Experimental Silent Films

In reality, to want something is to make an experiment, so as to find out what one is capable of…
Friedrich Nietzsche

Searching for the origins of experimental film harbours some difficulties. In the pioneering days, every film leads into unchartered territory and is therefore an experiment. It is only out of the perpetual contrast to commercialised film and out of the tension between them, that the word receives its present concrete meaning.
By its very nature, experimental film wants to move away from the conventions of the medium. It wants to break with the visual habits of the audience.
It is in this vein that Maya Deren’s sets out to create films beyond instruction and entertainment. Lyrical films which pull the film itself out of its everyday existence.
It is this birth out of a spirit of difference that is generally held to be the origin of the first experimental films of the 1920s. Beyond the dream factories’ dominance and productivity and in an opposite trend to the easy consumability and coherence of regular film, the aim is to use the moving picture to capture a reality that is perceived as fragmented and incoherent.

The Institute of Incoherent Cinematography invites you to meet four authors of early experimental film. All films will be shown on 16 mm copies and accompanied by live music.