I began as a poet. If I end up an experimental filmmaker, I will have come full circle. I started writing poetry when I was nine-years-old--I didn't even know what poetry was, but I was writing it.
I think of myself first as a scholar then an artist, a writer, and (lastly) a filmmaker. While film is my medium of choice, I came to it last. All that I've learned about film--in a critical/production sense--I've learned at UNCW. That is not to say I don't love it; I'm obsessed with it. It's perfect, and it's potential is limitless.
While narrative can be amazing, it is also limiting and prohibitive by its very nature. The job of a narrative filmmaker--and even a documentarist--is to tell a story. While, one is often rewarded for innovation within the realm of film, there are still conventions that one must at least address, if not entirely follow. Experimental film does not present the same boundaries.
Anything goes.
One must not even use a camera in order to make experimental film thanks to innovations in technology and large archives of footage. Experimental film can truly be an experiment—whether someone is testing the limits of a new (or sometimes reinventing an old) technology or trying to express an emotion or set parameters to follow like writers do in warm-up exercises—it can be a visualization of a poem; it can provide an outlet for an emotion on is unable to put to words; it can be anything that the filmmaker needs it to be.
Experimental film is poetry.
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