Film Seminar-Experimental Film Research

Film Seminar-Experimental Film Research

On Friday 11th October 2013 in a seminar we watched a range of short films. These included 'Gasman' Lynne Ramsey 1997, 'Salaryman' Jake Knight 2002, 'High Rise' Gabrielle Russell 2002, 'The Lifesize Zoetrope' Mark Simon Hewis 2007, 'Strange Lights' Joe King and Tosie Pedlow 2010 and 'Christmas With Dad' Conor McCormack 2008 which ranged from Drama, documentary and experimental. We identified; the themes and focus of the films, the directors primary aim, if we liked or enjoyed it in relation to it achieving its subject matter, interesting techniques and approaches and explored the structure and style of the film.

There was also another short film that in particular stood out to me, 'Tango' Zbig Rybczynski 1981. Tango is a short experimental animation film which especially intrigued me due to how low tech and simple, but highly intelligent it is. One way it did this was my curiosity of how Zbig Rybczynski created Tango, as it was made over 30 years ago. After research I found out the Oscar winning film took 16 hours a day for 7 months to create, in which he had to draw and paint about 16000 cell-mattes, and make several hundred thousand exposures on an optical printer. Compared to the animation you see now, you could argue that Tango presents us with a poor washed out, jittery quality, but I personally think that is what gives Tango its texture and makes it feel like a piece of art, rather than just an impressive piece of craft. Another reason I think this is art rather than craft, is that the narrative is unclear in the film creating a subjective viewer experience, as through speaking to my peers it can be interpreted in different ways. The film features 36 different characters which in tern enter the room repeating the same gesture until all the space in the room is filled. One way in which this can be interpreted is that this is the life cycle at key rememberable moments throughout the stages of their life.

As a task we had to either analyse 'Love Me or Leave Me Alone' Dwane Hopkins 2003 or 'Steel Homes' Eva Webber 2008 and post my research on my blog, which I will be doing shorty.

http://vimeo.com/21175765
http://www.zbigvision.com/Tango.html