Yesterday, upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I wish, I wish he’d go away...
When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door... (slam!)
Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away
From discovering this poem my group and I came up with the idea of following a character that suffers from heavy mental issues such as an extreme case of paranoid schizophrenia. In doing this we are able to use all of our ideas from the last meeting to interesting use. We still want to keep the film as elusive and confusing as possible so the audience gets a sense of what it is like for this character that is also as troubled and confused as to what is happening to him as much as the audience is. We do not however, and have fully agreed that this film shall not be about drug use or the dark side of illegal drugs as we all thought it would be too clichéd and a weak, predictable story.
I have just finished writing the script and have written down fully how the transitions of settings and how certain shots should look. I have also included a lot of hallucination scenes that work well with the characters state of mind and the mood of the film.
During a meeting with my group project partners Amy & Connor we came up with the idea of confusion & a sense of unease. We want to create a film thats extremely elusive, confusing and also the events to be shown in a non linear technique. From watching a number of sources we like the idea of bizarre transitions for example; a character sits down in a bar, as the character sits down they are in a new location etc. We also like the technique of using p.o.v. camera shots and using grips to get really eerie shots of settings and characters. We would like to have a narrative but not so much a narrative that will make much sense or in a way even help the story. Just placing a narrative there as a starting point then playing around with it to see what we can do to create the sense of extreme paranoia and confusion with time and space.
From watching this film I really found the p.o.v. shots extremely interesting and effective. I like the details they also put in with this camera work such as blinks in the editing stage. The colours and flashes used throughout also work great to create mood and atmosphere.
Inland Empire - David Lynch - 2006
From watching this story I really liked the elusiveness of the story, how the mystery of the story is never explained. Also, the transitions from one scene to another is elusive, as throughout you are never entirely sure if the film is linear or non linear or even if the actors are playing the same characters. Very obscure and confusing, which I like for my experimental film. I also liked the use of light in this film, for some scenes the use of lighting is very experimental using just flash lights or natural lighting etc.
Pi - Darren Aronofsky - 1998
Watching this film I really enjoyed the way that the film allowed you to get into the characters confused and troubled mind. The camera was very interesting in this film using grips, hand held shots and p.o.v. shots. I also enjoyed the grainy black & white colour and the scenes that are sped up to confuse the audience even more.
The music video for 'Come to Daddy' was filmed on the same council estate where Stanley Kubrick shot many scenes in 'A Clockwork Orange'. The music video is shot around Tavy Bridge Shopping centre, Thamesmead which was demolished in 2007. Part music video, part short film, this music video experiments with the surreal but also blends in genre of horror making the video very sinister and dark.
The music video opens with an elderly woman walking her dog in a grimy, industrial estate. The dog urinates on an abandoned television left lying on a pavement, which causes it to unexpectedly come to life. A sinister morphed face or evil spirit in the television keeps singing 'I want your soul'. The elderly lady is then terrorized by a group of young children, all of whom bear the face of Richard d. James. (Aphex Twin, the masks was made my silicone from a mould of Richard D. James). The young children create havoc in the estate and appear to inhabit the abandoned buildings.
Towards the end of the video the creature or evil spirit grows out of the television and screams at the old woman's face, all the children then are gathered around the creature (which also now bears the face of Richard D. James) almost looking as though they worship this creature, the creature is wrapping his arms around the children as if looking to hug them.
The mood of the music video is very dark and shocking; at one point it was banned in the UK. Although at first it may seem experimental, frightening and slightly vague to the point of the video, from watching the video a second time I believe director Chris Cunningham had some brilliant hidden messages in the video.
I believe Chris Cunningham is trying to send a message about the media and what children watch in the media such as violence, sex etc. For example, the children all bear the face of the creature and are running around creating havoc, are they copying what they see on the television?
Also, as the creature grows out of the television the children stand around in a worshipping way and the creature is wrapping his arms around the children resembling that the creature has successfully brainwashed and gained control of the children's minds. The lyrics in the song also go with the music video as the creature in the television is screaming throughout "I want your soul…I'll eat your soul…Come to daddy" this is repeated over and over which could resemble the brainwashing of the children.
'Rubber Johnny' - Chris Cunningham - 2005
'Rubber Johnny' is a six minute experimental short film and music video using music composed by Aphex Twin. The name 'Rubber Johnny' is a British slang word for condom, as well as a description of the main character, which explains the title sequence.
The concept for 'Rubber Johnny' came from Cunningham imagining a raver morphing as he danced. The idea evolved to the present film, in which Johnny (played by Cunningham) is an isolated deformed (possibly hydrocephalic) teenager kept on a wheelchair and locked in a dark basement with his Chihuahua. The film was shot in infrared night vision on digital video.
Still from 'Rubber Johnny'
The video starts out with a blinking fluorescent light, then shows a mouse crawling over a press-sticker credit followed by the title, 'Rubber Johnny' which written on a condom is played backwards being pulled of a penis. Johnny is first seen leaning backwards in his wheelchair with his oversized head hanging over the back of it. Johnny mutters distortedly which begins the Aphex Twin track and Johnny begins to rhythmically follow it, while his dog watches. His dancing involves him performing balancing tricks with his wheelchair and deflecting light beams with his hands as he dances. During his dancing the editing jump cuts between many numbers of shots making Johnny quickly change distance to the camera and position etc., creating a very manic scene full of movement and energy.
Concept art for 'Rubber Johnny' created by Chris Cunningham
A door then opens and Johnny is interrupted by someone who appears to be his father. During this, Johnny is out of his delusion and is shown sitting upright in the wheelchair, turning to look, his father yells and swears at him unintelligibly and then slams the door again.
Johnny is then seen inhaling a large line of white powder and with this the video then becomes even more erratic and delusional along with Johnny's morphing becoming more extreme and graphic. The music becomes more spasmodic remix of the previous tune and Johnny now hides behind a door, avoiding the white light beam that he previously was deflecting with his hands. Towards the end of the video we see what appears to be Johnny getting his face smashed at high speed into a piece of glass a number of times, with the camera filming from the other side so that the elastic-like skin and even some innards can be seen flattening out onto the glass every time. This was created using prosthetic-based special effects rather than digital morphing which became a more popular and easier technique during the time of video release.
Still taken from 'Rubber Johnny'
After a while Johnny is interrupted a second time by his yelling father, after which the video ends with Johnny, once again, reclining back in his wheelchair and babbling at his Chihuahua.
This video features pop singer Kylie Minogue strolling around a city block in the suburb of Paris, France. Each time she completes a circuit of the area, a new Kylie emerges from one of the stores (who is in fact the ‘old’ or original Minogue that did the circuit the first time around), also each people in the background are duplicated in slightly different positions. The video concludes with four unperturbed Minogue’s amidst an extremely chaotic scene with each background extra also depicted four times, the video ends as a fifth Minogue emerges from the shop. Fifty extras were used and it took over fifteen takes to create the desired effect. Fifteen days were required for the video’s special effects.
The music video reminds me of an animation film created by Zbigniew Rybczynski called ‘Tango’. The setting is in a living room with a dining table where actions from a number of different characters work around each other and a repeated over and over.
Let Forever Be – Music Video – The Chemical Brothers
This video utilized ground-breaking video and film effects in its depiction of a young woman’s nightmare shot with grainy hand-held camera.
Michel Gondry successfully and cleverly used invisible transitions to actual real built sets to show effects of this woman’s nightmare, building different objects such as different sized frames and objects to create the impression of a duplicated nightmarish, tormenting, subconscious world. For the effect of the duplicates for the woman he used real life extras and created a choreographed dance so that the duplicates could mirror the woman’s dance to give an added effect of a confused grasp of reality.
Around the world – Music Video - Daft Punk
This video features robots walking around in a circle on a platform (which represents a vinyl record), tall athletes wearing tracksuits with prosthetic heads walk up and down the stairs, women dressed as synchronized swimmers move up and down another set of stairs, skeletons dance in the center of the ‘record’ and mummies dance in time with the song’s drum pattern.
Gondry is portraying a visual representation of the song; each element in the video represents a different instrument. The androids represent the singing robot voice; the physicality and small-minded rapidity of the athlete’s symbolizes the ascending/descending bass guitar; the femininity of the synchronized swimmers represent the high-pitched keyboard; the skeletons serve for the guitars and the mummies represent the drum machine.
‘Around the World’ is Gondry’s first attempt at bringing organized dancing to his music videos.
Un Chien Andalou – Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali - 1928 The surrealists were interested in releasing the power of the unconscious through procedures that followed the logic of dreams. Directors Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel used bizarre imagery and incongruous juxtapositions to recreate their own dreams.
Still from 'Un Chien Andalou'
From its startling opening sequence, in which a man slices through and woman’s eyeball with a cut-throat razor, to the grotesque corpses of its closing scene, ‘Un Chien Andalou’ is a deliberate attack on the artistic and social convention of its time, Luis Bunuel himself described it as ‘a desperate and passionate appeal to murder’. The sequence with the cut-throat razor cutting the female’s eyeball sets up the violent tone of the film and its underlying link between sex and aggression; a sort of sadistic impulse runs throughout. The films key meaning is also implied during the shot of the thin cloud cuts across the full moon and then cutting to the cut-throat razor slicing the eyeball open. It implies identity between nature and consciousness and action. However in the film much of the editing is conventional, using much of the shot/reverse shot format. Bunuel was never to pander in the arty shot; there is always a rather simple straightforwardness to his framing, composition and editing.
Still from 'Un Chien Andalou'
Un Chien Andalou’s structure is that of a dramatic one rather than a narrative one. The film is a blend of both ordinary and surreal events whose dramatic and shock qualities derive from their realist interpretation but which have no narrative cause or a sense of logic. However it is not an anti-narrative film but one that plays with narrative with many of its concerns – abstraction, free-flowing image-making, image and text, social analysis and dreams are similar to many of the European avant-garde films of the 1920’s.
Still from 'Un Chien Andalou'
Some of the images in the film such as the rotting donkeys on pianos and the severed hand, were staged before the camera, the most instinctive sequences are those where editing is used to imitate the patterns of unconscious thought, such as the sequence of puns that cuts between:
A moth, mouth, a smile that is wiped off a man’s face, an outraged woman frantically applying lipstick, a beard of pubic hair and an armpit. Many of the films imagery has been related to the Freudian terms, although Bunuel however once stated ‘Nothing in the film symbolises anything’.
Avant-garde filmmakers had a desire to prise film from the grip of conventional and popular theatrical traditions, being wilfully nonconformist and challenged the traditional conventions of cinema. Coming mostly from backgrounds in the fine and plastic arts, which were revolutionised in the first two decades of the century by Futurism, Cubism and Dada, the earliest avant-garde filmmakers wanted express and redefine moving image as an art. Experimental films are made for many reasons. The filmmaker may wish to express personal experiences or viewpoints in ways that would seem eccentric in rather than the usual, convention perspectives of the mainstream audiences and filmmakers.
Scorpio Rising - Kenneth Anger – 1964
Still from 'Scorpio Rising'
The subject in this Experimental Film from director Kenneth Anger is the motorcycle culture of the 1960's, and he includes scenes of bikers working on their machines, dressing, revelling and racing. Anger cuts in still photos, comic strips, old movies and Nazi posters.There is also no dialogue throughout the film, a style in which Anger uses throughout most of his films. Both these techniques alone show experimental techniques and practices. Each segment of the film is accompanied by a rock-and-roll song that adds an ironic or ominous tone to the images. For example, there is a scene in which a young man is tuning up his motorcycle, in which throughout Anger shows the figure of death looming over him. The sequence links biking to a death wish, an idea that returns in cartoons and other imagery throughout the film. The techniques used in Scorpio Rising creates an elusive but powerful statement, evoking the possibility that people often model their behaviour on images supplied by mass media with the use of cut in imagery of film, photos etc. the genre of rock-and-roll music also reflects the negative biker culture.
Still from 'Scorpio Rising'
The experimental filmmaker may tell no story, creating poetic reveries or visual collages full of energy such as Ballet Mecanique. The filmmaker may also create a fictional story but is revealed in such a way that challenges the viewer.
Through a series of transitions, Experimental Film can create ideas that might not have any sudden logical connection however, through the juxtaposition of the images, sounds, settings etc. We are encouraged to look for a possible connection between them.
Ballet Mecanique one of the earliest abstract films also one of the most influential, remains highly enjoyable avant-garde film and a classic example of how mundane objects can be transformed when their abstract qualities are used as the basis for a films form. Leger had an interest in machine parts which he often stylized in his distinctive developed versions of his cubism paintings. Through the focus of obscure objects and human beings and creating a visual and temporal rhythms, the film changes the expectations about the about the nature of movement. Making objects dance and turn human action into mechanical gestures and the repetition of the shots connects humans to machines without actually using them. For example, there is a scene where a woman is swinging back and forth on a swing and turning her head to the side and back again. Another repetitive shot of a close of a woman’s lips smiling and unsmiling. Obscure and quick cut images are repeated throughout the film.
