Cityscapes, trance states, and women walking: embodied practices of walking in experimental film and video

ABSTRACT

Commonly associated with the cinema of Béla Tarr and Gus Van Sant, walking on screen has received relatively little attention from researchers despite the ongoing popularity of wayfaring films and videos. Unsurprisingly, even less is known about how walking functions in experimental film and video or responds to avant-garde storytelling. To fill this gap, I take a phenomenological stance on walking to discuss the pedestrian’s embodied experience in a few stylistically distinct works: Crowdog (Vanessa Renwick, 1984/1998), A Walk (Jonas Mekas, 1990), Ordinary Matter (Hollis Frampton, 1972), and Death Songs & Car Bombs (Brendan and Jeremy Smyth, 2013). Despite having different formats and narrative foci, which, respectively, explore walking in a structural-diaristic framework and as a trance state or turn it into a social commentary on female liberation and the culture clash, all of these films echo the phenomenological turn in film studies, demonstrating how pedestrians relate to the multisensorial, kinaesthetic practice and space of walking. Compared to the itinerant mode of art cinema, experimental film and video usually challenge the representational nature of walking and present it as a more complex, disorientating, and unconventional experience, linking the sensation of walking to social mobility, personal freedom, feminism, or place and urban memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Walking
• experimental film and video
• embodiment
• corporeal turn
• women’s film

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Saving the Proof can be accessed on Karen Holmes’ Vimeo website: https://vimeo.com/380635054.

2. An excerpt from Crowdog can be accessed on Vanessa Renwick’s website: http://www.odoka.org/crowdog. The film was also released on DVD under the title Nomads and No-Zones (Other Cinema Digital, 2004). Vanessa Renwick (b. 1961) is a Portland-based artist and filmmaker. Since 1981, she has created over fifty works, including experimental documentary films, videos, sculptures, photographs, and installations, which reflect on the relationship between place, landscape, environment, radical politics, and the body.

3. A Walk can be accessed on Jonas Mekas’ website: https://jonasmekasfilms.com/online_materials/. Jonas Mekas (1922–2019) was a Lithuanian-American award-winning artist, poet, and filmmaker based in New York. Widely considered ‘the godfather’ of American avant-garde cinema, Mekas is credited with developing the diary film and created dozens of films, videos, and art installations from the early 1960s on.

4. Ordinary Matter can be accessed through the Filmmakers’ Cooperative. Hollis Frampton (1936–1984) was an artist, filmmaker, photographer, and poet best known for his innovative and visually-arresting structural films that shaped the structural film movement.

5. Death Songs & Car Bombs can be accessed on the Smyth brothers’ Vimeo website: https://vimeo.com/81776581. Brendan and Jeremy Smyth are a duo of experimental documentary filmmakers based in Durham, North Carolina. Since the early 2010s, they have created several films and videos, which explore various aspects of visual anthropology.

Additional information

Funding

This work is funded by the National Science Centre, Poland, under the project Lost highways, forgotten travels: The road movie in the post-war American avant-garde and experimental film through the lens of women and men filmmakers (grant no. UMO-2018/31/D/HS2/01553).

Notes on contributors

Kornelia Boczkowska

Kornelia Boczkowska, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Culture at the AMU Faculty of English. She has received several research grants and is the author of two books and ca. forty other publications on independent, experimental, and documentary films. Her most recent papers have appeared in Feminist Media Studies, Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance, Mobilities, Studies in Documentary Film and other journals. She also serves as book review editor for The European Journal of American Studies and has guest edited the special issue of Papers on Language and Literature on experimental film and video. In 2022, she received the scholarship from the Polish Minister of Education and Science for outstanding young researchers.