Research And Idea Generation
Studies
These are some on the theoretical concepts I researched and learned about to expand my knowledge.
Experimental film
Experimental or avant-garde films break away from traditional narrative, visual, and auditory norms to explore cinema as an expressive art form. Emerging alongside Dadaism and Surrealism, these films favor abstraction, symbolism, and innovation over coherent storytelling. Pioneers like Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage used unconventional techniques to evoke mood and psychological depth. Formal features include superimposition, rapid montage, and non-diegetic sound. Often politically charged, experimental cinema embraces feminist, queer, and postcolonial perspectives to resist dominant ideologies. Focused more on how stories are told than what happens, these films invite viewers to engage deeply with film as a poetic, sensory experience.
Experimental or avant-garde films break away from traditional narrative, visual, and auditory norms to explore cinema as an expressive art form. Emerging alongside Dadaism and Surrealism, these films favor abstraction, symbolism, and innovation over coherent storytelling. Pioneers like Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage used unconventional techniques to evoke mood and psychological depth. Formal features include superimposition, rapid montage, and non-diegetic sound. Often politically charged, experimental cinema embraces feminist, queer, and postcolonial perspectives to resist dominant ideologies. Focused more on how stories are told than what happens, these films invite viewers to engage deeply with film as a poetic, sensory experience.
Avant-Garde cinema
The avant-garde, meaning “advance guard,” refers to radical, innovative art that challenges norms. In cinema, it breaks from traditional storytelling, embracing abstraction, disjointed editing, and non-linear structures. Emerging alongside modernist movements like Dadaism and Surrealism, filmmakers like Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, and Germaine Dulac used film to explore subconscious thought and reject bourgeois values. Avant-garde cinema critiques dominant ideologies—capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism—while championing feminist, queer, and decolonial voices. Artists like Chantal Akerman and Derek Jarman used it to center marginalized perspectives. Ultimately, avant-garde film prioritizes experimentation, emotion, and intellectual engagement over entertainment, redefining what cinema can be.
The avant-garde, meaning “advance guard,” refers to radical, innovative art that challenges norms. In cinema, it breaks from traditional storytelling, embracing abstraction, disjointed editing, and non-linear structures. Emerging alongside modernist movements like Dadaism and Surrealism, filmmakers like Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, and Germaine Dulac used film to explore subconscious thought and reject bourgeois values. Avant-garde cinema critiques dominant ideologies—capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism—while championing feminist, queer, and decolonial voices. Artists like Chantal Akerman and Derek Jarman used it to center marginalized perspectives. Ultimately, avant-garde film prioritizes experimentation, emotion, and intellectual engagement over entertainment, redefining what cinema can be.
Major Experimental Art And Film Movements
Surrealism 
Surrealism began in 1920s Europe, influenced by Freud’s psychoanalysis and the aftermath of World War I. Aiming to explore the unconscious mind, it rejected realism in favor of dream-like, symbolic imagery. In cinema, figures like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí led the movement with works like Un Chien Andalou (1929), featuring shocking visuals to bypass logic and provoke emotion. Surrealist films often use non-linear narratives, symbolism, and impossible scenarios to depict the subconscious and challenge rational thought.
Key features include:
Disrupted narrative logic
Dream imagery and symbolism
The uncanny and grotesque
Juxtaposition of unrelated elements
Surrealism in cinema is less about plot and more about emotional, psychological, and philosophical provocation. It invites the audience into a world where reality is unstable and meaning is multilayered.
Surrealism began in 1920s Europe, influenced by Freud’s psychoanalysis and the aftermath of World War I. Aiming to explore the unconscious mind, it rejected realism in favor of dream-like, symbolic imagery. In cinema, figures like Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí led the movement with works like Un Chien Andalou (1929), featuring shocking visuals to bypass logic and provoke emotion. Surrealist films often use non-linear narratives, symbolism, and impossible scenarios to depict the subconscious and challenge rational thought.
Key features include:
Disrupted narrative logic
Dream imagery and symbolism
The uncanny and grotesque
Juxtaposition of unrelated elements
Surrealism in cinema is less about plot and more about emotional, psychological, and philosophical provocation. It invites the audience into a world where reality is unstable and meaning is multilayered.
Expressionism 
Expressionism emerged in Germany during the 1910s and 1920s as a reaction to the anxieties of industrialization, war, and modern alienation. Instead of portraying external reality, German Expressionist films focused on inner emotional states. They used distorted sets, stark lighting contrasts, and exaggerated performances to reflect psychological tension. A key example is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), directed by Robert Wiene. Its surreal sets, tilted buildings, and painted shadows visually represent the protagonist’s disturbed mind and the film’s nightmarish tone, making it a landmark of the expressionist style.
Key features include:
Distorted and exaggerated visual style
High contrast lighting (chiaroscuro)
Themes of madness, isolation, and existential dread
Emphasis on emotion over realism
Expressionism had a major influence on film noir and horror, and continues to inspire filmmakers who want to explore psychological depth and visual abstraction.
Expressionism emerged in Germany during the 1910s and 1920s as a reaction to the anxieties of industrialization, war, and modern alienation. Instead of portraying external reality, German Expressionist films focused on inner emotional states. They used distorted sets, stark lighting contrasts, and exaggerated performances to reflect psychological tension. A key example is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), directed by Robert Wiene. Its surreal sets, tilted buildings, and painted shadows visually represent the protagonist’s disturbed mind and the film’s nightmarish tone, making it a landmark of the expressionist style.
Key features include:
Distorted and exaggerated visual style
High contrast lighting (chiaroscuro)
Themes of madness, isolation, and existential dread
Emphasis on emotion over realism
Expressionism had a major influence on film noir and horror, and continues to inspire filmmakers who want to explore psychological depth and visual abstraction.
Cubism 
Cubism, developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the early 20th century, revolutionized how space and form were represented. Rather than depicting objects from a single point of view, Cubism fragmented them into geometric shapes and multiple perspectives. Though primarily a visual art movement, Cubism’s influence extended to cinema—particularly in abstract and structuralist films that break down and rearrange visual forms. For example, cubist-inspired filmmaking may use rapid montage, overlapping frames, or a non-linear narrative that "disassembles" space and time.
In experimental cinema, Cubism is reflected in:
Fragmentation of narrative and perspective
Emphasis on formal elements (shape, color, movement)
Spatial dislocation
Geometric compositions
Cubism encourages viewers to reconstruct meaning, making the film experience more active and interpretive.
Cubism, developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the early 20th century, revolutionized how space and form were represented. Rather than depicting objects from a single point of view, Cubism fragmented them into geometric shapes and multiple perspectives. Though primarily a visual art movement, Cubism’s influence extended to cinema—particularly in abstract and structuralist films that break down and rearrange visual forms. For example, cubist-inspired filmmaking may use rapid montage, overlapping frames, or a non-linear narrative that "disassembles" space and time.
In experimental cinema, Cubism is reflected in:
Fragmentation of narrative and perspective
Emphasis on formal elements (shape, color, movement)
Spatial dislocation
Geometric compositions
Cubism encourages viewers to reconstruct meaning, making the film experience more active and interpretive.
Dadaism .jpg)
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Dadaism was an anti-art movement born in Zurich during World War I as a response to nationalism, violence, and bourgeois culture. It embraced absurdity, nonsense, and chaos, challenging traditional ideas of art, beauty, and meaning. Dadaists aimed to provoke and disrupt, often using irrational or random elements in their work. In cinema, Dadaist films like Entr’acte (1924) by René Clair and Francis Picabia featured whimsical, disjointed imagery and illogical sequences that defied conventional storytelling. These films helped influence experimental editing and montage techniques, leaving a lasting impact on avant-garde and experimental cinema.
Key features:
Randomness and absurdity
Anti-narrative and anti-aesthetic approach
Satire and social critique
Collage, cut-up techniques, and visual puns
Dada laid the groundwork for later experimental and punk-influenced art, emphasizing resistance to conformity and commodification.
Dadaism was an anti-art movement born in Zurich during World War I as a response to nationalism, violence, and bourgeois culture. It embraced absurdity, nonsense, and chaos, challenging traditional ideas of art, beauty, and meaning. Dadaists aimed to provoke and disrupt, often using irrational or random elements in their work. In cinema, Dadaist films like Entr’acte (1924) by René Clair and Francis Picabia featured whimsical, disjointed imagery and illogical sequences that defied conventional storytelling. These films helped influence experimental editing and montage techniques, leaving a lasting impact on avant-garde and experimental cinema.
Key features:
Randomness and absurdity
Anti-narrative and anti-aesthetic approach
Satire and social critique
Collage, cut-up techniques, and visual puns
Dada laid the groundwork for later experimental and punk-influenced art, emphasizing resistance to conformity and commodification.
Abstract/Absolute Film 
The Absolute Film movement, which emerged in the 1920s, focused on the pure form of cinema—color, rhythm, movement—without the use of characters, narrative, or realistic images. Artists like Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, and Oskar Fischinger created visual music through animation, painting directly onto film strips, or synchronizing shapes with sound. These films are often compared to musical compositions, where form and rhythm are central rather than storytelling.
Key features:
Non-representational imagery
Rhythmic editing and movement
Visual-music correspondence
Emphasis on the materiality of film
This approach treats film as a medium of visual composition, not just storytelling, influencing contemporary motion graphics and video art.
The Absolute Film movement, which emerged in the 1920s, focused on the pure form of cinema—color, rhythm, movement—without the use of characters, narrative, or realistic images. Artists like Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, and Oskar Fischinger created visual music through animation, painting directly onto film strips, or synchronizing shapes with sound. These films are often compared to musical compositions, where form and rhythm are central rather than storytelling.
Key features:
Non-representational imagery
Rhythmic editing and movement
Visual-music correspondence
Emphasis on the materiality of film
This approach treats film as a medium of visual composition, not just storytelling, influencing contemporary motion graphics and video art.
Structuralism 
Emerging in the 1960s and 70s, Structural Film focused on the material conditions of cinema itself—the frame, the reel, time, and the projection process. Instead of telling stories, structuralist films explore how film functions mechanically and conceptually. Key figures include Hollis Frampton, Michael Snow, and Peter Kubelka. Snow’s Wavelength (1967), for instance, is a 45-minute zoom through a New York loft, with minimal action but deep conceptual implications about space, time, and perception.
Key features:
Minimalism and repetition
Fixed camera or single-shot durations
Self-reflexivity (film about film)
Emphasis on time and viewer awareness
Structural film asks viewers to consider their own role in constructing meaning and to experience duration as a sensory phenomenon.
Emerging in the 1960s and 70s, Structural Film focused on the material conditions of cinema itself—the frame, the reel, time, and the projection process. Instead of telling stories, structuralist films explore how film functions mechanically and conceptually. Key figures include Hollis Frampton, Michael Snow, and Peter Kubelka. Snow’s Wavelength (1967), for instance, is a 45-minute zoom through a New York loft, with minimal action but deep conceptual implications about space, time, and perception.
Key features:
Minimalism and repetition
Fixed camera or single-shot durations
Self-reflexivity (film about film)
Emphasis on time and viewer awareness
Structural film asks viewers to consider their own role in constructing meaning and to experience duration as a sensory phenomenon.
Feminist and Queer Experimental Cinema
Experimental film became a powerful tool for feminist and queer artists seeking to challenge dominant representations and create space for marginalized voices. Filmmakers like Maya Deren, Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneemann, and Cheryl Dunye used the flexibility of avant-garde cinema to explore gender, sexuality, identity, and the body. Feminist and queer films often resist linearity and traditional aesthetics, choosing instead to use personal narrative, bodily performance, fragmentation, and poetic montage. These works aim to undo the "male gaze" (as theorized by Laura Mulvey) and propose alternative ways of seeing and being seen.
Key features:
Subjective, bodily, and intimate imagery
Disruption of the male gaze
Non-narrative, poetic structures
Intersectional and identity-driven content
These films are crucial to the evolution of experimental cinema as a politically engaged and inclusive art form.
Experimental film became a powerful tool for feminist and queer artists seeking to challenge dominant representations and create space for marginalized voices. Filmmakers like Maya Deren, Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneemann, and Cheryl Dunye used the flexibility of avant-garde cinema to explore gender, sexuality, identity, and the body. Feminist and queer films often resist linearity and traditional aesthetics, choosing instead to use personal narrative, bodily performance, fragmentation, and poetic montage. These works aim to undo the "male gaze" (as theorized by Laura Mulvey) and propose alternative ways of seeing and being seen.
Key features:
Subjective, bodily, and intimate imagery
Disruption of the male gaze
Non-narrative, poetic structures
Intersectional and identity-driven content
These films are crucial to the evolution of experimental cinema as a politically engaged and inclusive art form.
Expanded Cinema 
Coined by Gene Youngblood in the 1970s, “Expanded Cinema” refers to practices that move beyond the traditional screen to incorporate performance, installation, interactivity, or multiple projections. Artists sought to merge film with other forms of media, challenging the limitations of linear cinema. Expanded cinema explores how film can be experienced in physical space, often in galleries or through multimedia performances.
Key features:
Live projections, performance, and spatial installation
Audience interaction
Blending of digital, analog, and virtual media
Questioning cinema’s boundaries
This movement influenced video art, interactive installations, and immersive environments in contemporary art.
Coined by Gene Youngblood in the 1970s, “Expanded Cinema” refers to practices that move beyond the traditional screen to incorporate performance, installation, interactivity, or multiple projections. Artists sought to merge film with other forms of media, challenging the limitations of linear cinema. Expanded cinema explores how film can be experienced in physical space, often in galleries or through multimedia performances.
Key features:
Live projections, performance, and spatial installation
Audience interaction
Blending of digital, analog, and virtual media
Questioning cinema’s boundaries
This movement influenced video art, interactive installations, and immersive environments in contemporary art.
Inspirations
La La Land
La La Land (2016), directed by Damien Chazelle, is a romantic musical that blends classical Hollywood style with experimental elements. Paying tribute to golden-age musicals, it uses bold, symbolic colors and stylized lighting inspired by expressionism to reflect characters’ emotions. Surreal scenes—like Mia and Sebastian floating in a planetarium—break realism to convey emotional truth. The narrative experiments with structure, notably in the final act’s alternate reality montage, which explores memory, regret, and sacrifice through a postmodern lens. Chazelle also incorporates rhythmic editing and long takes, especially in the opening sequence, emphasizing movement and tempo as storytelling tools. Influenced by experimental musicals such as The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, La La Land uses symbolism, abstraction, and self-reflexivity to deepen its emotional resonance. Though commercially successful, it challenges genre conventions, transforming the musical into a meditation on dreams, loss, and the cinematic form itself.
About the director
Damien Chazelle is an American filmmaker known for his visually stylized, music-driven films. Born in 1985, he gained recognition with Whiplash (2014), a tense drama about ambition and jazz. He wrote and directed La La Land (2016), which earned him the Academy Award for Best Director at age 32—the youngest ever to win. Chazelle is praised for blending classical Hollywood influences with modern storytelling. His films often explore artistic obsession, sacrifice, and emotional complexity through rhythm and visual spectacle. He continued his ambitious work with First Man (2018) and Babylon (2022), further cementing his reputation as a bold, innovative director.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, directed by Robert Wiene, is a landmark of German Expressionism. Set in a distorted, nightmarish world, it follows Cesare, a sleepwalker controlled by the sinister Dr. Caligari to commit murders. The film’s visual style is its most striking feature, with angular, twisted sets and surreal lighting creating a disorienting atmosphere that reflects the characters’ psychological turmoil.Although a silent film, Caligari uses dissonant sound effects and a sparse, eerie piano score to enhance tension and mood. The narrative’s innovative twist ending questions the protagonist’s reality, making the story subjective and surreal.Recognized as one of the first true horror films, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari profoundly influenced horror, noir, and psychological thrillers. Its bold visual and audio design expanded cinema’s ability to depict complex emotional and psychological states, setting a precedent for future expressionistic filmmaking..
The Color of Pomegranates
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The Color of Pomegranates (1969), directed by Sergei Parajanov, is a masterpiece of experimental cinema renowned for its stunning visual style. Instead of a traditional biography, it presents a symbolic meditation on the life and poetry of Armenian bard Sayat-Nova through non-linear, tableau-like scenes rich in cultural and religious symbolism. The film uses minimal dialogue, relying on color, gesture, costume, and metaphorical imagery—like pomegranate splitting or wool dyeing—to evoke emotions and spiritual states. Influenced by Armenian art and folk traditions, each frame resembles a painting or religious icon. Time blurs as past, present, and future merge into a mythic flow. Parajanov also challenges gender norms by casting male and female actors for the poet’s various stages. The film transforms cinema into a poetic, dreamlike experience, making it a landmark of symbolic, experimental storytelling.
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Enter The Void.jpg)
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Enter the Void (2009), directed by Gaspar Noé, is an experimental and visually intense film that explores themes of life, death, and the afterlife through a psychedelic lens. Set in Tokyo, it follows Oscar, a drug dealer who is killed early in the story, and then experiences an out-of-body journey as his spirit floats through the city, witnessing past memories and the lives of those he left behind.
The film is known for its striking use of first-person perspective, vibrant neon colors, and long, fluid tracking shots that mimic a drug-induced or near-death experience. It blends surreal visuals with a non-linear narrative, challenging traditional storytelling to immerse the viewer in an intense sensory and emotional experience.
Enter the Void is notable for its experimental cinematography and exploration of existential themes, making it a landmark in avant-garde cinema.
About the director
Gaspar Noé is an Argentine-French filmmaker known for his provocative, visually intense, and boundary-pushing style. Born in 1963, Noé often explores themes of death, sexuality, consciousness, and human excess through experimental narrative techniques and immersive cinematography. His films, including Irreversible (2002) and Enter the Void (2009), are marked by long tracking shots, vivid colors, and nonlinear storytelling, creating visceral, often disorienting experiences. Noé’s work challenges traditional filmmaking norms, blending art-house aesthetics with controversial subject matter to provoke strong emotional and intellectual reactions. He is regarded as a key figure in contemporary avant-garde and experimental cinema.
Idea Generation
After watching a range of visually and conceptually rich films, I found myself drawn to specific elements within each that deeply resonated with me. These fragments, though coming from vastly different cinematic traditions, inspired the vision for my own experimental project, The Room Where the Sun Was Born. Each offered a unique language—of color, sound, and symbolism—that awakened new ways for me to think about storytelling.
From La La Land, I was especially captivated by its vibrant use of color. The saturated blues, yellows, reds, and purples in the film are not simply aesthetic choices, but emotional signifiers. They reflect mood, desire, disillusionment, and the tension between dreams and reality. Damien Chazelle’s deliberate color palette elevates mundane settings into magical spaces—whether it’s a traffic jam transformed into a dance floor, or the planetarium scene that floats into a surreal ballet of starlight and longing. This use of color as an emotional amplifier directly inspired how I began to think about the visual design of my film. I wanted each dream world my character enters to feel emotionally coded: warm hues for longing, cool tones for confusion, clashing palettes for inner conflict. Color became a character of its own.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari influenced me in a very different way. As one of the earliest examples of German Expressionism, its jagged sets, harsh lighting, and distorted perspective create an uncanny, disorienting world. But more than the visuals, I was drawn to the film's unique audio usage—particularly the dramatic and artificial the feel is. Modern versions often pair it with haunting soundtracks that heighten its surreal effect. I took inspiration from this by thinking about how sound—or the absence of it, could be used creatively.I began to design my film’s soundscape as an emotional guide: whispers, distorted echoes, environmental noises that morph and shift, drawing the viewer deeper into the protagonist’s psyche.
The Color of Pomegranates had a profound impact on the narrative and symbolic structure of my film. Sergei Parajanov’s poetic, non-linear storytelling, where each image functions like a symbol in a larger emotional or spiritual puzzle, showed me that a story doesn’t have to be told through plot—it can be expressed through metaphor. This gave me the freedom to construct The Room Where the Sun Was Born not as a straightforward quest, but as an internal transformation rendered through symbolic spaces. Like Parajanov, I sought to infuse each shot with layered meaning—objects, gestures, or settings that represent aspects of my character’s inner world.
I chose to use Enter the Void as a reference for my own film primarily because of its powerful depiction of a male-dominant environment. The film realistically portrays how women often experience discomfort and marginalization within spaces controlled by male power, which is a theme I want to explore and critique in my work. Additionally, Enter the Void’s innovative use of visuals deeply inspired me—particularly its striking color palette dominated by neon hues and its immersive, surreal settings. The mirror maze-like sequences and reflective surfaces in the film create a disorienting, dreamlike atmosphere that I aim to incorporate to visually represent psychological tension and fragmented identity. Overall, the film’s blend of thematic depth and experimental visual style makes it a valuable model for my project.
Together, these films helped me reimagine what cinema can be: not just a narrative tool, but a multi-sensory canvas for emotion, identity, and self-discovery.
Synopsis
A young
woman embarks on a surreal journey to find "The Room Where the Sun Was
Born" , a mythical place said to hold the light of pure joy. As she
wanders through shifting dream-worlds, each one reflects a different aspect of
her inner emotions. She moves through fragmented cubist spaces, chaotic expressionist
landscapes, and bizarre surrealist realms, each representing a stage of
her transformation. Along the way, she learns that the light she seeks isn’t
something to be found, but something she must create within herself. By the
time she reaches the final space, she realizes that joy is born from her own
ability to shape the world around her, and she steps into a vibrant,
self-created world filled with light.
Contextual understanding of histories and media in experimental practice
1. Contextual Understanding
My film taps into psychological, philosophical, and artistic themes, especially the inner search for joy, identity, and agency. I'm working with universal emotional truths (grief, transformation, self-realization), but I'm also connecting them to specific artistic traditions and cultural narratives about the self, womanhood, and healing.
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Influenced by feminist psychoanalysis (like Julia Kristeva’s ideas of the inner self and symbolic spaces).
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The idea that “joy is not found but created” has roots in existential philosophy and feminist theories of agency (e.g., Sara Ahmed's The Promise of Happiness).
2. Histories
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Art history: Referencing movements like Cubism, Expressionism, and Surrealism , all of which have deep historical and political roots. These styles were responses to war, modernity, repression, and personal alienation.
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Film history: You’re drawing from experimental traditions like Maya Deren, Luis Buñuel, or Alejandro Jodorowsky, who used dream logic and symbolic space to explore inner realities.
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Feminist film/art history: The journey of a woman through internal and symbolic landscapes speaks to the work of Carolee Schneemann, Chantal Akerman, or Julie Dash, who used experimental practice to reclaim female subjectivity.
My story shows an understanding of these histories even if abstractly, by continuing and evolving these traditions in my own voice.
3. Media
Not just telling a story but also visually and structurally experimenting:
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Using linear narrative, symbolic imagery, stylized spaces.
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Blending visual art styles with film language.
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Each “world” in my story acts as a media experiment like a moving painting or spatial metaphor.
I am engaging with the medium of film as an expressive tool, not just a storytelling device. Which is a key part of experimental practice.
4. In Experimental Practice
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Deconstructing narrative norms (dreamlike progression, symbolic resolution rather than plot-based).
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Foregrounding form (cubism, surrealism, etc.) over realism.
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Exploring the internal landscape of a female protagonist in a way that reflects broader cultural ideas.
I'm also showing a reflective awareness of what experimental film is, challenging form, structure, and content while being informed by art and cultural history.
Idea Presentation
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