Genre

Documentaries

Experimental and Animation

Fictional

Hollywood

Art

Films of all kinds may be the results of experiments or may contain attempts to overturn traditional genres, but the mode of experimental film has always been reserved for those endeavours produced and exhibited with the aim of questioning or revolutionizing the medium itself. The mode is by definition limited, because no real traditions can develop that do not soon cease to be experimental.

The first significant experimental film movements emerged during the 1920s, when sophisticated artists began to play with the film medium and when film societies, specialized theatres, journals, and museum lectures began to cater to audiences wanting to be disturbed or surprised. In France at that time a true avant-garde led by painters such as Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Fernand Léger, and Salvador Dalí scorned the mass market and sought exhibition in clubs and museums. French directors of the time, including Jean Epstein, Marcel L'Herbier, and Abel Gance, experimented with narrative structure in their films but were still involved in creating feature films for theatrical release. Although these films, especially Gance's Napoléon (1927), are full of experimental camera and editing techniques, they are not considered to be experimental films because of their exhibition histories.

The experimental film has been forged out of two impulses. The first has stemmed from movements in the fine arts, such as Futurism, Constructivism, Dada, Surrealism, Minimalism, and Abstract Expressionism. Artists working in these movements have often shifted to cinema as new terrain for their ideas, radically rethinking the medium to make a personal or cultural point. The other impulse has been technological. The experimentalist, curious to see what the medium can do, has explored and expanded the basic processes and techniques involved in filmmaking. The early films of Méliès were precursors of this type of cinema.

The two impulses have rarely been seen separately. Luis Buñuel's scandalous Un Chien andalou (The Andalusian Dog, 1928) arose as much from his curiosity about film and narrative as it did from his association with the Surrealist movement. The same can be said of Maya Deren, founder of the American avant-garde during the 1940s. Other artists have rejected narrative altogether and linked up with traditions in poetry and the visual arts. During the 1950s and 1960s, the heyday of the American avant-garde, Stan Brakhage manipulated focus, lighting, and sequence in a range of distinctively personal and often mythic films. His most radical technical strategy was to eliminate photography altogether--by scratching directly on film, gluing particles on the emulsion, and even growing algae on the film before copying it--in an attempt to express himself without the movietion of character, plot, or objects. Like other filmmakers of the period, he called on the theories of action painting to justify his excesses.

Nonphotographic techniques can also be used to produce representational objects and even stories, as the experimentalist Len Lye proved with his short animated films of the 1930s. Laboriously drawing black-and-white (and later polychrome) figures on every film frame, he achieved a lightness of effect impossible in photography. Imaginative animation can also be used to demonstrate movements or changes that are difficult or impossible to photograph. It can produce striking, eye-catching effects or make a dull subject interesting and entertaining. In addition, information is often conveyed more quickly and clearly through animation than through live action. For these reasons, animated films are widely used for instructional and advertising or other promotional purposes. Animated films can, of course, exist simply to amuse, and the best-known works of animation are undoubtedly the cartoon comedies.

Whatever their length or purpose, animated films have a motion and characterization more succinct than live action. They can more freely contract or distort both time and space and defy the forces of gravity; they can be as realistic or as fantastic as their designers wish. The potentialities of animation have fascinated filmmakers since the earliest days of the motion picture.

The graphic style of early animated entertainments followed at first that of the cartoon strips of the period--hard outlines, little or no modeling, and the flat application of paint when colour was introduced. Walt Disney was responsible for improving the professionalism of the animated film and for getting it into the standard theatrical distribution system. He also helped to develop and popularize the animated feature film. Disney's feature-length Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) contained about 477,000 photographed drawings; it was the leading international box-office favourite of 1938, and its sound track was dubbed into 13 foreign languages.

=The symbolic political fable L'Idée (1934), by the Austro-Hungarian animator Berthold Bartosch, represented a rare use of animation to present a serious, as distinct from a comic or legendary, subject; the approach was first achieved at feature length by the British husband-and-wife team of John Halas and Joy Batchelor in their adaptation of George Orwell's novel Animal Farm (1954). More recently, cartoons were used on occasion in certain Communist countries to make social statements in the guise of highly stylized anecdotes or fables. Some of the most advanced, most inventive work of this kind was done in such countries as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. In the United States, highly individual styles were pioneered in the 1940s by the United Productions of America (UPA) group under the direction of Stephen Bosustow. Among their creations were the series that featured Mr. Magoo and Gerald McBoing Boing.

Later, various kinds of graphic fantasy found expression through animation, and the older style of cartooning associated with Walt Disney was completely overtaken by artists using a diversity of contemporary graphic styles, often extremely elaborate. The work of Jirí Trnka and Karel Zeman exemplified the long-established Czech leadership in animated puppetry. Trnka's Old Czech Legends (1951) and The Good Soldier Schweik (1955) used stylized puppets in naturalistic settings to dramatize social satires, folk legends, and classics. Zeman's work used both puppets and live actors moving within real sets.

Since the 1950s, the experimental filmmakers Robert Breer and Norman McLaren, among others, have developed new styles and techniques of animation, including collage and pixilation (a technique that makes human movements look like those of animated automatons). In the 1960s the cartoon film appeared to lose ground as pure entertainment, except in the Communist countries, but it has steadily advanced in the fields of education and public relations. The growing use of computers in graphic design has further emphasized this use of animation.