Avant-Garde and Surrealist Films | Inspiration

Prior to filming and throughout my research I have been watching films to get inspiration and see what I like about them and define what I can use in my own project.
I have watched many films, also, because my first education degree is BA in Film and TV management.
I would like to narrow down the list of films I have watched to a few names that I got inspired by greatly/mainly.

M A Y A   D E R E N

Maya Deren  came to the USA in 1922 as Eleanora Derenkowsky. Together with her father, a psychiatrist, and her mother, an artist, she fled the pogroms against Russian Jews. She studied journalism and political science in at Syracuse University in New York, finishing her BA at NYU in June 1936 and then received her MA in English literature from Smith in 1939.

In 1943 she made her first film with Alexander Hammid, called Meshes of the Afternoon(1943). Through this association she changed her name, at Hammid's suggestion, to Maya, meaning "illusion." Overall, she made six short films and several incomplete films, including one with Marcel Duchamp titled Witch's Cradle (1944).

Deren is the author of two books, "An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film" 1946 (reprinted in "The Legend of Maya Deren," vol 1, part 2) and "Divine Horsemen : The Living Gods of Haiti" (1953)--a book that was made after her first trip to Haiti in 1947 and which is still considered one of the most useful on Haitian Voudoun. Deren wrote numerous articles on film and on Haiti. Maya Deren shot over 18,000 feet of film in Haiti from 1947 to 1954 on Haitian Voudoun, parts of which can be viewed in an assembled video made after her death by her then-husband Teiji Ito and his new wife Cherel: Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1985).

In 1947, Maya Deren became the first filmmaker to receive a Guggenheim grant for creative work in motion pictures. She wrote film theory, distributed her own films, traveled across the USA, and went to Cuba and Canada to promote her films using the lecture-demonstration format to teach film theory, and Voudoun and the interrelationship of magic, science, and religion. Deren established the Creative Film Foundation in the late 1950s to reward the achievements of independent filmmakers.

- IMDb Mini Biograph

Maya Deren - Rituals in Transfigured Time

TIME

The film's unusual specialty is how Maya Deren manipulates the idea of time through editing. The slow motion or 'freezing' or repetition of the scenes - retiming happens throughout the film.

MYSTERIOUS CHARACTERS

In most of her films, you would see some unexplained figure who appears and does some trick. It also echoes with the occult motives linked to surrealist's influences, the director herself is known for practicing it. 

NOT LOGICAL BEHAVIOUR

The scenes are edited together in a way that if they aren't considered deeply, they don't make sense, the characters' actions do not suggest a viewer can instantly identify himself with the character, as they break the logic's rules, and make it more interesting to watch.

OUTCOME: I got inspired by Maya Deren because she likes to 'play' with re-timing in her films. They always manage to bring me in the state of hypnosis, and the links made in my mind when the weirdly edited scenes are put together, it made me curious of how I can connect the three parts of my own project together, with the idea of retiming. Also, original films I could find were without the sound. And it made me realise how important it is to manipulate time and sound in order to put a viewer in a certain state, because sometimes a blank image or an absence of sound can bring a greater use of a scene.

Maya Deren - At Land

SOCIETY vs NATURE

I like it how the name of the film, its' beginning and a transition of the character(played by Maya Deren) into the 'people's' world is shown. It's a juxtaposition of society and nature, that is clear from anything caused by any daily life activities

Outcome:

In my project, the clothes that the female is wearing is always absent and the male actor is wearing more clothes. I have details like nails, crystal, greenery that a 'mysterious' person mixes/ plays with throughout the various episodes of the film. It is to show how different a relationship can be. When these characters were different in the beginning, their clothes mixed later on, and so the scenes with all the crystals and nails, they follow each stage of the relationship to show how nature and purity can get mixed with something mechanical/ something created artificially.

Maya Deren - Meshes of the Afternoon

DANCES, COSTUMES, THE UNKNOWN

What I got inspired by in this film, was the idea of dances, objects, mysterious creature and its' very surreal and interesting costume and the slow-motion.

L E N    L Y E

Len Lye was born on July 5, 1901 in Christchurch, New Zealand. He is known for his work on Free Radicals (1958), A Colour Box (1935) and Rainbow Dance (1936). He was married to Annette Zeiss and Jane Florence Winifred Thompson. He died on May 15, 1980 in Warwick, Rhode Island, USA.

Projections and the idea of animation, the colours and the manually created paintings/ drawings in his film. I like the idea of how today it is interesting to make something with 'hands' rather than digitally, which happens so often. 

Regarding this idea, I would like to also, mention my previous experience in photography and creating collages created by hand, earlier this year - http://anyaoderyakova.com/2014/04/10/collages-by-anya-oderyakova/

And I find it a great idea to look back to take something from his signature style, without using the same techniques, but as I mentioned in my other post, I wanted to go for something similar but it's psychedelic projection. Also, created by hand.

I have been asked why I reckon it's best, to my opinion, 'taking a step back' in out modern computer age and do something with glue, pieces of paper and cutting (in case of Len Lye it was painting, in case of my MA project's film- oil projection) , and I said the same thing I can say today- it's about the experience and experiment, it's more about the soul, it's the idea of 'chance', you can't always plan how this piece of paper will attach and often, I used to be lead simply by instinct not planning of where i'd glue this or that piece. It's automatism, the idea of 'coincidence', whereas it is so mechanical with digital programmes- you plan, you chance, you edit, you cancel.

About the importance of 'drawing' and manually created art pieces in digital age, there's a great recent article :

http://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/read/think-pieces/5311/why-young-artists-are-returning-to-drawing-in-the-digitial-age

Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali 

Their Surrealist film - "Un Chien Andalou" is definitely a classic of the genre. It is impossible not to look for the roots of inspiration to understand the genre. 

From imdb's critical outlines:

• A surrealistic film with input from Salvador Dalí, director Luis Buñuel presents stark, surrealistic images that shock the viewers including the slitting open of a woman's eye and a dead horse being pulled along on top of a piano. Obviously open to interpretation - from deep meanings to it all meaning absolutely nothing - it is certain that this short (17 minutes) film presented something new in the cinema of its day.
  - Written by garykmcd
• In a dream-like sequence, a woman's eye is slit open--juxtaposed with a similarly shaped cloud obsucuring the moon moving in the same direction as the knife through the eye--to grab the audience's attention. The French phrase "ants in the palms," (which means that someone is "itching" to kill) is shown literally. A man pulls a piano along with the tablets of the Ten Commandments and a dead donkey towards the woman he's itching to kill. A shot of differently striped objects is repeatedly used to connect scenes.
  - Written by Ryan T. Casey <RTCasey@mn.uswest.net>
• Un Chien Andalou consists of seventeen minutes of bizarre and surreal images that may or may not mean anything. A straight razor seems to be placed by a woman's eye, a small cloud formation obscures the moon, a cow's eye is slit open, a woman pokes at a severed hand in the street with his cane, a man drags two grand pianos containing dead and rotting donkeys and live priests, and a man's hand has a hole in the palm from which ants emerge.
  - Written by Michael Brooke <michael@everyman.demon.co.uk>

 Un Chien Andalou

REVOLT

As it was mentioned in one my posts outlining the original manifesto of Surrealism published by Breton, revolt was one of the inevitable features of the genre and the artists of surrealism were commonly attracted to the idea of rough, sometimes unapologetic use of revolt-provoking imagery and footage. The cut of an eye- scene is one of the most famous and definitely at the point the film was released, pretty ground-breaking in cinematography. 

The idea of EROS and LUST

The aggressive tension between the characters followed by 'random' scenes, and metaphors like ants, piano, panic on the street..

Crazy Visual Metaphors

The mentioned above metaphors are really strong and unusual. 

In my films, I used these ideas as well: cutting meat, nails, triangle glass..