Evocation, Atmosphere, Place, Experimentation

Before doing anything else read this piece on Experimental Film from the BFI

What I want to look at today are some experimental filmmakers who create work that is not primarily motivated by storytelling or narrative. The trails and routes that you are thinking about and will be presenting ideas for today also lend themselves to this way of working.

What then is left if narrative is not the primary motivation for a piece of work?

Evocation: Thesarus

Noun

evocation – imaginative re-creation

imagery, imaging, mental imagery, imagination – the ability to form mental images of things or events; “he could still hear her in his imagination”

Chris Marker La Jetee

Atmosphere:

The dominant tone or mood of a work of art. An aesthetic quality or effect, especially a distinctive and pleasing one, associated with a particular place.

We can see this at work both in experimental films and also computer games:

Both of these clips although very different and each has narrative elements work to produce atmosphere, and place to evoke a mood that the viewer or user participates in. This ability to evoke is not restricted to a particular medium. Different things can be used to evoke and set mood….we usually think of music in this regard and it is easy to talk about music in this way. But it is less easy to talk about music in terms of narrative. Why do we feel comfortable talking about mood and atmosphere for music but find it more difficult to look at visual imagery without looking for specific meaning or narrative?

This Time Photo essay of Detroit evokes atmosphere and place but there isn’t a specific narrative each image works on its own.