Experimental film & video, 2004
Tuesday, June 1st, 2004
For my cover story to this month’s Independent Film & Video Monthly, read by indie filmmakers from Manhattan to Mill Valley, I went looking for artists still breaking the barriers:
What counts as experimental in 2004? Ideas that once stretched the boundaries of what a movie is have become mainstream fare at the multiplex. Out-of-order scenes, found (or supposedly found) footage, montages, collages, computer-processed film, unscripted actors, even unaware actors . . . all standard stuff now in Hollywood. Cinema veritÈ has been taken lowbrow via reality TV and amateur video clips on the net. Digital and interactive video technologies, which once amazed both producers and audiences, have lost their novelty now that DVDs and multiplayer videogames are as common as soda pop.In search of novel approaches to the medium, we dodged the current academic and in-crowd definitions of the ìexperimental film/videoî genre, and went in search of a different, non-Establishment kind of experimentalism: Moving images that continue to probe the accepted relationships between artist, medium, and audience, and seek to break them.
