It is keyed to films I often teach in the first few weeks of the course. The films we'll be looking at vary significantly from the usual dramatic narrative and documentary modes. Here are some concepts that can help you experience and analyze them. Theme, rather than story, is often the uniting structural factor. The link between images is usually associational rather than descriptive or discursive.
Little attempt is made to preserve the illusion of real time or real space.
The expressive rearrangement of actual space and time is the norm. Often the experimental film generates a new time-space context of its own. This is the reverse of narrative film practice. The relation between sound and image tends to be based more often on analogy or contrast or contradiction than on reality. The statement made or the vision presented is most often the personal one of an individual artist working directly in the medium, rather than supervising a group of hired technicians.