collection of top gangster films

Exam Response

Experimental Film requires a different kind of spectatorship.' Has this been your experience? [35]

Experimental films are full of strange mixtures of images, situations, words and expressions that may not tell a cohesive story but, in the end, don't have to in order to achieve an emotional goal. This type of film therefore requires the spectator to shift their conventional cinematic expectations to accommodate more radical narrative techniques, themes and meaning construction. 

Un Chien Andalou, the infamous 1929 surrealist short film from Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, attests to this.

Un Chein Andalou offers a dramatic impact on a spectator as this film holds values of artistic work of Salvador Dali who I pay great interest in his work this grasped me .The way of life this film uses this art to show the dream state of mind holding metaphorical religious connotations. This film offers me a surrealist viewing as it disorientates the mind and make’s it believe the showcasing however this is in the dream state so by allowing my mind to take a preferred reading I am able to escape into this experimental film. This film uses anchorage to confuse it’s audience by displaying ‘once upon a time’ , ‘8 years later’ e.c.t by using this anchorage the spectator is confused by the mix of other genre’s conventions in its use. The opening scene shows an extreme close up of a female’s eye being cut this instantly grabbed my attention into reading the film as ‘gore’ attracts me in films by using this shot it gains and arouses the audience as I expected more ‘gore’ within this film I feel for the first scene and no real ‘gore’ was used after disappointing me as a spectator. Un Chie Andalou holds disorientating unrealistic scene’s within for instance a scene where ants are growing out of the characters hand , this shows feeding and rotting. The end scene shows the characters in the mise-en-scene of a beech with half their body’s buried representing the date in which the film was set representing the trenches in the World Wars. This film offers excitement and disappointment in my opinion. One of the scene’s in Un Chien Andalou shows the female and male character as he begins to gropes

 and harasses the female this scene is particularly upsetting as a female viewer I had watch a perverted scene. Overall I enjoyed Un Chien Andalou as a spectator as an experimental film the attributes used in the film really attracted me.

Chris Marker became known internationally for the short film La Jetée (1962). It tells of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel by using a series of filmed photographs developed as a photomontage of varying pace, with limited narration and sound effects. 

La Jetee’s story is told via the uses of voice over to narrate the story , a collection of images were edited together with use’s of still’s being a very static film to watch. I found this film very mind numbing as an interaction was connected with the film. However compared to the other films with no narrative this holds a narrative yet leaving my mind in a tedious state. The use of stills cross fades between images I enjoy the aesthetics of stills but with no moving film at all I was in a sleepy state of mind as I was just listening to the voice over. Artistically one scene drew my attention back to the film once a moving film was used to show the movement of an eye movement this left me to enigma codes as to weather the eye did move making this contrast to the whole of the film making it a very memorable scene as a spectator to rember.