swo17 wrote: ↑Mon Mar 27, 2023 9:44 am
I would be inclined not to limit eligibility based on length or any other terms. However, if one round of voting that way left us without a consensus, we could allow for additional rounds where people are permitted to get rid of their orphans and replace them with picks that others support.
Also, I could in theory head this up, but another question is whether zedz might like to make his triumphant return to list tabulation with such a project...
Oh, okay.
Let's kick around a few parameters here before we officially set this up, to see if we can get some coherent guidelines in place.
Working from easiest to hardest definitions, a film is eligible for consideration if it is;
- abstract (i.e. non-representational)
- non-narrative
- experimental (here's where things get tricky)
"Experimental" does not equal "independent" or "arty" or "weird": there's some kind of substantial formal leap away from the norms of commercial filmmaking involved.
Experimental cinema is film:
- created outside the mainstream commercial film industry (so studio films are therefore not eligible);
- created in some kind of opposition to the mainstream commercial film tradition (so independent films mimicking commercial forms are not eligible - Herschell Gordon Lewis may have made some bizarre films in his time, but he's not an experimental filmmaker);
- generally acknowledged to be in the tradition of "underground film", 'experimental cinema" or "avant garde cinema" (i.e. if you're the only person who argues that your pet film is experimental, for the purposes of this project, let it go and move on). There's a lot of writing on this subject, and if a filmmaker is well known but doesn't feature within it, maybe they're not part of the tradition.
Scott MacDonald's opening half-paragraph from
A Critical Cinema (a series which was - initially- concerned with US experimental film) might be useful as a reference point:
The most interesting and useful film-critical insights of recent years, it could be argued, have been coming not from the continuing elaborations of auteurism and genre studies or from the systematic application of recent French theory to popular film, but from that remarkable body of North American films known variously as "underground film," "the New American Cinema," * "experimental cinema" and "avant-garde cinema." Many, if not most, of the filmmakers loosely designated by such terms explicitly and implicitly view the dominant, commercial cinema (and its sibling, television) not as a competing mode but as a set of culturally conditioned and accepted approaches to cinema - a cultural text - to be analyzed from within the medium of film itself. One of the goals of these critical filmmakers has been to place our awareness and acceptance of the commercial forms and their highly conventionalized modes of representation into crisis. In this sense , the term "avant garde," which is widely used to designate this area of cinema, is a misnomer because it suggests that the films are important primarily because they lead the way for the more conventional forms.
MacDonald's notion of "critical cinema" isn't exactly what I imagine we're looking at (he includes independent narrative feature filmmakers who transitioned into studio work, for example), but his five volumes of interviews give a pretty thorough picture of the kind of filmmakers we're talking about:
Hollis Frampton, Larry Gottheim, Robert Huot, Take Iimura, Carolee Schneemann, Tom Chomont, J.J. Murphy, Vivienne Dick, Beth B., Scott B., Bruce Conner, Robert Nelson, Babette Mangolte, George Kuchar, Diana Barrie, Manuel DeLanda, Morgan Fisher, Robert Breer, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, James Benning, Su Friedrich, Godfrey Reggio, Yoko Ono, Michael Snow, Anne Robertson, Jonas Mekas, Bruce Baillie, Yvonne Rainer, Laura Mulvey, Lizzie Borden. Anthony McCall, Andrew Noren, Anne Severson, William Greaves, Jordan Belson, Arthur Peleshian, Ken & Flo Jacobs, Craig Baldwin, Gunvor Nelson, Rose Lowder, Peter Hutton, Valie Export, Patrick Bokanowski, Yervant Gianikian & Angela Ricci Lucchi, Elias Merhige, Aline Mare, Cauleen Smith, John Porter, Raphael Montanez Ortiz, Martin Arnold, Peter Kubelka, Harun Farocki, Peter Forgacs, Kenneth Anger, Tony Conrad, Nathaniel Dorsky, Peggy Ahwesh, Phil Solomon, Matthias Muller, Sharon Lockhart, Shiho Kano, Ernie Gehr.
Some filmmakers included in the volumes whom I didn't include above are:
Ross McElwee, Hara Kazuo, Christine Choy, Alan Berliner - as they belong more to the tradition of documentary than experimental film
John Waters, Peter Watkins, Charles Burnett, Mani Kaul - I consider these primarily narrative feature filmmakers (with Watkins sometimes straying into documentary / essay film)
Sally Potter, Chantal Akerman - that difficult category of filmmakers who have made unambiguously independent experimental films
and unambiguously commercial feature films within the industry. Will need to be considered on common-sense grounds case by case. Philippe Garrel and David Lynch would also be on this watch-list.
* For those not aware of its historical provenance, "the New American Cinema" has nothing to do with Scorsese, Coppola or Easy Rider.
