Understanding A Cinema of Physics and Perception

By Arturo Menchaca

Experimental films can be rather intimidating. The term “experimental” conveys a sense of bizarreness to the average moviegoer. When placed in the context of filmmaking, the word suggests strangeness, complexity, inaccessibility, and more negatively, pretension and “weird for the sake of weird.” Even if these stereotypes are not necessarily true (though in some cases they are), most people do not approach experimental films, often because the films are not readily available, but even more significantly, because most people are not sure how to.

This is where A Cinema of Physics and Perception hopes to intervene. By making these films available to our patrons, we hope to give those who have never seen them a chance to, and those who already have a chance to see them again, for these are indeed films that reward multiple viewings.

The films in A Cinema of Physics and Perception are some of the most aesthetically compelling, intellectually challenging, and thoroughly enjoyable films ever made, because they use image and sound not simply as a way of entertaining (and certainly not as a way of selling a product), but as a way of articulating an aesthetic idea. All of the films in the series operate in this manner, and are directly concerned with expressing ideas about the art of filmmaking. A film like Tony Conrad’s The Flicker, while containing only frames of black and white and a drone-like soundtrack, is an aesthetic study in minimalism and the perceptual effects of long-term exposure to drastic changes in light and slowly shifting, protracted music. It is also a focused exploration into the nature of film and medium specificity.

This series favors a textual approach, one concerned with science and aesthetics. By observing and perceiving these films and the way they were physically constructed, one can extract a great deal of knowledge and meaning, no matter how conceptually dense the film may seem. This model suggests viewing films from the universal standpoint of 1) physics and 2) human perception.

The way a film uses and examines light, sound, matter, energy, and spacetime are at the forefront, as are issues of how a viewer perceives the film via the senses. The filmmakers whose works are included in the series made films because they had an aesthetic idea to express, and film was the only medium with which they could articulate it. Their statements rely as much on the regulated pulse of the projector as on the way the viewer perceives the world through vision and audition.

These films focus on the conditions of the medium, on the way each film is uniquely constructed and perceived. The inscriptions light has made in the emulsion through photochemical interaction, the way a strip of film comprises many discrete, individual frames, the fact that each of these frames can be edited and spliced together, the countless ways an image can be manipulated via an optical printer, the creation of images without using a camera, the illusion of motion or depth, the way a viewer perceives the colors in an image, the frequencies and amplitudes of sound being heard, the way language is biologically detected and comprehended: all of these are fundamental concerns of the films in this series.

So while some of the films in this series may seem unintelligible at first, one can gain a better understanding of them by regarding them as works of art akin to music, paintings, or sculptures rather than the straightforward forms of entertainment that most dramatic narrative films typify. Careful reflection on the ways these films operate in relation to physics and human perception offers a sound starting point from which to appreciate their aesthetic purpose. It is my hope that this model will give even the most unfamiliar viewer a way not only to approach the films analytically, but also to enjoy them on a more basic level, as pleasurable experiences for the senses and the mind.

A Cinema of Physics and Perception runs at Block through June 2.