experimental-series-blog

[experimental-series-blog]

Animation and Earthworks; Eyeworks and Errata: Films by Alexander Stewart.

The films of Chicago-based filmmaker/graphic artist (and co-director of Chicago’s Eyeworks Festival of Experimental Animation) Alexander Stewart are variously energetic and animated and oddly geological. They flirt with the legacies of structural film and psychedelic cinema while adding significantly to the obscure traditions of the hand-drawn animation and film-as-abstract-graphic-art. Revealing an obsessive fascination with gradual accumulation of marks and movements and with self-imposed challenges and limitations, Stewart’s film press against their own boundaries and reveal glistening grace under pressure. 

 Errata 

 Errata (16mm, 2005) is an experimental film in which I used a photocopier to generate frames of animation. Each frame of the film is a photocopy of the previous frame. Both black & white and color photocopies were used to make this film, approximately 4,600 copies total. 

Crux Film (2013)

What I Want (2013)

Peacock (2014)

Very similar To

Disappears - Power

https://vimeo.com/72467556

[experimental-series-blog]

Croatian Avant-Garde Filmmakers of the 1960s [Yugoslav Avant-Garde Cinema, 1950s–1980s Ex-Film from an Ex-Land]

Experimental film is one of the most exciting forms of cinematic expression and, paradoxically, also one of the most ignored by the various (historical, theoretical, critical, economic, educational, etc.) discourses on the cinema. It has long been predominantly the domain of rather marginalized theory and practice, separated from the mainstream.In all of the former Yugoslavia experimental film almost unfailingly derived from the tradition of the so-called amateur film, whose home ground consisted in the numerous cinema clubs (kino klub) that flourished in all major cities of the former federation. The line separating amateur film from experimental film is thus unclear not only due to the subjectivity of judgment, but also because the former term in its most widely accepted meaning refers to the production conditions, while the latter term designates the aspirations, procedures, and effects of a specific cinematic expression. 

Furthermore, the terms experimental film and its more or less synonymous avant-garde film never really took hold in our current or former countries; thus the Croatian (or more specifically the Zagreb) school tried to shape new theories and practices, such as "antifilm", while the Belgrade school struggled with the even looser term of "alternative film".One short-term result of such interdisciplinary connections was a far richer and more diversified film production, while one of the long-term results may have been that this selfsame production made less of an impact historically as a whole. Publications dealing with the history of Slovenian film are few, and in them we search in vain for any mention of amateur or experimental film. 

The whereabouts of the few known archives (e.g. that of the ŠKUC Gallery, which in the 1970s and 1980s was one of the few venues in Ljubljana that sustained continuous promotion and production of experimental film) are unknown; and none of the present-day professional national archives is engaged in systematically maintaining extensive film oeuvres. Unlike the disastrous state of affairs in Slovenia (and slightly better one in Serbia), the avant-garde film in Croatia has been treated far better: there are monographs, historical overviews, numerous DVDs, even restored copies of film (thanks to the Croatian Film Clubs' Association); but above all, experimental film has been seamlessly integrated into the national film history as one of the principal sources of new ideas and film professionals.The most prominent members of the enormously vibrant

Croatian experimental scene of the 1960s

All of them were members of the amateur cine-clubs that formed in all the major cities of Yugoslavia at the time, as well as participants in the Genre Film Festival, a unique festival of experimental film in Zagreb that was the most important gathering point for “film researchers” and other independent filmmakers from Yugoslavia. Their approach to cinematic experiments differed greatly, from a prototype of the so-called anti-film to works that anticipated the structural film movement, to poetic-meditative orientations.

ENCOUNTER (SRETANJE) Vladimir Petek, Yugoslavia, 1963, 5 mins, B&W

THE FORENOON OF A FAUN (PRIJE PODNE JEDNOG FAUNA) Tomislav Gotovac, Yugoslavia, 1963, 8 mins, B&W.

I’M MAD, Ivan Martinac, Yugoslavia, 1967, 5 mins,.

AFTERNOON (THE GUN) (POSLIJE PODNE (PUŠKA)) Lordan Zafranović, Yugoslavia, 1968, 15 mins, B&W.