Alternative Film and Video Practice: A Written Blog

WEEK 1: Introduction

As a mature student entering my final year studying Film Production at Brunel University London, I have decided to take a module on alternative film - or to name it properly, Alternative Film and Video Practice. I’m always interested in film as a creative art away from the business of film, away from film as a purely entertainment medium for commercial purposes. The first week of studying alternative film certainly gave insight into film as something other than a commercial product.

This first week was an introduction and quick examination of the avant-garde in filmmaking. We were introduced to various artistic movements beginning with Cubism before moving on to Futurism, Dada - sometimes known as Dadaism - and Surrealism. We were also given a taste of the avant-garde and experimental filmmaking by watching the Larry Gottheims’s 1970 silent film Fog Line (Gottheim, 1970, United States). Fog Line is a an almost 11 minute long film showing nothing more than fog moving and slowly revealing trees and what appears to be either power lines or phone lines that had been previously hidden in the fog.

It is difficult for me to restrain myself from making a joke directly comparing Gottheim’s Fog Line to John Carpenter’s The Fog (Carpenter, 1980, United States). Jokes aside, however, this comparison serves as an example encapsulating my interest in examining film away from commercial interest. The Fog is a commercially successful horror film designed to entertain, as well as scare, the masses, while Fog Line is something else entirely. MacDonald points to this difference between the commercial and the alternative while examining the history and emergence of academic studies of film and the development of American independent film that occurred in the 60s and 70s (MacDonald, 2001, p.29). MacDonald claims that these developments lead to filmmakers having a “cultural critique” that was “… often directed at the commercialism of Hollywood, which was seen as a particularly visible index of the increasingly rampant materialism of capitalist culture” (MacDonald, 2001, p.29). MacDonald then holds up Fog Line as “anticommercial” and it’s creator Larry Gottheim as a filmmaker attempting to embark on an “anticommercial filmmaking career” (MacDonald, 2001, p.30).

So Fog Line is intentionally separated from the commercial film, or rather, from the mainstream. There is sometimes difficulty in defining exactly what avant-garde is in relation to film however, after all, a film can be weird and unusual and still have some commercial success. Darren Aronofsky’s bizarre religious allegory Mother! (2017, United States) did make money at the box office. O’Pray states “There has been little agreement among historians or artists as to what is meant by the term ‘avant-garde’ in relation to film’ (O’Pray, 2003, p.1), but then goes on to define avant-garde as “film-makers who… are fundamentally different to their mainstream counterparts - no-budget, intensely personal and using quite different distribution and exhibition circuits” (O’Pray, 2003, p.2). I feel that there is an exception, however.

My first experience learning anything about the Dada movement came when I discovered a YouTube by Lindsay Ellis - a University of Southern California film graduate - asking if Tom Green’s Freddy Got Fingered (2001, United States) is a Dadaist Masterpiece (Ellis, 2016). The Lindsay Ellis video comes down on the side of Freddy Got Fingered not being Dadaist, it apparently has too much plot and looks too much like a conventional film to be Dada. However, the video briefly introduces Dada as an art form that is anti-art, and if film can be looked upon as an art form in and of itself, then Freddy Got Fingered is certainly a film that is anti-art.

The YouTube channel RedLetterMedia also have a video on Freddy Got Fingered (RedLetterMedia, 2018), in which they argue that the film is a meta criticism of the people who gave Tom Green roughly $14 million to make this film. They argue that Tom Green seems to be rejecting the studio that gave him the money to make the film, and intentionally insulting his audience. Freddy Got Fingered seems to be a deconstruction of the type of mainstream Romantic Comedy that was popular in the late 90s and early 2000s. It can be argued, then, that Freddy Got Fingered is a $14 million alternative film. It is an absurdist comedy film that seems to be anti Romantic Comedy that can, probably, be argued is actually a Surrealist film.

In this lecture, I was also introduced to Surrealist concept of ‘automatic writing’. Automatic writing is a Surrealist writing technique to try to tap into the unconscious to write, to write without intention and tap into automatism. There’s various surrealist writing techniques, including having a group of writers working together, writing a word or a sentence one at a time, then folding the paper and passing it on so that the next writer doesn’t know what the previous writer has written. Eventually, together they’ll produce a combined written work that doesn’t conform to the narrative structure of most novels. There’s also the technique of having a group of writers sleep in a room together and then write down their dreams when they wake up, those dreams will then, again, be turned into a combined work. I’m fascinated by the idea of a group of people all working on something separately that will then be turned into a combined work, and I’m wondering if we could use a similar technique for our own alternative film. I’m thinking that we could make an experimental film where each member films their own content which will then be passed onto another person to edit, and then eventually all be brought together and edited to create one complete film.

WEEKS 2 and 3: The City

The second week of studying alternative film wasn’t spent in a lecture but was instead spent visiting the Tate Modern in the Bankside area of London, followed by a long walk to Canary Wharf. As students who for this module will be tasked with producing a piece of film art, it was fascinating to see the art on display at the Tate Modern. Two exhibitions stood out to me.

First, Quarta-feira de cinzas / Epilogue (2006, Brazil) by artists Rivane Neuenschwander and Cao Guimarães is a projected short film that shows ants carrying away colourful pieces of confetti the morning after a carnival. The film only lasts 5 minutes and 43 seconds, however, it is played on a loop and unless you happen to catch it from the beginning and watch through to the end, if you catch it in the middle, you’re never quite sure where the ants are in their journey. I also never learned why the ants were carrying away the pieces of confetti to begin with, are they made of sugar? Are the ants consuming them ? Or are they taking them for some other purpose? I’m sure those questions have a definite answer but I never learned it. There is, however, something fascinating about watching the ants, and something poetic and beautiful about watching the ants carrying the various colours of the confetti, like a swarm of moving coloured dots sweeping across the landscape.

The second piece that stood out to me was Blue Purple Tilt by Jenny Holzer. Blue Purple Tilt is made up of 7 tall LED lights that look like they’re leaning against a wall. Each LED light - or sign - displays a scrolling message. Displaying bright blues and purples, the signs are beautiful to look at, however, if you stand long enough attempting to keep up with and read the scrolling writing, the message becomes lost as the words speed by, meshing into a mess of unreadable almost alien letters.

Walking through London from the Tate Modern to Canary Wharf, the thing that really stands out is that London is a city in constant flux, caught between the past and the new. London is constantly being shapes and reshaped but the remnants of London’s past as an industrial city remain. The Tate Modern is a testament to this change as what is now a an art gallery was once a power station, the Bankside Power Station to be exact. London’s old architecture remains but has been repurposed as something new. One of the many things that fascinated me when I first moved to the Greater London area was one of the methods by which some buildings in the inner city are redeveloped. I seen plenty of buildings that had been demolished almost entirely but with the facade, the building front intact, leaving nothing but a strange wall with doors and windows but no actual building behind it. London is a city constantly on the move and things always carry on around these new building. If you go to Oxford Street right now you’ll see a couple of big buildings being redeveloped while the shops below remain open as always, essentially building something new on top of the shops that function below and will eventually be part of the ‘new’ building. Even the building that I used to work in - Film House, 142 Wardour Street - has been completely gutted inside as it is being redeveloped, and I’m sure that I would no longer recognise the interior building. London is constantly changing, but in some ways never changing.

For week 3 of the module the focus remained on the city, not only London, but how cities are represented in film. Cities were actually represented very early on in the history of film as some of the earliest examples of film were a type of film named ‘City Symphonies’. Stein explains that the city symphonies of the 1920s would often capture a 24-hour period of city life but focused on the spatial organisation of a city and the industrial labour of the workers of the city (Stein, 2022). Stein further explains the impact that these films had on the narrative form of film even though they are supposedly non-narrative in nature, the films are cut to a rhythm which creates it’s own near-narrative form (Stein, 2022).

I’m interested in seeing how my own city, London, is presented in film. It was surreal for me to see locations where I would walk everyday due to working in the Soho area popping up in the British Independent Horror Film Cradle of Fear (Chandon, 2001, United Kingdom). However, what I found most interesting in our examination of cities on film was watching the first part of the film Los Angeles Plays Itself (Andersen, 2004, United States). In the documentary, Los Angeles is an interesting case study for the representation of a city in film as it’s very much a city that revolves around film. In the film we see Los Angeles morph and almost bend itself as a location for film, as buildings change purpose from film to film, and parts of the geography of Los Angeles changes to suit a narrative. Another film which features Los Angeles but isn’t shot entirely in Los Angeles in Her (Jonze, 2013, United States). Her is set in some undefined near future version of Los Angeles, however, the filming was split between Los Angeles and Shanghai. This gives the city within the film a unique look and feel, it has it’s own architecture and spacial organisation that doesn’t exist in the real world even though the film was shot at real locations (Prilepchanska, 2022).

WEEK 4: Water

It has dawned on me that while this module relates to the study of alternative film, it is also supposed to relate to the environment and how we can show the environment through our filmmaking. I was so wrapped up in the things that interest me personally on the module, such as experimental film and the separation between alternative film and commercial film, that I have completely neglected the environment part of the module. Now I’m somewhat lost.

This week we looked at water and watched the film Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor and Paravel, 2012, United States). I was also introduced to the concept of Hydrofeminism for the first time. Astrida Neimanis encourages us to think of ourselves as bodies of water, stating 60 to 90 percent of our bodily matter is made up of water (Neimanis, 2014, p. 1-2). We are therefore not separate from water, and water is not simply a resource for us to consume, we are connected to water, and by extension we are connected to nature and the environment.

Leviathan begins chaotically as we are plunged into darkness, we can’t see much but we can hear the sea, along with the wind and clattering chains. We are immersed straight into the world of a fishing boat without ever really getting a human point of view at this stage. We see the fishermen but when they talk their speech seems garbled and indecipherable, almost like we’re not supposed to understand them. We are on the fishing boat and occasionally have a view from cameras attached to the fisherman’s clothes, but we’re never invited to believe that we are fishing with them, we never seem to be put into their point of view. At various points in the film the cameras sink below the waves, immersing us, the audience, back into the sea and reuniting our watery bodies with the water in line with the concept of Hydrofeminism as proposed by Neimanis.

WEEK 5: Matter

This week in Alternative Film and Video Practice we looked at Matter. Does it really matter? I guess so, so let’s look at why it matters.

Matter deals with the physical stuff of film, the material that is was used to create a movie, the actual reel of film itself. The film that we had to watch this week was Stan Brakhage’s Dog Star Man (1961-1964, United States). When we talk about Stan Brakhage and ‘the physical stuff’ of film, it is because one of the techniques that Brakhage was known for was to apply scratches and paint directly onto the filmstrip of his movies (Camper, 2010). Not just using the filmstrip to capture an image as it was designed to be used, but also using it as a sort of canvas to be manipulated in other experimental ways.

Though, maybe difficult to watch for some, it did take me a few attempts to watch it myself, Dog Star Man is a fascinating film that uses some of these techniques of directly scratching or colouring the film stock. Dog Star Man is an experimental film with a possibly abstract meanings. Early in the film we are bombarded with colours and quick cuts. The image above is me attempting to explain what Dog Star Man may be about as part of my homework for the week. Being an experimental film, Dog Star Man, of course doesn’t have to be about anything, however, I offered one possible interpretation that the film is about the life cycle of one particular human man.

WEEK 7: Wilderness

This week in alternative film was an… interesting week. This week we was introduced to the work of James Benning, who I think I find endlessly entertaining. We watched Benning’s Stemple Pass (2012, United States), and if you Google Stemple Pass right now you’ll see that if is described by Google as a Documentary/Horror and I can see why it’s described that. However, I find Stemple Pass to be a wonderfully unusual film that I find incredibly watchable. The film is a fixed shot for more than two hours on the eponymous Stemple Pass, in which time we see each of the four seasons for 30 minutes each while Bending himself reads diary entries from the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. We’re not actually watching much, we do see a reconstruction of Ted Kaczynski’s own cabin and though Stemple Pass changes from season to season, nothing much changes in each 30 minute segment that we’re watching it. However, seeing the relative peace of nature juxtaposed with Benning’s weird monotonous reading Kaczynski’s diary as he describes his violent acts and invites the FBI to fellate him, creates something weirdly watchable, and I think, actually sort of entertaining.

Benning is a fascinating filmmaker because he seems to want to test the patience of his audience. He holds on shots that don’t seem to be doing anything if you run out of patience after a couple of minutes, but stick with it and you’ll have witnessed something. In Stemple Pass, he is showing us nature while reading aloud the violent acts of a domestic terrorist who is committing these acts of violence in the name of protecting nature.

WEEK 8: Desert

Last week in Alternative Film and Video Practice, we looked at James Benning’s film that was, at least partially, about the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. Kaczynski was a man who hid away in nature in order to launch violent attacks against the government in the name of nature. Kaczynski’s own diary entries reveal him to be a violent man, however, the natural environment in Benning’s film Stemple Pass (2012, United States) is shown to be relatively peaceful.

This week, however, we looked at the ways in nature itself can be violent. Violent may not be the correct word, inhospitable may be a better word, however we looked at environments that can actually kill people, and are used to kill people. By ‘used to kill people’, I mean areas of land where the environment is hostile to humans and are subsequently used by governments to control migration. Migrants have all other routes closed off and are funnelled into these areas but undertake the journey at their own risk. These are known as ‘spaces of exception’, spaces that are incredibly dangerous, such as the desert, where the chances of survival are slim. Nature itself becomes the agent of violence. The governments that don’t want migrants don’t have to kill you, but they also don’t have to save you.

Being an island, here in the UK we are surrounded by a ‘space of exception’ in that we are surrounded by water. Nigel Farage and his like have been waging a propaganda campaign to stop boats of migrants crossing the English Channel. Part of this campaign is to convince people that the French Navy, as well as the Royal National Lifeguard Institution (or RNLI) are accompanying migrants across the Channel when most likely they’re just doing their job and ensuring no one dies (The Ferret, 2021; Robson, 2020). They will often attempt to spread the message that RNLI shouldn’t be saving immigrants attempting to reach the UK via crossing the Channel. Of course they’ll not come out and say openly that they want people to die, but they do know that in most cases where people find themselves in bother while crossing the channel, that’s the only alternative. They are either rescued by the RNLI or they drown. Some would argue that this mass loss of human life constitutes a deterrent to put people off of attempting the perilous journey while others would say this is simply callous.

WEEK 9: Earth, Extraction, Extinction

The last week looking at Alternative Film and Video Practice was a cheery one as we looked at how humans have changed the planet in ways that’s eventually lead to our extinction. The thing that is leading us down this road to our own demise is capitalism. We are taking all of the natural resources out of the Earth en masse for the sake of profits big companies. This is what is meant by extraction. The problem with this system is that those resources can’t be replaced, everything is finite. Demos calls this extractivist logic “Capitalocene”, or “a world sacrificing the earth itself to the interests of short-term profits” (Demos, dispatchesjournal).

We know the causes of climate change, we can’t plead ignorance anymore when the world around us becomes more and more unlivable at a time when more and more people are trying to live in it. However, we also know that our behaviour isn’t going to change anytime soon, not while corporations are able to keep extracting resources for free - other than labour costs - and sell them at a profit.

I began this module trying to make a point about Tom Green’s Freddy Got Fingered (Green, 2001, United States) being a rare high budget alternative film, and I end it contemplating our existence, our almost inevitable extinction by our own hand, and what exactly I can do about it by making avant-garde films.

On the bright side, the module has left me feeling rebellious about my future filmmaking.

References

Camper, F. (2010) ‘By Brakhage: The Act of Seeing . . .’, Criterion, 25 May. Available at: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/272-by-brakhage-the-act-of-seeing (Accessed: 25 March 2024)

Cradle of Fear (2001) Directed by Alex Chandon [Film]. United Kingdom: Film 2000

Demos, T, J. ‘Blackout: The Necropolitics of Extraction’, dispatches journal, Available at: https://dispatchesjournal.org/articles/blackout-the-necropolitics-of-extraction/ (Accessed: 25 March 2024)

Dog Star Man (1961-1964) Directed by Stan Brakhage [Film]. United States

Ellis, L. (2016) Is Freddy Got Fingered a Dadaist Masterpiece?. 25 February. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3v_wfECtCvQ (Accessed: 25 March 2024)

Ferret Journalists. (2021) ‘Claim by Nigel Farage about RNLI is False’, The Ferret, 4 August. Available at: https://theferret.scot/claim-nigel-farage-about-rnli-taxi-service-false/ (Accessed: 25 March 2024)

Fog Line (1970) Directed by Larry Gottheim [Film]. United States: The Film-Makers' Cooperative

Freddy Got Fingered (2001) Directed by Tom Green [Film]. United States: 20th Century Fox

Her (2013) Directed by Spike Jonze [Film]. United States: Warner Bros. Pictures

Leviathan (2012) Directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylo and Véréna Paravel [Film]. United States: Cinema Guild

Los Angeles Plays Itself (2004) Directed by Thom Andersen [Film]. United States: Thom Andersen Productions

MacDonald, S. (2001) ‘The Garden in the Machine’, in The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place. Available at: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/brunelu/reader.action?docID=893088 (Accessed: 25 March 2024).

Mother! (2017) Directed by Darren Aronofsky [Film]. United States: Paramount Pictures

Neimanis, A. (2014): ‘Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water’. Available at: https://spacestudios.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/hydrofeminism_or_on_becoming_a_body_of_water.pdf (Accessed: 25/03/2024)

Neuenschwander, R. and Guimarães, C. (2006) Quarta-feira de cinzas / Epilogue. Available at: https://vimeo.com/112728720 (Accessed: 25 March 2024)

O’Pray, M. (2003) Avant-Garde Film: Forms, Themes and Passions. London: Wallflower Press

Prilepchanska, S. (2022) An Architectural Review of Her. Available at: https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/rtf-architectural-reviews/a8654-an-architectural-review-of-her/ (Accessed: 25 March 2024)

RedLetterMedia (2018) Freddy Got Fingered - re:View. 24 March. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEn3wcpNsg8 (Accessed: 25 March 2024)

Robson, B. (2020) ‘Nigel Farage films migrants in English Channel heading to Dover and alleges French Navy made threats over filming’ Kent Online, 21 May, Available at: https://www.kentonline.co.uk/dover/news/nigel-farage-films-national-scandal-of-migrants-in-boats-227551/ (Accessed: 25 March 2024)

Stein, E. (2022) ‘Telling one another’s stories: the city symphony and cine-genre narrative’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, 20(2), pp. 25-36. Available at: https://doi-org.ezproxy.brunel.ac.uk/10.1080/17400309.2021.1981711

Stemple Pass (2012) Directed by James Benning [Film]. United States

The Fog (1980) Directed by John Carpenter [Film]. United States: AVCO Embassy Pictures