Watching experimental film is a bit like reading poetry that uses abstract sounds rather than complete words. There's certainly something lurking beneath it all, but without the benefit of concrete meaning to latch onto, the experience is akin to diving headfirst into murky water with only a slim chance of reorienting yourself accordingly.
The viewing process often entails just as much guesswork as it does effective interpretation, and the mental gymnastics required to keep up are very different from the comfortable, familiar feeling of switching on your favorite television show.
True to form, this year's presentation of The International Experimental Cinema Exposition (somewhat nonsensically abbreviated as TIE) offered up 11 films, among them plenty of head-scratchers and more than a few fascinating pictures. It was held on March 5 at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston.
The program, which is committed to exhibiting "film on film" — as opposed to digital media — provides an outlet for avant-garde directors to showcase their work to audiences around the globe.
So what is it that makes a film "experimental?" Well, there's a strong tendency toward rapid-fire editing and constantly shifting images — usually abstract — that suit the films less to passive viewing and more to the challenging territory of requiring active interpretation.
Running time, too, isn't quite on par with what you'd see at AMC: The longest-running film clocked in at a scant 20 minutes. Still, the unfamiliar and obtuse nature of their material has a way of making brief works feel a great deal longer than they actually are.
Frank Biesendorfer's one-minute film, "Cold Fried Chicken," which opened the program, is a quintessential example of this odd phenomenon. With sprocket holes skittering through the frame to simulate the effect of a filmstrip, the viewing area is bisected into separate panels, each presenting a rogues' gallery of seemingly unrelated footage and shifting colors. A kaleidoscope of abstract imagery, including a frame of two vertically inverted trees that seem moments away from falling out of the sky, is striking enough to linger in the memory.
Many of the subsequent films keep close company to the structural underpinnings of "Cold Fried Chicken," progressing their stories through tangentially connected, rapidly transitioning images. In Dominic Angerame's "The Soul of Things," this takes the form of multi-layered, gray-scale renderings of industrial construction and destruction, including a chilling frame of black-and-white caution tape fluttering in the wind.
While several films delve so deeply into the obscure as to be off-putting — Saul Levine's "Light Lick: Daily Camera," for instance — Paul Turano's "Album Leaf" and Kyle Glowacky's "Ioka" stand out as the two pictures most grounded in discernible reality. Whether or not that accessibility betrays some element of the experimental label is debatable, and the filmmakers' willingness to borrow from more traditional practices benefits their work as a whole.
"Album Leaf" is noteworthy for its earthy, natural vibrancy. Where many of the experimental works are dragged down by a detached, clinical vibe, Turano deftly captures a simple portrait of a pianist bathed in natural light and spilling over with otherworldly radiance. His film presents a sort of hyper-reality that is both grander and more delicate than the world from whence it came.
Similarly, "Ioka" can't help but charm its audience with its rustic elegance. The documentary short is a love letter to the now-closed Ioka Theater in Exeter, N.H., and the Bachelor of Fine Arts thesis of Emerson student Kyle Glowacky. "Ioka" nods to old-world techniques like optical printing, which layer images over one another in a single frame. The piece strikes an incredible balance between antiquity and youthful nostalgia, concluding the program exquisitely.
Unsurprisingly, the question-and-answer periods that followed the films' presentation proved the directors to be nearly as inscrutable as their material. Among them, the young Glowacky communicated most directly about his work, perhaps because he is a newcomer to the idiosyncratic, strange and beautiful world of experimental filmmaking.
And for those newcomers keen on dipping their toes into these dark waters, don't fear that the opportunity has eluded you. By all indications, the collaboration between TIE and the ICA promises to become something of an institution, and next year's iteration must already be in the works.
