ABSTRACT
An examination of experimental film traditions has obvious implications for anthropological film practice. Experimental film, especially in its 1960s and 1970s incarnations of so-called “structuralist” or “materialist” film (which referenced earlier twentieth-century traditions of abstract and absolute film) interrogated fundamental issues, such as film time (the length of a film) vs. experienced time, narration, the apparatus (e.g. camera, and projection devices), and the materiality of film itself. As with rituals based on the repetition of gestures, the repetition of images in experimental film would disrupt perception and make viewers dizzy in order to bring them into a fantasy world. Some interesting problems are also posed by film, especially experimental film’s relation to memory. A particularly important area of experimental film concerns materiality or rather the material conditions of film-making. In fact, practices of experimental film-making, especially when they are voiced in an expressly material, analog medium, are a form of resistance.
