Your previous book is on early European cinema and its aesthetic links film to other artistic disciplines, such as theater and painting. What appeals to you about these works?
These were the first feature films to try to appeal to the middle- and upper-class audiences, and so they took tools from theater and painting, which were respectable, and applied them to film. Those tools are still in place today, and what we consider to be beautiful cinematography, that was mostly established in Denmark, France, and Italy.
Why should student filmmakers watch and learn from these old films?
The silent films from the 1910s and 1920s create a world in which you don't need words. It’s just pure visual storytelling. We tell students, “Show, don’t tell.” You watch these films to see how visual storytelling really works. And so much of what we see today is present in these films. It's widely accepted that continuity editing—the way we use "invisible" editing techniques to tell stories today—has been in place since 1917 and has gone mostly unchanged. The same is true for experimentation with techniques we more commonly attribute to arthouse cinema, new waves, or experimental cinema. A lot of those techniques were experimented with and widely applied in the 1920s.
Why teach experimental filmmaking to undergraduates who are more likely to work in narrative film?
It’s like you’re cutting the cord of what students are used to, the conventions they are used to, and it can open their mind in creative ways that will strengthen their films regardless of the genre or mode. Part of what I emphasize is how many of these techniques have already made their way into commercial narrative films, like Everything Everywhere All At Once, for instance. Experimental cinema often hones in on light and shadow, on how the mechanism of the camera works, and on how single images are animated by persistence of vision. It goes back to thinking about the core of what cinema is. We can dangle a camera outside a window, make it seem like we are falling, or put it in water and we are swimming. There’s also a handmade, visual arts craft component to it, especially when working on celluloid, which I do with my students. You can cut and reorganize frames, you can scratch, draw and paint, and, not unimportantly, you can do it all by yourself.
