The Awakening of Perception: An Experimental Film Showcase
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Through an exploration of time and space, six filmmakers challenge us to reach beyond the limits of our senses to interrogate, reinterpret and reimagine the experience of being human.
A Visual Odyssey From our first waking moments, we become aware of our surroundings through the lived experience of human sensory perception.
The very technology of cinema functions to reproduce the ostensibly natural conditions of human perception through the conventions of dominant cinema demanded by realism. This combination of “naturalizing” conventions sutures the spectator into the narrative in a way that renders its ideological work invisible.
By operating and existing outside of normative conventions, experimental film practices provide audiences with an opportunity to experience sensory pleasures often relegated to the liminal perceptual space of dreams.
These six experimental films take us on a journey beyond reality to awaken our perception.
1.
Prelude
By Elisha Brodsky
Year Released: 2016
Total Run Time: 2:22
Vimeo Link: https://vimeo.com/160293140
Filmmaker, photographer and designer Elisha Brodsky’s 2016 film, Prelude, explores the sensations of waking dreams by cutting together a non-narrative poetic film set to the tune of J. Viewz’s song “Prelude.” The effective deployment of multiple exposures lends a haunting but dreamlike quality to the character’s lucid self-examination. Created in the year where an admitted sexual predator became president of the United States, Prelude is an enlivening reimagining of an artist’s study of life.
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2.
Skin
By Spyros Aronis
Year Released: 2020
Total Run Time: 1:56
YouTube Link: https://youtu.be/vnR-unV8CfY?si=dax2ngCafj6fKJfI
Filmmaker Spyros Aronis’s film, Skin, abstracts and dismembers the human form to provide a closeup examination of the human body’s largest and most visible organ. But how often to we pause to consider its features, to explore the topography of the body? This film is as much an exploration of the textural beauty of different skin types as it is the liminal manifestation of the sensations of pleasure. This orgiastic collection of abstracted human forms highlights the inherent beauty and complexities of skin and the role both light and camera play in defining standards of beauty.
Mature subject matter, viewer discretion is advised.
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3.
Perception
By Mark Lamin
Year Released: 2018
Total Run Time: 3:36
Vimeo Link: https://vimeo.com/252173882
Film students are taught to examine the narrative role that lighting plays in foregrounding a film’s tone and telegraphing to the audience emotional information that inform the nature of the subject-spectator relationship. In his 2018 experimental film, Perception, filmmaker Mark Lamin explores and interrogates lighting’s narrative function through a simple but hauntingly beautiful demonstration of cinematic lighting techniques. How has Lamin’s lighting exercise altered and informed your perceptions?
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4.
Elements
By Lukas Kasimir Kuhne
Year Released: 2012
Total Run Time: 9:02
Vimeo Link: https://vimeo.com/62485376
AFDA Cape Town film student Lukas Kasimir Kuhne’s third-year experimental film project, Elements, is a lyrical experimental narrative film that explores the relationship between two lovers, played by Kirstin van As and Tylan Wray. Andrew Mageto’s masterful camerawork elevates what could have been an overly contrived film-school project into a higher art form. The very nature of interpersonal human relationships—especially romantic ones—are fraught with a mix of pain, grief, beauty, wonder, discovery, and triumph. Julz Sanchez’s delicate visual effects never feel forced or unmotivated. Kuhne has created a masterful poetic work that tracks the emotional trajectory of two people finding love, feeling truly elemental.
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5.
þLuTØ
By Paul-Michael
Year Released: 2018
Total Run Time: 2:23
Vimeo Link: https://vimeo.com/308511956
Paul-Michael’s 2018 experimental film, Pluto, is a haunting exploration of the role media plays in defining individual identity. Pluto is as much about the evolving nature of mediated experiences as it is a probing interrogation of social media and gaming platforms, and how their invisible construction sets the agenda for personal and political discourse (to deleterious effect). The figures in Pluto exist in a digital-analog hybrid world—much like the modern denizens of Meta’s Facebook , Elon Musk’s Twitter, and the fully-digital realms of the many meta-verses currently operating or under construction. Pluto asks us, is this the future we want to inhabit, one where perception is a manufactured and commodified facsimile? How is humanity defined if it exists outside of life?
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6.
Doors of Perception
By Caroline Schwarz
Year Released: 2020
Total Run Time: 14:30
Vimeo Link: https://vimeo.com/491114110
Fear of the unknown is the single biggest driver of destructive human behaviors, whether directed inward to the self, or outward to society. Caroline Schwarz’s 2020 film, Doors of Perception, is a beautiful distillation of the nature of human connection. Through an innovative use of black light reactive yarn over black-bodied human forms, Schwarz’s “characters” explore the relationship of touch to our understanding of the physical world and our place within it. Doors of Perception is truly one of the most innovative explorations of the themes of trust and connection made possible only by existing entirely outside of—and opposed to—dominant narrative structure. Can you see yourself here?
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