Five essen­tial exper­i­men­tal short films

When it came to forg­ing a blue­print for the won­drous and exot­ic pos­si­bil­i­ties of exper­i­men­tal cin­e­ma, this is pret­ty much the equiv­a­lent of a sparkling sum­mer block­buster. A scan­dalous minia­ture dropped dur­ing dur­ing the twi­light years of the Jazz age, it marks a mar­riage between the unique sen­si­bil­i­ties of the sur­re­al­ist art-world provo­ca­teur Sal­vador Dalí, and the arch, anti-author­i­tar­i­an film­mak­er, Luis Buñuel. It’s a film which offers a bar­rage of stark, sur­pris­ing images, wit­ty jux­ta­po­si­tions and florid eroti­cism. Its shock­ing cen­tre­piece – a razor slid­ing across the sur­face of an eye­ball – remains an unwatch­able gore effect for the ages.

Fans of David Lynch will def­i­nite­ly want to seek out this 1943 mas­ter­piece from hus­band and wife Maya Deren and Alexan­dr Hack­en­schmied. It’s an exam­ple of film as pure atmos­phere, where the cam­era imbues banal house­hold objects such as a loaf of bread, a key and a record play with a sense of pure dread. It chan­nels clas­sic Hol­ly­wood noir and goth­ic hor­ror while employ­ing a range of sim­ple tech­niques for inno­v­a­tive, expres­sive effect. It deals with dreams and dou­bles, and the mesh­es them­selves are both dec­o­ra­tive, bil­low­ing cur­tains and a por­tal into an alter­na­tive dimension.

If some­one tells you that the only thing you need to make a movie is a cam­era, tell them it’s not true and direct them to Stan Brakhage’s 1963 short Moth­light. Instead of using the cam­era eye as per­spec­tive point, Brakhage instead col­lect­ed moth wings and var­i­ous oth­er frag­ments of flo­ra and fau­na and phys­i­cal­ly pressed them on to a strip of 16mm film. The result is 24 unique images per sec­ond, as we can see the intri­cate cap­il­lar­ies of a moth wing as swift­ly as we would had it had flut­tered past our eye line in real time. It’s a film which exem­pli­fies the director’s project of merg­ing organ­ic and mechan­i­cal forms to cre­ate tran­scen­dent visu­al beauty.

The essence of lan­guage and the impos­si­bil­i­ty of com­mu­ni­ca­tion are the sub­jects of this stun­ning 1982 trip­tych from Czech ani­ma­tor Jan Švankma­jer. Employ­ing tac­tile clay mod­els and stop-frame ani­ma­tion, this sin­gu­lar direc­tor offers three exam­ples of human dis­course with each one break­ing down into impas­sioned vio­lence. The high­light is a cou­ple merg­ing in a lov­ing embrace, synched per­fect­ly to Jan Klusák’s baroque, vio­la-dri­ven score. Lat­er, the mood switch­es on a dime and the pair lit­er­al­ly start claw­ing chunks out of one anoth­er. Grotesque body hor­ror has sel­dom looked this gorgeous.

Some of the best exper­i­men­tal films take clas­si­cal genre as a bedrock, and build upwards from there. Aus­tri­an film col­lage artist Peter Tscherkassky takes as his base mate­r­i­al a sec­tion of footage from 1982 pulp hor­ror film The Enti­ty – in which Bar­bara Her­shey plays a women who is being sex­u­al­ly abused by a mys­tery appari­tion – and builds it into some­thing more abstract and ter­ri­fy­ing. By lay­er­ing, churn­ing and bruis­ing the image, he cre­ates a mood piece that is com­plete­ly orig­i­nal and which taps a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent vein of visu­al fear. A sound bed of aggres­sive white noise is what nudges this into the realms of greatness.

Want to be able to make movies like this? Stafford­shire University’s unique Exper­i­men­tal Film Pro­duc­tion degree allows you to com­bine being a cre­ative artist with becom­ing a film­mak­er of the future. It is ide­al if you’re inter­est­ed in estab­lish­ing a career in film, tele­vi­sion and the arts.

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