'experimental' film

[anne mcknight]

I've been reading the history of Meiji-era pedagogies, and oddly enough, the
phrase that keeps coming up in the context of compositions that students were
instructed to write is "jikken seikatsu," or actually-experienced daily life.
This got me thinking about this term of jikken, and of course "jikken eiga,"
or what we usually in English translate as "experimental film."   Perhaps
there are historical or critical links from "experimental" to "experience"
that I had never thought about.  Does anyone have any ideas about how this
term (jikken eiga) came into use, and what kind of assumptions about
perception or phenomenologies of realism it was attached to?  The "actuality"
it points to seems, on a level of gut intuition, quite counter to the usual
"avant-garde-ist" properties we usually associate with experimental
cinema--discontinuity, fantasy, meta-discourse, fragmentation--in short,
anything but an unmediated access to "the real" in the object of
representation itself.

Any speculations, please.  There may be an ethnographic-perceptual history
embedded in here somewhere, given Origuchi Shinobu's predilection for "jikkan"
(roughly:  directly perceived feeling).

Anne McKnight