Avant Gosh

We live in a time of sequel after sequel, remake after remake, yet everyone wants to be different. And they try so hard to be different they end up creating the same exact thing they want to be different from. Avant Garde filmmaking may be rare to see in the wild, but while attending film school? Not so much. 

During my time at film school, we studied many different variations of experimental filmmaking, from Martin Scorsese’s use of freeze frames in the movie Casino or that dream sequence in Twin Peaks that has the actors speaking in reverse. While it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, it’s something every film student has to learn. In the Avant-Garde class I took, we were required to make our own version of an alternative film, but as I watched everyone's movies I noticed something: each movie had some version of vomit in it. 

Bodily fluids were the most common thing I saw in my classmate’s films, and instead of taking a nuanced approach to avant-garde filmmaking, they resorted to making the audience uncomfortable. Moral of the story: Just because David Lynch does it doesn’t mean you have to, too. 

After watching these movies one after another, it was almost comical how all of them felt the same; I left inspired. “I can certainly make a parody of these films," I told myself. And that's exactly what I did.