As a poor college student, the idea of cameraless filmmaking is alluring to me. With a canvas in the form of a film strip the powers of cinema are endless because you can evoke emotion or interest from a viewer on an instinctive level through color, rhythm, shapes, and sound. It’s like subliminally sharing an intimate secret.
Animations such as the one we saw in class makes you think of the filmmaker as a composer, equivalent to a painter or musician. It definitely takes a lot of time to master the art on a technical level as well as a creative level, and then balancing the two so that others will enjoy it. The film animation we watched in class was a journey through geometric fractals. The shapes had a distinct pattern that continued to grow and rearrange through addition and subtraction. Because it was a pattern, it could be “followed” more easily. It reminded me of jazz music in that the standards were set but there was room for structured improvisions. In contrast to the Brakhage piece we viewed, it was more mathematical and less chaotic. The pacing of the film was just right, edited to the music and musical sounds such as clapping. Brakhage had no sound because of the powerful image, but this particular filmmaker used sound to flow with the images.
Even as a pre-film student, I remember walking into my intro level class in Kenan and seeing the painted film strips hanging on the wall. I was fascinated. I heard about the class through various classmates and friends. Last semester I took Shannon’s experimental class as well as James Kruel’s Avant Garde history. After learning a lot about art history in general I knew what direction I wanted to go. I realized that the only way for film innovation is through hands on experimentation, so here I am in 6x1 ready to see what happens.
