Citizen MickeyExperiments in Cinema 2025: The Persistence of Grass-Roots Experimentation Dirk de Bruyn November 2025 Festival Reports Issue 115 Experiments in Cinema in Albuquerque, New Mexico has just turned twenty. In the lead up to the 2025 edition, Basement Films, the non-profit organisation behind EIC, managed to survive Trump’s latest onslaught on funding; just weeks before the event took place, the festival was asked to return funds that had already been allocated. It was EIC’s localism and volunteerism backbone that saw it through, led by artistic director Bryan Konefsky’s irreverent presentations and engaging framing, further echoed by his new collaborator and partner Nina Schoenfeld, composer and musician, who has added new energy and impetus to the event. Schoenfeld’s article in Pause and Play: Experiments in Cinema, 20 years in the Saddle, a book documenting the festival’s history and launched during EIC, chronicles their coming together, and testifies to the humanity that permeates this event. Konefsky and Schoenfeld’s presence on stage, as well as their insightful presentations of and respect for the works presented, defines the festival’s off-hand intimacy. Surrounding the pair is a circle of local artists, teachers, students and friends who radiate their same energy. Each year, EIC brings together an intriguing mixture of local, national, and international titles; all artists receive a fee for showing their work. Can we really say the festival is nourished by volunteerism, when even the most rudimentary function receives some form of reward or payment? The event feels closer to a communal experience than any corporate hierarchy. There is only one theatre at EIC, which brings artists and audience together in stimulating post-screening chats. There are no prizes either, as Konefsky sees them as divisive: “Creating a micro community meant bringing folks together rather than creating an environment that divided. To that end, we immediately eliminated awards because we felt that being adjudicated into our programming was about all the competition we could stomach.” (Bryan Konefsky, p1. Introduction. Pause and Play 2025) The curatorial committee is gleaned from previous attendees and tasked with selecting entries from an ever-increasing number of submissions. There are also curated programs, which this year included Diana Nenadić’s retrospective on early Croatian Cinema, a special focus on Japanese filmmaker Takashi Makino’s abstract work, and a workshop on antiquated video systems by Christian Haart, head of the archive department at the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. This local/national/international scope was reflected by two outstanding films in the Experiment 1 program, which tackled the history of experimental cinema: Max Hattler’s Serial Parallels (2019) and Corrie Francis Parks and Daniel Nudersher’s SKRFF (2024). Serial Parallels animates the facades of high-rise residencies in Hong Kong as kinetic strips of 16mm film in modular form. Similarly to these vertical strings of flats, each unit stacked atop the other to create pervasive and vertiginous structures, the filmstrip suggests a sort of lattice. The filmstrip was staple imagery in publications about early generations of avant-garde cinema, documenting abrupt frame to frame changes in these experimental 16mm films. Hattler mines Paul Sharits’ 1960s and 1970s experimental practice, particularly his assembled mosaic fields of 16mm filmstrips. Sharits presented visual fields of film strips and markings as technical commentary on his moving image works. His Frozen Film Frame Series (1971- 76) contained repeating 16mm film strips jammed between two sheets of Plexiglas. Hattler has migrated this modular formalism into a digital film form expressing Hong Kong’s architectural landscape. Serial Parallels SKRFF (2024) demonstrates that a documentary animation can play with abstraction. SKRFF re-animates a Viennese wall encrusted in graffiti. The wall is an archaeological site whose materiality is mutilated into a scratched and erased field of colour and shape. These playful erasures and rubbings are systematically documented with stop motion photography. The forty year-long sedimentation of posters, tags, and graffitis on a public wall is laid bare like the crumbling decomposing pages of an old book, while their shedding creates a palimpsest field. This technique can be traced back to Oskar Fishinger’s wax slicing machine, which he used to animate cross-sections of a length of moulded wax and clay in Wachs Experimenta (1920-26). The layered textures are like tree-rings that mark the passing of time. Those filmmakers were not present, but for those that were, productive conversations opened up. Salise Hughes’s Citizen Mickey (2024) uses footage from Citizen Kane to tell the story of Mickey Mouse and his recent copyright debate over free expression and property rights. To juxtapose Mickey’s myth, Hughes includes several artists who appropriated his image, often at a legal cost. Claus Oldenburg, Damien Hirsh, Keith Haring, Jeff Koons, Banksy and Andy Warhol are all on the list. Bogus interviews are presented as imparting real history. An actor playing Minnie Mouse, for instance, talks about her growing marginalization as Disney used Mickey to promote positive American values. Ruth Hayes’s Gimlet (2024) is described as a phytogram made with three varieties of basil. A phytogram is an organic technique that uses the internal chemistry of plants to create images on photographic emulsion, and magnify cellular-level shapes. Fuelled by Karel Doing’s recent work in the field, there has been a resurgence of films experimenting with phytogram. In Gimlet, the colours are unexpectedly enticing; since every frame is different, the film is nothing short of dynamic. Gimlet The full program screened at the Guild Theatre, just down the road from the co-op supermarket, where it was possible to pay for what you could afford and donate to just causes. The neighbourhood that houses EIC, Nob Hill, retained an alternative counter-cultural atmosphere. The festival ran as an in-person event from April 16-20, with 18 screenings called Experiment 1 to 18, which I attended. Its online version ran from April 28 – to May 10 at the festival’s website, which enabled international access but also allowed attendees of the physical fest a chance to rewatch what they’d seen at the Guild Theatre. Konefsky’s own profile has evolved through the years. The artistic director has now abdicated from academic positions of power, and teaches film and art courses at the University of New Mexico, which has successfully become a sustainable cultural capital. Basement Films is the organization that showcases the festival and sponsors an Artist in Residency program. Filmmakers can access filming and editing tools as well as an archive of 6,000 16mm film prints and 1,000 8mm films, a research resource that was shifted from a University space a few years ago. Another crisis negotiated with a DIY communal attitude. This year, in Experiment 18, Jeremy Rourke performed his live music to imagery that included stop motion from a NYC to San Francisco bicycle tour, a celebratory ending to the festival which led to further discussions at local bars and eateries. The community that survived around EIC re-asserts my love of DYI – so shoved aside in Oz by the construction of a National Film Industry, but thankfully resuscitated and on life support through Artist Film Workshop in Melbourne. I was made to feel that I belonged here. I had travelled to Albuquerque with my abstract film Traceless Traces (2024), but I wasn’t the only Australian filmmaker screened. Richard Tuohy and Diane Barrie, luminaries of that Oz scene, were also showcased at EIC 2025 in 16mm splendour. Tuohy and Barrie process footage in their own film lab; viewers could admire the strong image quality of Tuohy’s The Land at Night (2024), and appreciate the relative “novelty” of the unique abstraction and movement in Barrie’s Fear of Floating (2024). The Land at Night Both had already shown their works in previous EiC editions, as evident in the roll call of all the films shown in Albuquerque included in Pause and Play. Among other notable Australian filmmakers is Deborah Kelly, who brought to EIC her group collage animations Lying Woman (2016) and The God of Tiny Things (2019), works reminiscent of Frank Mouris’s technique in Frank Film (1973). Ian Haig’s flesh-based bodily mutilating sci-fi like Alien vs Predator (2020) and Analogue (2016) also screened at EIC. The program that showcased the most positive aspects of this community was one put together by David Sherman and Rebecca Barton’s through their Total Mobile Home Microcinema. Elsewhere at EIC, Barton’s I Cannot Seem to Remember (2024), a short examining memory loss through found footage, screened in the Experiment 10 program. While New Mexico may not be the epicenter of US experimental cinema, one of the qualities of this community and its artists is that they know and retain access to their innovative moving image history. Total Mobile Home Microcinema is an eloquent case in point. Sherman and Barton ran their 25-seat microcinema, a word they allegedly coined, from the basement of their apartment without their landlord’s knowledge. The basement – also used by other renters as a band practicing space – became an entrypoint into the “exploding” Bay Area film culture in the 1990s, and a node in a microcinema network around the nation that tilled, re-gurgitated, and extended the community’s history. “Films are generally short, non-narrative and structurally idiosyncratic,” reads a quote by Scott Stark on the nature of experimental film included in a pamphlet on the project, “though the makers often use narrative elements in unconventional ways.” Scott has put together and long managed an online portal gathering info on festival screenings and funding opportunities, a digital resource that replaced the paper-based Film and Video Makers Travel Sheet put out by the Carnegie Institute Museum of Art through the 1970s and 1980s. Sherman and Barton included Stark’s Degrees of Limitation (1982) in their program; shot on a 16mm spring wound Bolex mounted on a tripod, the short captures Stark as he runs up a San Francisco hill before the camera stops, and then repeats the same process multiple times over, adding one more crank and getting a little farther from the camera each time, a stratagem that recalls the kind of training apps now available on mobile phones. Other TMHM standouts included audiovisual recordings of performance pieces by Stuart Sherman and Luther Price. Sherman’s A Christmas Spectacle placed the filmmaker at the front of the cozy 25-seat venue; the film saw him write a Christmas card, fold it into an envelope (Merry Christmas…), and then tear it up and throw it into the air like confetti (… and a Happy New Year). Luther Price’s Clown 2: Scary Transformation retained its confronting nature in the intimate room. Sitting with a bathrobe draped over his naked body and a wooden penis strapped on his pelvis, Price is seen ringing up personalities in the experimental art scene, likely known by the audience, and abusing them anonymously in a spectral voice. The program’s modular presentation and the banter between Sherman and Barton as they debated what to show next reminded me of the compact structures that now regulate mobile telephone activities like scrolling and grazing, a much more concentrated form of negotiating visual culture. Cathy Lee Crane remarked on the predictive modular nature of their program, and how Stark’s piece was framed similarly to the way shoot ‘em up video games have evolved. Crane’s own Border Dwellers (2025) documents those living along the US/Mexico frontier, with 14 channels each depicting one of the border towns. Listening to Crane’s attempts to negotiate access to her subjects and establish a safe filming environment was impressive and absorbing. Border Dwellers In a post-screening chat Sherman reminded filmmaker and EIC guest Dominic Angerame, who used to run the distribution organization Canyon Cinema, that his response to a Luther Price telephone call had been the most effective he had heard, along the unconcerned lines of “Whatever you think is fine in your world is fine by me”. Konefsky had also directed the audience to Angerame’s entertaining testimonial in Pause and Play, which off-handedly documented the trials of a group stay at an AirBnB at a previous EIC under the title “The Toilet Paper Kaper”. Angerame also showed War Zone (2024), a recently recycled piece of work originally shot in 2005, which mapped the landscape of the Korean demilitarized zone (DMZ) devoid of people but rife with traces of occupation. War Zone reminded me of sections of James Benning’s Landscape Suicide (1987), but in a more nonchalant style that seems to reflect Angerame’s own unflappable personality. Curated by Diana Nenadić, a retrospective of Croatian experimental works from the 1960s showed the beginnings of the experimentalism that would spread across the English-speaking world a decade later via structuralism. Mihoval Pansini’s 1960s works, for instance, played with the technical formalism that Malcolm le Grice and Peter Gidal would dub structural film. Pansini’s K3 III Cisto Nibo Bez Oblaka (K3 or Clear Sky without clouds, 1963) was almost completely devoid of imagery, registering a more complete erasure of content than Peter Gidal’s Room Film (1973). Nenadić suggested that this film may have been inspired by Pansini’s medical practice, through the unfortunate occurrence of a visiting doctor embarrassingly showing a film about some medical issue where the image had been completely overexposed and washed out by accident during processing. Ivan Galeta’s Water Pulu 1869 1896 (1987) also utilized formal considerations to re-animate content. In Galeta’s chronicle of a water polo match between Korea and France, the ball, an object that is usually dynamic, remains in the centre of the image all through the take, while the game’s choreography of bodies, hands, and water splashing surrounds this re-framed centre. The strength of Experiments in Cinema is the focus the festival places on the artist and on the dialogue between members of its community; this is what allows participants to understand how the form has evolved and sustained itself historically. It is a festival worth attending and worth inserting your experiments into. I will finish this dispatch with the Mark Twain quote that Salise Hughes appropriates in the opening of Citizen Mickey: “There is no such thing as an original idea” Experiments in Cinema 16 – 20 April 2025 https://www.experimentsincinema.org/
