Avant-garde
films employ filmmaking styles that are different from, and often opposed to, those
used in mainstream commercial and documentary filmmaking. The term is French for ‘ahead of the crowd’
or, in modern terms, ‘cutting edge’.
These
‘experimental’ films emerged in Europe in the 1920s
when cinema was maturing as a medium and, at the same time, avant-garde
movements in the visual arts were flourishing.
Filmmakers wanted to experiment with new ideas, forms, techniques, and
expressions and the Dadaists and Surrealists were becoming very interested in
cinema, which led to a number of artists, including Hans Richter and Jean
Cocteau, contributing to Surrealist shorts.
‘Ballet Mécanique’
(1924) a short film by artist Fernand Léger
is considered one of
experimental cinema’s masterpieces. It uses a series
of images of a woman's lips and teeth, close-up shots of ordinary objects, and
repeated images of human activities and machines in rhythmic movement.
In 1928, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's short film ‘Un Chien Andalou’ came out
and is generally considered to be the most famous experimental film. This was Buñuel’s first movie and put him into film history. He used shocking imagery in the film, such as
the slicing of a woman's eyeball, and continued to use surreal imagery throughout
his career, including scenes where chickens populate nightmares, women grow
beards and aspiring saints are desired by luscious women.
The Soviet filmmakers also combined with modernist painting and
photography at this time, and the films of Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein,
Alexander Dovzhenko and Vsevolod Pudovkin were instrumental in providing an
alternate model from that offered by classical Hollywood. While not strictly experimental films, they contributed
to the film language of the avant-garde.
The United
States had some avant-garde filmmakers
before World War II but it didn’t really take off there until the 1940s. Much of the credit for the promotion of the
American avant-garde filmmakers goes to Jonas Mekas, who founded Film
Culture magazine in 1955. This
became the primary publicity organ for the American avant-garde film movement.
Research:
www.jahsonic.com
www.miracosta.cc.ca.us
www.antheil.org
en.wikipedia.org
www.imdb.com
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