The most extraordinary experimental film we'll be looking at is Mothlight, a physical object collage on film. Although viewing it in facsimile digital video form rather film is not ideal, the magic still comes through...what is projected here is not an optical rendering of things, instead it's the semi-transparent things themselves.
Writer J. Hoberman explains thus...
...Mothlight was created by painstakingly collaging bits and pieces of organic matter—moth wings, most notably, as well as flowers, seeds, leaves, and blades of grass—and sandwiching them between two layers of clear 16-mm Mylar editing tape."
And points out that the significance is this...
"NOT THE CAMERA BUT THE PROJECTOR; not a representation but the thing itself, a ribbon of once-living stuff preserved in celluloid coursing along, flashing before our eyes: It was neither Muybridge’s 1879 motion studies nor the Lumière brothers’ 1895 actualités nor even Peter Kubelka’s imageless flicker film Arnulf Rainer (1960) that truly manifested the very essence of cinema but the film-object Mothlight, a three-minute-thirteen-second motion-picture collage assembled and printed by Stan Brakhage..."
You can find the entire article here...
https://www.artforum.com/print/201207/j-hoberman-on-stan-brakhage-s-mothlight-31955
The question we're left with is this...can digital technology be similarly manipulated to bring us so close to the real?
