Avant Garde

Avant Garde translated as ahead of the crowd was started during the 1950’s. Artist saw film as a new way to express creativity and art different from what was usually expected and therefore took a very different approach to film than the usual Hollywood features at the time. New ideas, forms, techniques and expressions were all factors experimented with to give Avant Garde the outlook of being ahead of its time and as artists the directors tended to concentrate more on lyrical, abstract and formal beauty of the film rather than conventional narrative and structure, somewhat mocking the common codes and conventions as we know it.

The artist Salvade Dali and director Luis Bunel were the minds behind one of the first ever Avant Garde films ‘Un Chein Andalou”. The 16 minute surreal short film holds no real narrative or plot of any kind, the opening of the film mocks common story telling narratives with the words ‘once upon a time’ and later goes on to jump from shot to shot in a dreamed sensed sequence with effective use of fade shots, the film follows a series of surreal situations such as ants crawling out of the palm of a mans hand and a women’s eye being sliced open by a razor. For me the only ideas I can make from the film is to go totally against common film conventions and like most Avant Garde forms it’s used to create a surreal and particularly uncomfortable piece of art.

Meshs of the afternoon is a short Avant Gard film directed by Maya Deren and Alexandra Hammid, once again the film focuses on surrealism and has strong resemblance to dreams with key objects within the film have symbolic relations to Physiology. I feel this Avant Gard films carries more of a narrative than other Avant Gard films but still feels very loose in comparison to feature length holly wood films. The narrative has been described by Maya Deren as a film “concerned with the interior experiences of an individual. It does not record an event which could be witnessed by other persons. Rather, it reproduces the way in which the subconscious of an individual will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and casual incident into a critical emotional experience”