DOCUMENTARY FORMS:

Categorical Form:

Often begins by identifying its subject. These might develop in simple ways which could bore the viewer because of the risk to seem like a list predictably building from one example to another.

Les Blanc’s Gap Toothed Women, however, are a complex and fascinating take on the categorical form. His film makes this form feel like a kitschy scrapbook of images and vignette monologues. A “talking heads” style situation as the book refers to.

I loved the balance between the interview subjects, found images, and especially the slyly suggestive, gap-evocative imagery like the harp.

Experimental:

A “wilfully nonconformist” approach to filmmaking also known as avant-garde. These can be made for a variety of reasons: desire to express a personal experience, convey mood or physical quality, explore possibilities of medium itself…There may not be a story but more poetic language or “pulsating visual collages” like Ballet mechanique. They can also have a story but it will usually be a challenging one.

Abstract Form:

Can be a film organised around colours, shapes, sizes, and movements in the images.  Can be organised according to theme and variations – terms taken from the musical world playing on motifs, keys, and rhythms. Similarly, abstract films can also be arranged as such – introducing viewer to initial ideas and materials that could be expected. An establishment of tone, if you will. Then other segments will begin, typically going on from previously established tones and materials. Perhaps augmented in energy or colour but still a similar idea.

Often filmmakers will juxtapose photographs of real, recognisable objects alongside creations of shape/colour etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QV9-l-rXOE

Ballet mecanique uses film techniques to stress the geometric qualities of ordinary things. Close framing, masks, unusual camera angles, and neutral background isolate objects and emphasize their shapes and structures.

The film has been divided in 9 parts:

Credit sequence, intro of rhythmic elements, objects through prisms, rhythmic movements, people and machines, intertitles and photographs, more rhythmic movements mostly of circular objects, objects dancing, return to opening elements.

Associational Form:

Drawing on a poetic series of transitions. They suggest ideas and expressive qualities by grouping images that may not have logical connections but the viewer will look for and probably find a pattern or way of association.

Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi is a full length associational form film in which the associations are not purely image-based but also suggest a whole range of context, meaning, and emotion.

The power of an associational formal system: its ability to guide our emotions and to arouse our thinking by juxtaposing different images and sounds.