“Dokumentarne” tendencije u hrvatskom i svjetskom eksperimentalnom filmu
“Documentary” Tendencies in Croatian and International Experimental Film

Summary/Abstract: What is an experimental documentary film? The histories of documentary film such as Erik Barnouw’s seminal Documentary: a History of the Non-fiction Film (1993) or Betsy A. McLane’s A New History of Documentary Film (2012) generally mention the avant-garde film movement as an important impetus for the development and formation of documentary film itself. However, little has been said about the documentary tendencies of the second film avant-garde, despite the filmmakers such as Stan Brakhage or Jonas Mekas (the latter explicitly calling his films diaries). From the opening example of Brakhage’s film Window Water Baby Moving (1959), which stands as a “hybrid” between documentary and experimental film, the paper deals with the specific film procedures that manipulate the “presumptive trace” (Noel Carroll), a direct optical-acoustic recording, without the film losing its “representative” relation to the world in front of the camera. Questions are primarily raised in the context of discussing the two main tendencies of experimental cinema: the poetic (Brakhage, Pansini, etc.) and the minimalist one (Gotovac, Warhol, Frampton, etc.).

• Details
• Contents