As a genre, Experimental film has frequently — and justifiably — been excoriated for a sort of brutalism. Writing in The New Republic in 1966, for example, Pauline Kael commented on its pompousness, impersonal dexterity, clever gimmicks, and plain messiness, as in “uneven lighting, awkward editing, flat camera work, the undramatic succession of scenes, unexplained actions, and confusion about what, if anything, is going on.”
Kael was not hostile to the experimental work of skillful filmmakers, such as Bruce Baillie, Carroll Ballard, and Jordan Belson. Her scorching focus was on young Americans who, in reacting to “the banality and luxuriant wastefulness which are so often called the superior ‘craftsmanship’ of Hollywood,” went to the other extreme. “Craftsmanship and skill don’t, in themselves, have much appeal to youth,” she wrote. “Rough work looks in rebellion and sometimes it is: there’s anger and frustration and passion, too, in those scratches and...
Keith Garebian has published thirty books, including the poetry collections Three-Way Renegade and, most recently, Stay.
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