Upon arriving to the 50th anniversary of the Ann Arbor Film Festival, my most curious thought concerned the audience. What would the turnout be? Are people here with a genuine interest in experimental cinema? How has a festival that highlights the more obscure world of cinema drawn an audience in an age dominated by the conventional narrative? For me, it’s an interesting question to think about.
Personally, I’m interested in the effect that a moving image can have on your emotions. How something you’ve never experienced before in person can somehow, within a mess of subconscious thought, evoke a response not generated by anything else. For narrative cinema it makes sense; stories are often drawn from life experiences and everyday emotions, making it easy for an audience to connect on an emotional level.
Then there is experimental cinema, usually using recognizable images as its basic level of content, but then altering it to a point where those recognizable images don’t create the same response they once did at the basic level. So, how do these films work? How does an approach to cinema so dedicated to stretching its boundaries from what has proven to be effective manage to attract a consistent audience? They must be doing something right.
Then there were films that experimented to a point that rendered nearly everything unrecognizable, letting the experience fall into nothing more than a meditative encounter supported by the subjective experience of each individual audience member. At that point of experimentation, interpretations differ depending on the person.
On the surface, it can be expected that the films resembling the experiences of the conventional narrative would prove to be most successful, yet the films with a more hallucinogenic approach still held their ground rather triumphantly. But the question still remains: how do these films work? The first answer that comes to mind stems from an excerpt discussed in Walter Murch’s book “In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing.”
In this book, Murch is attempting to explain why a film cut works, and he explains that: “We accept the cut because it resembles the way images are juxtaposed in our dreams. In fact, the abruptness of the cut may be one of the key determinants in actually producing the similarity between films and dreams. In the darkness of the theater, we say to ourselves, in effect, ‘This looks like reality, but it cannot be reality because it is so visually discontinuous; therefore, it must be a dream’.”
Indirectly, I believe this idea is at the root of explaining also why experimental films work, but the difference is that Murch is talking about narratives and these experimental films don’t usually look like reality. The experiences with these types of films are quite often more blatantly surreal and dream-like on the surface. The experimental film skips the idea of reality and goes directly towards a more dream-like approach, thus taking reality to the next step and requiring the audience to explore the meaning of the fabricated dream created by the filmmaker. It’s like analyzing the meaning of your own nonsensical dreams, except these dreams aren’t yours, but still require an explanation. Therefore, is the reason audiences get drawn to festivals like the one held in Ann Arbor due to a desire to experience a dream-like state within reality?
As for my desire to explore this aspect of the film medium, I think what draws me in most is the idea that I’m going to experience something that doesn’t come by the local megaplex. The expectation that I’m going to be taken to a dark corner of film that hasn’t been seen before gets a rise out of me, therefore, in a sense, I myself expect to experience dream during reality. A subjective experience with another’s “dream” can morph within, and into something completely new that changes the viewer from where they were as an individual at the beginning of the film.
So, does this get at why these types of films continue to draw an audience? I think it does. Granted, there are festival goers that walk in blindly to what they’re about to experience, but I’m referring to the individuals that know what to expect. I’m discussing the audience members that attend these events year after year, and essentially keep festivals like this alive. Although, it doesn’t mean that somebody attending the festival on a whim can’t enjoy the same experience as a person that attends regularly. Let’s just say they’re in for a rude awakening.
No comments:
Post a Comment