writing with a camera

Experimental Moving Image Works

Thrown together by David Tamés, updated on February 18, 2026

This handout introduced experimental moving image works framed in the context of Edward Small’s concept of “Direct Theory” that characterizes experimental moving image works as constituting a major genre equal in status and significance to fictive narrative and documentary.

See also:

Edward Small and Timothy Johnson in their book Direct Theory1 argue that experimental moving image works constitute a major genre equal in status and significance to fictive narrative and documentary. Experimental works are not a minor, marginal, or an “avant-garde” subset.

This genre is characterized by several interrelated features. The first of these is reflexivity (the work foregrounds its own formal and material conditions); the second is attention to materiality (the physical and technical properties of the medium become thematically significant); the third is the collapse or problematization of the content/form distinction; and the fourth, significantly, is what they call “direct theory,” the capacity of experimental works to theorize about the nature of the moving image through the medium itself instead of written or spoken language.

Experimental media makers often ask questions with their work like: what is film? What is video? What is cinema? What can moving images do? how do moving images function? What is the relationship between perception and representation? The list is endless. With direct theory, the answers to these questions are given not in words but in images, sounds, durations, using the material processes of photochemical film, analog video, digital video, computational media, or a combination.

Where to View Works

For streaming video, the Northeastern University Scholar One Search page is the best starting point to find videos available to Northeastern students from Kanopy, Video Data Bank (VDB), and other streaming sources. If a title can be found through One Search, it will be higher quality than what you’ll find on YouTube.

The MassArt Ciné Culture (MACC) Screening Series brings to MassArt moving image artists for screenings, panel discussions, master classes and more. Most events take place in MassArt’s Design and Media (DMC) Center Lecture Hall on Wednesdays at 5 p.m. Screenings are open to the public, and are generally followed by discussion or Q+A sessions.

Other opportunities to see experimental moving image works in the Boston area include the ICA/Boston, the Harvard Film Archive and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, the MIT List Visual Arts Center and MFA/Boston. Take a look at their listings of exhibitions and screenings.

If you have a chance to see experimental films that were originally made to be projected on a screen in a theatre the way they were intended to be seen, do not miss the opportunity, it is a totally different experience. The same goes for analogue video works originally designed to be shown on a CRT display or projected in a darkened room. Museums and film archives often go to great lengths to show works the way the artist intended.

This list of works in this handout will be updated as the semester progresses.

Experimental moving image works foreground form, materiality, reflexivity, and semiotic operations, distinguishing the genre from fictive narrative that prioritizes transparency to deliver a story and documentary that prioritizes content about the social-historical world. The works below are listed under categories that describe overlapping modes of practice. These categories provide an analytical frame, a way to identify the primary formal, material, and conceptual orientation of a work. Many experimental works operate across multiple categories simultaneously; consider how a work can be examined through several of these frames, which are not rigid divisions.

History

Free Radicals: A History Of Experimental Film (Pip Chodorov, 2010, 1:23:00), view on Kanopy

  • Pip Chodorov wrote, “I wanted to share a few of the films I love and introduce you to some of the free, radical artists who made them.” This entertaining and personal introduction to avant-garde cinema includes interviews with Jonas Mekas, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, and Hans Richter.

Assemblage

Assemblage refers to works constructed through the combination and juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements, e.g. disparate images, sounds, textures, found materials, and temporal fragments brought together into a new composition. The term borrows from visual art (e.g. Jean Dubuffet, Robert Rauschenberg) emphasizing the constructed nature of the work: the viewer perceives the seams, the differences between source materials, and the act of assembly as semiotically significant. Assemblage foregrounds discourse (the “how” of arrangement) by making the combinatory logic visible rather than transparent. The meaning of the work arises from the relationships, tensions, and collisions between the elements assembled.

ANTS in my Scanner (François Vautier, 2010, 2:00), view on Vimeo

  • “Five years ago, I installed an ant colony inside my old scanner that allowed me to scan in high definition this ever evolving microcosm (animal, vegetable and mineral). The resulting clip is a close-up examination of how these tiny beings live in this unique ant farm. I observed how decay and corrosion slowly but surely invaded the internal organs of the scanner. Nature gradually takes hold of this completely synthetic environment.” — François Vautier

Portraiture

Portraiture designates works organized around the observation, evocation, or investigation of a person, place, body, or subjectivity. While documentary portraiture aims to reveal something true about its subject, experimental portraiture foregrounds the role of the medium in constructing the portrait. Related to portraiture are diary and autobiographical works foregrounding lived experience, subjective memory, embodied perspective, and personal history. While this mode overlaps with portraiture (often the creator is both author and subject) and can employ strategies from any of the other categories, its distinctive feature is a first-person stance in how it conveys personal experience, memory, and temporality, with the camera becoming an extension of the body recording traces of the filmmaker’s presence, rhythms of daily life, and subjective relationship to time.

Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid, 1943, 4:00, 16mm, silent), view on Kanopy

  • Maya Deren wrote, “[it] is concerned with the inner realities of the individual and the way in which the subconscious will develop, interpret and elaborate an apparently simple and causal occurrence into a critical emotional experience.” It was originally released as a silent 16mm film, therefore, I recommend watching the silent version if this is your first time watching this film. After watching Meshes of the Afternoon, take a look at Notes on experimental filmmaker Maya Deren.

Me and Rubyfruit (Sadie Benning, 1990, 5:30, Pixelvision video, sound), view on VDB

  • Based on a novel by Rita Mae Brown, Me and Rubyfruit chronicles the enchantment of teenage lesbian love against a backdrop of pornographic images and phone sex ads. Benning portrays the innocence of female romance and the taboo prospect of female marriage. For more about this video, see Me and Rubyfruit: A prescient glimpse into the future of personal video.

Materiality

Materiality as a category of practice (distinct from materiality as a theoretical concept) designates works that investigate the physical, photographic, electronic, or computational substance of the medium itself. These works examine the question, what is this? What happens when we scratch it, paint on it, degrade it, overexpose it, re-photograph it, feedback-loop it, compress it, layer it, distort it, corrupt it, etc.? The medium is simultaneously tool, subject, and content, foregrounding the signifier in a manner in which the signified becomes the material properties of the signifier like grain, flicker, pixel, glitch, noise, damage, scratch, etc. The content/form distinction collapses to the point in which there is no “about” beyond the material existence of the work the perceptual experience it produces in the mind and body of the viewer.

Mothlight (Stan Brakhage, 1963, 4:00, 16mm, silent), view on YouTube

  • Stan Brakhage created Mothlight without a camera. Brakhage collected moth wings, flower petals, and blades of grass, and pressed them between two strips of 16mm splicing tape. The results were then printed to film on an optical printer2 for projection in a cinema. This is a silent film, however, versions with sound are playing the optical track area of the 16mm print, and any sound is simply dirt on the print.

(nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971, 38:00), view on YouTube

  • “In (nostalgia), Frampton is clearly working with the experience of cinematic temporality. The major structural strategy is a disjunction between sound and image. We see a series of still photographs, most of them taken by Frampton, slowly burning one at a time on a hotplate. On the soundtrack, we hear Frampton’s comments and reminiscences about the photographs. As we watch each photograph burn, we hear the reminiscence pertaining to the following photograph. The sound and image are on two different time schedules. At any moment, we are listening to a commentary about a photograph that we shall be seeing in the future and looking at a photograph that we have just heard about. We are pulled between anticipation and memory. The nature of the commentary reinforces the complexity; it arouses our sense of anticipation by referring to the future; it also reminisces about the past, about the time and conditions under which the photographs were made. The double time sense results in a complex, rich experience.” — Bill Simon

SIGHTINGS: Littoral Zones (Sabrina Ratté, 2017, 6:00), view on Vimeo

  • “Ratté uses her signature modulator technique to intricately layer a series of moirés and checkerboards that bring depth to the otherwise flat surface of the video screen. Where others create depth through recording or simulating hallways and tunnels, Ratté bends the signal of the video itself to carve out corridors of an undetermined distance.” — Excerpt from Nicholas O’Brien’s text for Undervolt&Co.

Appropriation

Appropriation refers to taking existing cultural materials like films, television broadcasts, advertisements, news footage, internet video, music, institutional imagery, adverts, ephemeral films, etc. and transforming3 them to produce new meaning. Appropriation overlaps with assemblage, however, the emphasis is different: assemblage foregrounds the act of combination; appropriation foregrounds the act of taking and reframing. The semiotic operation is that of displacement. Signs are extracted from one semiotic system (e.g. mainstream films and television shows, television news, advertising, propaganda, music videos, etc.) and are recontextualized so that conventional signifieds are destabilized or revealed as constructed. Appropriation is strongly reflexive, making visible the ideology, codes, and conventions of the source material by disrupting them.

Super Mario Clouds (Cory Arcangel, 2002, 5:53), view on YouTube

  • For this video installation, Cory Arcangel hacked a cartridge of Super Mario Brothers, the original version of the blockbuster Nintendo video game released in the United States in 1985. By tweaking the game’s code, the artist erased all of the sound and visual elements except the iconic scrolling clouds.

Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (Dara Birnbaum, 1978, 5:22, video), view on Vimeo

  • “Explosive bursts of fire open Technology/Transformation, an incendiary deconstruction of the ideology embedded in television form and pop cultural iconography. Appropriating imagery from the 1970s TV series Wonder Woman, Birnbaum isolates and repeats the moment of the “real” woman’s symbolic transformation into super-hero. Entrapped in her magical metamorphosis by Birnbaum’s stuttering edits, Wonder Woman spins dizzily like a music-box doll.” — Gregory Zinman

Coronavirus Outbreak (Christina Carroll, 2020, 2:08, online video), view on Vimeo

  • Christina Carroll produced this remix work in my Introduction to Film Production class during the pandemic. The video got 4.7M views on Twitter (now X). Christina had no idea what would happen when she shared it with her friends. The icing on the cake is that it got the attention of the CBS affiliate in Miami from whom she appropriated materials, and they mentioned her video on the nightly news.

Terms and Concepts

  • Abstraction
  • Analog Video (distinct from film and digital video)
  • Appropriation
  • Computational media4
  • Content (see Form)
  • Digital Video (distinct from analog video and film)
  • Direct theory
  • Discourse
  • Documentary (as a major genre in contrast to fictive narrative and experimental works)
  • Experimental (as a major genre in contrast to fictive narrative and documentary works)
  • Fictive narrative (as a major genre in contrast to documentary and experimental works)
  • Film (distinct from analog video and digital video)
  • Form (see Content)
  • Genre
  • Materiality
  • Medium
  • Metaphor
  • Moving image
  • Portraiture
  • Reflexivity
  • Representation
  • Semiology
  • Semiotic system
  • Sign
  • Signified
  • Signifier
  • Symbol
  • Technostructure
  • Theory

Footnotes

  1. Edward S. Small and Timothy W. Johnson. Direct Theory: Experimental Motion Pictures as Major Genre. Second edition, Southern Illinois University Press, 2013, Snell Library, WorldCat ↩

  2. An optical printer is a device that combines a projector and a camera facing each other, with a lens system between them. The projector runs existing footage while the camera rephotographs it frame by frame onto new film stock. The image may be manipulated during re-photography including stretch-printing (printing the same frame multiple times), skip-printing, superimposing multiple layers, altering exposure, isolating, and repositioning elements within the frame, creating mattes, adding effects like dissolves and freeze frames, etc. The optical printer has been used by experimental filmmakers as instruments of investigation, transforming footage to foreground the materiality of the film image and the temporal structure of cinema. Every film image is a mediation, and that remediation through re-photography reveals new perceptual possibilities for the source material. The optical printer has no direct equivalent in analog or digital video, however, compositing software like Adobe After Effects and the Motion Page in DaVinci Resolve can performs similar functions in a computational media context. ↩

  3. If you remix or quote third-party media assets, to avoid running afoul of Copyright Law, your use must be transformative. See the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video, published by the Center for Media and Social Impact at American University (CMSI) for more on what constitutes transformative use. Refer to the CMSI Fair Use Library to learn more about fair use, the right given in U.S. copyright law to use copyrighted material without payment or permission under some circumstances. ↩

  4. Computational media isn’t a term used by Small and Johnson, but it can be defined in a manner coherent with their framework, extending the logic of their media-materialist and semiotic analysis into territory that the second edition of Direct Theory gestures toward but doesn’t fully theorize. Computational media designates moving image (and interactive) systems in which the underlying processes of creation, transformation, and display are orchestrated by algorithmic operations on digital data. Computation is constitutive of the work’s materiality, form, and semiotic possibilities. With computational media, the algorithm, the data structure, the database, the code, and the computational process itself become part of the technostructure as described by Small and Johnson, they actively shape what can be signified and how. ↩

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