Experimental cinema. A brief survey

[Dean Luis Reyes]

Dear colleagues:

My name is Victor Fowler and I work in the International School of Film 
and TV (Cuba) as Head of the Department of Publications. We are 
publishing a digital review on film and television and our main interests 
is to present a wide vision on these subjects. Our next issue will deal 
with avant-garde and experimental cinema and we are sending a pair of 
questions to experts and filmmakers who could help us to understand the 
landscape of contemporary experimental cinema. As you could suppose we 
know history and facts of USA's cinema (mainly), France, Germany, England 
and a little bit or nothing about other countries. We offer no pay, but 
an opportunity to reach a wider audience, especially in the schools of 
cinema of Latin America. Thanks for your time. Kind regards.

1- Why to become an experimental filmmaker? Why not to follow a career 
into the industry (considering salaries, awards, fame...)?

2- How could be sustained a circuit of experimental film? Which social 
actors or institutions should be part of the process? 

3- In recent years interest in experimental films has grow in countries 
like India. Do you think that experimentation is a kind of natural step 
in national cinemas or, in this case, another consequence of 
globalisation?

4- Today experimental techniques are learned in schools (sometimes there 
are workshops even in middle-schools) and we have a lot of prices, 
festivals, magazines and so on in the subject. Perhaps we have a rethoric 
of experimental cinema? How to differentiate between this and 
authenticity?

5- Considering the developments in the field of video, computing arts, 
experimental cinema and video-games (as spaces of "audio-visuality"). Are 
we approaching to a new type of synthetic art and artist?

If you have time to answer, we'll feel deeply honoured publishing your 
ideas. The name of our electronic review is Miradas and the address: 
www.miradas.eictv.co.cu