W4D3

Stephen Connolly (born Montreal, 1964, lives in London) is an artist-filmmaker who employs the investigative and reconstructive aspects of documentary, exploring how its formal conditions can reflect on both individual and social agency.

Shown at film festivals as well as in gallery contexts, Connolly's work uses various practices associated with conceptual film, including atemporality and montage, while always emphasising a central motif or subject. The artist does not foreground his own presence, but employs a multitude of voices and modes that include direct commentary, reportage and reconstructed speech.

What is an experimental film?

An experimental film is a project bucks the trends of conventional cinema and pushes the medium of film in unexplored ways. The spectrum of experimental films is extremely broad; this genre encompasses a great many types of projects of varying lengths, styles, and goals.

There are experimental feature films, though more experimental projects have shorter runtimes. This is due in part to many experimental films being made for low budgets and/or the fact that the majority of experimental films are never intended for mainstream appeal or traditional distribution.

What is Experimental Film — History, Examples & Movements (studiobinder.com)

In today's class, we watched four experimental films created by an artist named Stephen Connolly.

The first film is related to a Panopticon（圆形监狱）.

The Imagination diagram of Panopticon

The second film was made in memory of one of his deceased friends.
The third film explores the issue of abandoned cities, specifically focusing on Detroit.
The fourth film is a short video created using 3D particle effects. He also showed us the project files for this film. The specific effect was achieved using Blender, and his project allowed for automatic arrangement of 3D particles based on the arrangement of pixels in a photo.

(photo shot in the class)