In drama the most radical innovator was August Strindberg (1849 1912), and from that day to this, drama (forced to compete with the cinema) has become ever more experimental, constantly striving for new methods, materials, and, especially, ways to establish a close relationship with the audience.
Yet it's the noncommercial, or experimental, cinema that excites Mekas even more, and that's what most of the book is filled with, and that's what gives rise to his longest, fullest, and most passionate texts.
Pitched between the experimental cinema of Clio Barnard's The Arbor and the more accessible theatrics of Les Misérables ("It's a wicked bloody world," sing the locals awaiting sight of the prisoner), London Road exists in the quarter tones between speech and song, the lilt of voices drifting almost imperceptibly into melody.
Stephen Holden of The New York Times found the film to be an entertaining "luminous Hollywood ghost story", and offered that if more experimental films were as entertaining, "the notion of a thriving avant-garde cinema might not be so intimidating to the moviegoing public".
Lucia became more experimental.
Dad was more experimental.
"They taught us non-narrative, independent experimental cinema," he said.
Other films were more experimental.
If there were more experimental films as entertaining as "The Decay of Fiction," Pat O'Neill's luminous Hollywood ghost story, the notion of a thriving avant-garde cinema might not be so intimidating to the moviegoing public.
Stan Brakhage, one of the leading figures in American experimental cinema, died on Sunday in Victoria, British Columbia.
