Psychedelic Aesthetics and the Body without Organs at the Limits of Perception

This article focuses on the aesthetics of the psychedelic experience. Aldous Huxley’s Doors of Perception remains one of the few studies that investigates the aesthetic dimension of the psychedelic experience as profoundly meaningful as such, because it gives direct attention to the nonhuman otherness of the universe that is hard to describe in words, but that can be felt and sensed. Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari have investigated psychedelics as a perceptual, aesthetic, phenomenon. They argue that psychedelic aesthetics offers an experience at the limits of perception to the point of ultimate abstraction of geometric figures and grains. Drawing upon the works of two experimental filmmakers from two different generations and backgrounds, Philippe Garrel’s enigmatic Le Révélateur ( The Revealer, 1968 ) and Morgan Quaintance’s thought-provoking Surviving You, Always (2021), the borders of the perceptual field by cinematographic means will be investigated. These works are exemplary of how the nonhuman perception of the camera, its ‘bodies without organs’, and its affective intensity evoke a psychedelic, mind-revealing, experience and an ethics of – in Deleuze’s words – ‘becoming not unworthy of the event’.

The revolutionary subject: Masao Adachi and Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War

This article’s title originates from a line spoken by a revolutionary towards the end of the film Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War. Like the film born of the collaboration of politically radical Japanese experimental filmmakers and revolutionaries, this examination concerns revolution itself as a film subject. More specifically, it interrogates this film as a revolutionary tool and the limitations thereof, as well as revolution and revolutionaries captured in the film and the revolutionary as embodied in the film’s maker Masao Adachi. What it produces might be termed ‘the revolutionary subject’.

Using Experimental Filmmaking to Create an Engaging Brain-Computer Interface

Inspired by storytelling ideas in surrealist creative productions and experimental films, we created a brain-computer interface (BCI) designed to offer users an exercise of the imagination. While many previous BCIs have used simple visual interfaces, we wanted to understand if an open-ended, story-based BCI experience could be helpful for allowing users to effectively interact with the story using their brain activity. We employed experimental storytelling techniques to prompt users to explore new thought patterns and ideas for changing brain activity. In our BCI, users were able to change the color of the main character in the story using their thoughts. We found that many users were able to change brain activity and enjoyed the BCI experience, while others were primarily frustrated. Based on our results, we offer ideas for future contributions to the development of engaging, story-based BCI applications.

Stormy Images: Elemental Kinetics in the Recent Films of Takashi Makino (2018–2021)

Abstract This article examines the movements of the elements (water, air, fire, and earth) in the recent (2018–2021) films of Japanese experimental filmmaker Takashi Makino. It proposes that Makino’s unique style of filmmaking – which consists of layering thousands of moving images of the natural world on top of each other – expresses and encompasses elemental tensions between form and formlessness, clarity and obscurity, and identity and transformation. Taking the storm as an ecological force which foregrounds elemental kinetics, Makino’s films are analyzed in their capacity to disclose natural motion. This allows for a renewed conception of the elemental, understood as process and flow rather than individual units. An elemental politics of the storm emerges, which calls for the fostering of productive and complex movement rather than the stasis of conservation.

Messy Knowledge-Making with Korsakow

This paper explores interactive documentary production's power dynamics and knowledge-making practices through the ethnographic case study of Christoph, a white media scientist and trained film editor from a Western European country. Christoph's research project, conducted as part of an international and multidisciplinary team, dealt with discourses surrounding a specific restitution case in an African country. The study focuses on Christoph's use of the Korsakow software to create an interactive documentary, examining the complexities he encountered in the field and his efforts to represent them in a powercritical manner. Throughout the production process, Christoph attempted to address power relations by making himself visible in the documentary and ensuring that his authorial influence remained minimal during the film's assembly. He employed a two-fold strategy that included acquiring shaky footage without a tripod and utilizing materials that might be deemed unusable in traditional production environments. Christoph's use of Korsakow as a tool for assembling his interactive documentary served to represent the complexities he found in the field. Despite Christoph's powercritical aspirations, he acknowledged the potential bias inherent in the keywording process, stressing the importance of actively pursuing powercritique as a practice. Korsakow, as an interactive and nonlinear tool, offered an experimental environment in which Christoph could explore alternative ways of filmmaking and knowledge-making. This environment facilitated the development of open, complex, and messy practices, challenging conventional filmmaking norms. This case study raises questions about the knowledge-making practices found in interactive documentaries and how they can inform visual research methodologies. Further research may delve into the methodological implications of these findings and the potential for interactive documentary software to serve as a laboratory for experimental filmmaking practices. By examining Christoph's use of Korsakow and his efforts to navigate power dynamics in creating an interactive documentary, this paper contributes to the broader understanding of knowledge-making in non-linear and interactive film environments.

Notes for Wavelength

Abstract Notes and diagrams made by the great experimental filmmaker as he devised his revolutionary WAVELENGTH (1967).

Hélène Cixous, Laida Lertxundi, and the Fruits of the Feminine

In the fields of experimental writing and experimental filmmaking, respectively, Hélène Cixous and Laida Lertxundi gather images of fruits: apples, oranges and lemons. Although Cixous and Lertxundi are well-known for seeking something of the feminine for writing and filmmaking, in these texts and these films, fruit is not equivalent to feminine anatomy and the juiciness of neither apple, nor orange, nor lemon is mere metaphor for feminine jouissance. While Cixous and Lertxundi recognise in art, literature and philosophy an historical relation of women to nature, an essentialist equation of one to the other is loosened as the texts and the films situate apples, oranges and lemons as organic things in the world. Neither Cixous nor Lertxundi, then, eradicate the distance between human and non-human on the ground of the feminine: fruit is not entwined with women—but women do look, from time to time, at fruit. As if photosynthetically towards the sun, both Cixous and Lertxundi turn from the self towards the world, taken by the beauty and the light of fruit. In an addition to recent ecofeminist philosophy (Donna Haraway, Luce Irigaray) and also to recent feminist film-philosophy on attention (by way of Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil), I refer throughout the article to Kaja Silverman’s philosophy of ‘world spectatorship’ (2000) as I outline the way Cixous and Lertxundi each post-deconstructively combine a language of desire—feminine appetite, curiosity and pleasure—with a language of things to affirm, with women’s eyes on a simple piece of fruit, the world anew.

Not the Songs but the Singing: Sounding Sense in Colonial Films from British Mandate Palestine

This essay considers how Palestinian history and experience might be reclaimed from colonial films from British Mandate Palestine, and how sensory and synesthetic attention developed in experimental filmmaking might bear on archival footage. Analysis focuses in particular on the possibilities of sound. My reflections draw heavily on a current work in progress, Partition, which makes extensive use of found footage from Britain’s imperial collections and sound recordings made with Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and across the sites of their displacement. The film attempts to harness the disruptive potential of refugee voice to make visible the continuity of Palestinian presence in colonial archives and to deconstruct and reconstruct archival authority and colonial history.

Backdating the Crip Technoscience Manifesto

This essay considers experimental filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin’s work as a lifelong process of technological activism and “knowing-making.” Using recent frameworks from Critical Disability Studies, Chamarette demonstrates how Dwoskin’s decades of activism parallel and in some cases pre-date the evolution of Disability Studies as it is currently situated. As an early adopter of digital and ‘cusp-of digital’ technologies (Hi-8 cameras, Mini-DV tapes, email, digital editing suites), Dwoskin’s creative work aligns with and backdates the “Crip Technoscience Manifesto” developed by Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch in 2019. Drawing on Dwoskin’s films and his archive, now housed at the University of Reading Special Collections (UK) Chamarette reframes Dwoskin’s late creative activity as tactics of technological adaptation, crip technoscience, and spheres of influence within digital and non-digital realms. These digital activisms ultimately give cause to reflect on the ambivalent, interdependent, friction-filled relationships between filmmaking, digitality and disability.

Ecology/Echography

This essay deploys the theoretical frames of inheritance and echography to recover and redefine the meaning, for environmental philosophy, of Martin Heidegger’s storied hut in the Black Forest in Germany, where large portions of Being and Time and other major texts were written. Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, Stanley Cavell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others, the essay insists that a deconstructive reading is crucial to recovering and sustaining the significance for environmental philosophy of Heidegger’s work, a reading quite different from those found in Deep Ecology. In that context, the essay transforms the hut into a kind of spectral presence that is put into dialogue with other, later “echoes”: the poetry of Paul Celan, the work of experimental film-maker and artist James Benning, and the author’s own current art project, focused on a clearcut site in the mountains of Colorado.

Projek SISI TV: A Basic Guide on Experimental Cinema Involving Media Arts Collectives in Southeast Asia

In every major city in Southeast Asia, especially Kuala Lumpur, where the populace is constantly exposed to sensational mainstream media that is entertainment, it is undoubtedly difficult to find support and acceptance for producing experimental cinema on your own (DIY). Most Malaysians find the phrase "Experimental Cinema" to sound "foreign". The question "What is it? What does any of that matter to me? What exactly are you doing? Therefore, the purpose of this writing is to provide some basic guides concerning experimental cinema. We are all aware that this diverse area of cinematic art defies easy categorization, and the DIY attitude of experimental art honors the humble personal opinion. The goal is to learn about the SISI TV Art Project, which consists of a number of collective experimental video works in Southeast Asia, specifically in Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines, and to observe and hear from various viewpoints, collectives with various backgrounds, as they share the joy and bravery that experimental filmmaking has brought them. May it motivate us to share the fun with one another.

Towards a post-anthropocentric aesthetics: Kerry Tribe’s Exquisite Corpse

Kerry Tribe’s recent film on the Los Angeles River, Exquisite Corpse (), blurs the lines between genres. With aspects of documentary and experimental filmmaking, it captures interactions among human and non-human life, ecological systems and machines along the river. This article develops a post-anthropocentric aesthetics from the film by drawing on Sianne Ngai’s book, Our Aesthetic Categories (), and Rosi work on post-anthropocentrism. Bringing these resources together leads to three productive transformations of Ngai’s categories: the commodity aesthetic of cuteness becomes the differential aesthetic of interaction; the performative aesthetic of zaniness becomes the functional aesthetic of activity; and the discursive aesthetic of information becomes the peri-discursive aesthetic of sensation. The article concludes by arguing that these three aesthetic categories are well suited for describing how the contemporary built environment and the complexity of life within it might be perceived and assessed and, following Jacques Rancière, affirms these categories’ role in building a politics that is attuned to such complexities.

Film as Fabric: A visual essay signalling the importance of clothing in expanded cinema performance

In this visual essay, I discuss how clothing made for an expanded cinema performance entitled Film as Fabric took on significance. The live work shows analogue film as fabric and stitching as editing to highlight historical relationships between textile practice and experimental filmmaking. The work developed through iterations from 2013 to 2017 as a part of doctorate research carried out from 2012 to 2020. My position as an experimental filmmaker with a background in embroidery grounded the study. Annabel Nicolson’s seminal live expanded cinema performance Reel Time (1973), in which she punctured 16mm film with her unthreaded sewing machine, was also a point of departure. Feminist critique from both disciplines – film and textile studies – supported the possibility of repressed relationships between the fields. Feminist scholars have repeatedly problematized contextualization of experimental filmmaking as narrow and misplaced (Blaetz 2007; Hatfield 2006; Reynolds 2009, ; ). Until now, connections with textile practice in experimental filmmaking have been largely overlooked, most likely because domestic crafts have a long association with women’s work (), are central to deep rooted Western stereotypes of femininity, and remain denigrated art forms (). The development of Film as Fabric led to the creation of hybrid tools, forms and gestures, such as optical sounds and moving images made from fabric and stitch patterns. These were measured on the body, cut with dressmaking scissors, stitched, spliced into loops and projected in former cotton mills. This process allowed sounds associated with textile production and my personal textile ancestry to re-surface in new ways. The live context demands attention is given to material practices, which typically take place out of sight in the home and the film cutting room and have also recently undergone significant shifts in cultural status.

‘A long meandering slide’: Feminist critique, genderqueerness, sexual agency and Crip subjectivity in Stephen Dwoskin’s late works

Stephen Dwoskin was a prolific experimental filmmaker from the mid-1960s until his death in 2012. Commonly associated with the New York underground film scene and the London Filmmakers’ Co-Op, which he co-founded in 1966, Jewish-American Dwoskin was also a childhood survivor of polio and a disability rights activist. Though an enduring oral legacy of feminist criticism of Dwoskin’s work remains since the 1980s, Dwoskin’s later work from the 1990s and 2000s is acutely understudied. In this article, I recontextualize earlier feminist positions in light of the ‘cripping’ of sexuality and gender proposed by recent critical disability studies, applied to two of Dwoskin’s later works. Adopting archival evidence of feminist critique, feminist art histories and Crip approaches to sexuality, I examine androgyny and genderqueerness in Dwoskin’s photomontages from Ha, Ha! La Solution Imaginaire (1993) and conflations of critical medical and BDSM-structured care in the film Intoxicated by My Illness (2001). I conclude that Dwoskin’s work invites rich epistemological re-evaluation of both feminist critique and entrenched sociocultural conceptions of gendered subjectivity, intimacy and sexual agency.