The Moviegoer: Experimental fantasias – Chicago Reader

The Moviegoer is the diary of a local film buff, collecting the best of what Chicago’s independent and underground film scene has to offer.

In searching for a concise definition of experimental cinema, I came across this description from the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam: “These films by definition are unconventional, and therefore almost never reach a wide audience.” This is true—even the most well-known experimental film is unlikely to be seen by even 1/100th of those who see the averagely successful commercial film, much less the blockbusters.

Two things I saw this past week intrigued me, as they are by definition “unconventional” yet were made for a wide audience. The first, Robert Zemeckis’s latest film, Here, has been described as experimental in many reviews of it, and the film certainly meets the technical standards of the “genre.” Here’s gimmick, if you will (though there may be no filmmaker for whom gimmickry is a more earnest pursuit than Zemeckis), is that it’s all shot from the same camera angle, largely taking place in one room, the home of Tom Hanks’s Richard and his family. This includes his childhood through his marriage to Margaret (Robin Wright, with whom Hanks costarred in Zemeckis’s 1994 film Forrest Gump), and what came before and what came after, ranging all the way back from the dinosaurs—a very Malickian touch—to the Black family living there in the near-present day, as is indicated by the conversation they have with their teenage son about police brutality and, later, the emergence of COVID.

But it’s nonlinear and also fragmented, literally, with the screen being broken up into squares and rectangles, with parts of one scenario turning into another, piece by piece. (The film is based on a graphic novel, borrowing this panel motif of its source to traverse between eras and families.) Here has been a flop, netting only $11.6 million at the box office against a production budget of approximately $50 million. But I quite liked the film. It’s ambitious, and the formal bravura keeps it fast-paced, making it entertaining on a pretty basic level. Was it the experimentation that detracted from critics’ and audiences’ appreciation of the otherwise conventional plot? Has Zemeckis pushed it too far past the palatable manipulations of Tom Hanks situated at various historical events? 

On the opposite side of things, Walt Disney’s Fantasia (1940), which I saw on 35 millimeter at the Music Box Theatre on Saturday (the matinee screening; I couldn’t stay up for the midnight show on Friday), is still Disney’s most “experimental” film to date. Obviously it needs no introduction—Mickey as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice is part of the cultural fabric. More than that, Fantasia embodies the magic of cinema and the relationship between image and sound, set as it is to all classical music. The mode comes to life through animated vignettes, none of which, except for “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” aligns with the “story” of its respective composition. 

In both films, the makers’ imaginations feel boundless, in Here to imagine several generations of families in one location (boundless in practice but not literally, an interesting juxtaposition), and in Fantasia, any number of situations made animated to music’s most famous classical compositions. I would like to say the experimental mindset perseveres, but alas, while the screening of Fantasia was packed to the gills (lots of families with children, of whom I was super impressed by sitting quietly, for the most part, during a two-hour film), Here hasn’t found its audience. 

In terms of a more traditional experimental screening, I also went to the second program of the 2024 Eyeworks Experimental Animation Series at Block Cinema on Saturday (after Fantasia), an annual event brilliantly curated by artists Alexander Stewart and Lilli Carré. It was a packed house there, too, so perhaps there’s some hope for more straightforwardly (haha) experimental fare.

Until next time, moviegoers.