Teaching experimental film: On the practical and analytic treatment of avant-garde cinema

Abstract

This article highlights the potential of experimental and avant-garde cinema in film educational contexts. In the first part, Stefanie Schlüter evaluates her practical experience in working with 10- to 11-year-old schoolchildren. Based on reflections by Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage and others, she emphasizes the act of engaging with film material (scratching, painting) as a genuine haptic and perceptual experience. In the second part, Volker Pantenburg reframes classical avant-garde films by Gary Beidler, Peter Tscherkassky and Morgan Fisher as valuable, implicitly didactic 'lessons of cinema'. In a playful and elaborate way, these films perform and display basic qualities of the moving image: movement and stillness, materiality and narration, format and affect.