Experiemntal Video Art Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Experiemntal Video Art - Research Paper Example There is debate surrounding the importance of audience understanding the message of the video art. The genre, style and intent of the filmmaker is the major factor here. Some films are deliberately made in an abstract fashion, whose beauty lies in its ambiguity. This is the modernist direction in film and cinema where narrative forms have undergone experimentation. A discussion of French cinema is relevant here, as it offers a rich repository of filmmaking for over a hundred years. French directors, screenwriters and cinematographers have influenced or initiated various ‘waves’ of cinematic style over this period. French New Wave cinema is especially influential in this regard, which gave rise to truly modernist interpretations of cinematic art. Auteurs like Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Alain Resnais, etc have pushed the boundaries of narrative form and content. In the case of Godard, the break from conventional cinema or cinema du qualite is so c omplete that his works have eschewed narrative story-telling altogether. Instead, in the highly experimental ‘attempts at cinema’ (as Godard refers to his works) the emphasis is on constructing essays. This is a sharp deviation from the traditional preoccupation with storytelling. Godard can be credited with pioneering the ‘video essay’ format, an experimental genre that is marked by its artistic, theoretical, and political perspectives. It is a format that is not easily accessible to the lay audience. The video essay marks â€Å"a distinct aesthetic strategy, one that is premised on a mode of relationality. According to Ursula Biemann, the video essay as a genre, situates itself between documentary film and video art. Considered too experimental, self-reflexive and subjective for