ings, they resist the kind of accessible and
universal meaning found in conventional
narrative and documentary films.^1Because most experimental films do not tell a
story in the conventional sense, incorporate
unorthodox imagery, and are motivated more by
innovation and personal expression than by com-
merce and entertainment, they help us understand
in yet another way why movies are a form of art
capable of a sort of motion-picture equivalent of
poetry. Disregarding the traditional expectations of
audiences, experimental films remind us that film—
like painting, sculpture, music, or architecture—can
be made in as many ways as there are artists.
For example, Michael Snow’s Wavelength(1967)
is a 45-minute film that consists, in what we see,
only of an exceedingly slow zoom lens shot through
a loft. Although human figures wander in and out of
the frame, departing at will from that frame or
being excluded from it as the camera moves slowly
past them, the film is almost totally devoid of any
human significance. Snow’s central concern is
space: how to conceive it, film it, and encourage
viewers to make meaning of it. Wavelength is
replete with differing qualities of space, light, expo-
sures, focal lengths, and printing techniques, all
offering rich possibilities for how we perceive these
elements and interpret their meaning. For those
who believe that a movie must represent the
human condition, Wavelengthseems empty. But for
those who believe, with D. W. Griffith, that a movie
is meant, above all, to make us see, the work demon-
strates the importance of utterly unconventional
filmmaking.
Su Friedrich’s experimental films also “make us
see,” but in different ways. Friedrich’s Sink or Swim
(1990) opens abstractly with what seems to be sci-
entific footage—a microscope’s view of sperm cells,
splitting cells, a developing fetus—inexplicably nar-
rated by a young girl’s voice recounting the mytho-
logical relationship between the goddess Athena
and her father, Zeus. As the movie’s remaining
(^1) Fred Camper, “Naming, and Defining, Avant-Garde or Exper-
imental Film” (n.d.), http://www.fredcamper.com/Film/Avant
GardeDefinition.html.
Experimental film: style as subjectAmong many
other random repetitions and animations, Fernand Léger
and Dudley Murphy’s Ballet Mécanique(1924) repeatedly
loops footage of a woman climbing stairs. This action lacks
completion or narrative purpose and instead functions as a
rhythmic counterpart to other sections of the film, in which
more abstract objects are animated and choreographed in
(as the title puts it) a “mechanical ballet.”
TYPES OF MOVIES 77