The Impressionists

I'm going to borrow a label from Art History, Impressionism, to describe films labeled "Experimental Cinema" or "Avant Garde Cinema."
The most well-known American film makers in this category are Maya Deren, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage and Ken Jacobs. Also, (you may have heard of) Jonas Mekas, who is now mostly known for helping other filmmakers.
These people made short independent films before Sundance. They worked in the 50's and 60's and I think I can say that with the arrival of MTV in the 70's, Experimental Cinema in America was gone.
There's a point in Ken Burn's Jazz documentary about black musicians picking up brass instruments left over from the Civil War and using them to make great music. That's kind of what happened with 8mm movie cameras in the 50's and 60's. (I'm speaking from personal experience here.) Kids borrowed Dad's home movie camera and made short movies with very little money. And as it has been said elsewhere, these movies bore little resemblance to what was in the theatres and on TV. The 60's was a time when it seems like everyone took themselves very seriously indeed, and these little movie makers were no exception.

Stan Brakhage was a true American original, an outstanding film maker. He was obsessed with vision, and I'm not talking about the metaphoric kind. You can find some of his films on YouTube, which is a good thing. As you can imagine, you lose a lot, watching on a computer in a well-lit room. The title sequence to the movie Seven is a Brakhage homage. I think I should write about the films of Brakhage at a later date, when more people have seen a little of his work. I should also say that I attended a five week summer course with him at NYU.

People who study art history seem obsessed with labels and I am no exception. So this subject is -to be continued. I want to say what I mean by Impressionism in this context, what happened, and how this ties into our list of ways to look at movies.