George Landow in Remedial Reading Comprehension: the text declares the participatory film’s paradoxical inversion of the trance film

Stan Brakhage - The Way to Shadow Garden, 1954

Hollis Frampton - Poetic Justice, 1972

Arthur Lipsett - Very Nice, Very Nice, 1961

watch here

BLACK IS, Aldo Tambellini | 1965 | black and white | sound | 4 min | 

This experimental film was made entirely without the use of a camera. “Working directly on 16mm … I scratched, perforated, drew,used acid and other substances on the surface of the leader. … The movement of the projector (30 frames per second) created the animated rhythm of the film. To get down to the essentials: light and motion”. 

watch here

The Very Eye of Night, Maya Deren (1958)

Dancers, shown in photographic negative, perform a series of ballet moves, solos, pas de deux, larger groupings. The dancers glide and rotate untroubled by gravity against a slowly changing starfield background. Their movements are accompanied by music scored for a small ensemble of woodwind and percussion.

I now no longer photograph, but rather paint upon clear strips of film – essentially freeing myself from the dilemmas of re-presentation. I aspire to a visual music, a ‘music’ for the eyes (as my films are entirely without sound-tracks these days). Just as a composer can be said to work primarily with ‘musical ideas,’ I can be said to work with the ideas intrinsic to film, which is the only medium capable of making paradigmatic ‘closure’ apropos Primal Sight. A composer most usually creates parallels to the surroundings of the inner ear–the primary thoughts of sounds. I, similarly, now work with the electric synapses of thought to achieve overall cathexis paradigms separate from but ‘at one’ with the inner lights, the Light, at source, of being human.

Stan Brakhage

“The confrontation of a man and his torment. Juxtaposed against his external composure are images of a woman and lights in distortion, with tension heightened by the sounds of power saws and a heartbeat.”

Thanatopsis | Ed Emshwiller (1962)

watch here.

“Every breaking away from the conventional, dead, official cinema is a healthy sign. We need less perfect but more free films. If only our younger film makers – I have no hopes for the old generation – would really break loose, completely loose, out of themselves, wildly, anarchically! There is no other way to break the frozen cinematic conventions than through a complete derangement of the official cinematic senses.”

Jonas Mekas, February 4th, 1959

(Source: mubi.com)