Non-narrative film, or abstract film, is an aesthetic of cinematic film that does not narrate, or relate "an event, whether real or imaginary". It is usually a form of art film or experimental film, not made for mass entertainment. Narrative film is the dominant aesthetic, though non-narrative film is not fully distinct from that aesthetic. While the non-narrative film avoids "certain traits" of the narrative film, it "still retains a number of narrative characteristics". Narrative film also occasionally uses "visual materials that are not representational". Although many abstract films are clearly devoid of narrative elements, distinction between a narrative film and a non-narrative film can be rather vague and is often open for interpretation. Unconventional imagery, concepts and structuring can obscure the narrativity of a film. Terms such as absolute film, cinéma pur, true cinema and integral cinema have been used for non-narrative films that aimed to create a purer experience of the distinctive qualities of film, like movement, rhythm, and changing visual compositions. More narrowly, "absolute film" was used for the works of a group of filmmakers in Germany in the 1920s, that consisted, at least initially, of animated films that were totally abstract. The French term cinéma pur was coined to describe the style of several filmmakers in France in the 1920s, whose work was non-narrative, but hardly ever non-figurative. Much of surrealist cinema can be regarded as non-narrative films and partly overlaps with the dadaist cinéma pur movement.
Abstract film
Abstract film or absolute film is a subgenre of experimental film and a form of abstract art. Abstract films are non-narrative, contain no acting, and do not attempt to reference reality or concrete subjects. They rely on the unique qualities of motion, rhythm, light, and composition inherent in the technical medium of cinema to create emotional experiences. Many abstract films have been made with animation techniques. The distinction between animation and other techniques can be rather unclear in some films. For instance, moving objects could either be animated with stop motion techniques, recorded during their actual movement, or appear to move when being filmed against a neutral background with a moving camera.
History
Abstract animation before cinema A number of devices can be regarded as early media for abstract animation or visual music, including color organs, chinese fireworks, the kaleidoscope, musical fountains, and special animated slides for the magic lantern (like the chromatrope). Some of the earliest animation designs for stroboscopic devices (like the phénakisticope and the zoetrope) were abstract, including one Fantascope disc by inventor Joseph Plateau and many of Simon Stampfer's Stroboscopische Scheiben (1833).
1910s: Earliest examples Abstract film concepts were shaped by early 20th century art movements such as Cubism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Suprematism, Futurism, Precisionism, and possible others. These art movements were beginning to gain momentum in the 1910s. Italian Futurists Arnaldo Ginna and his brother Bruno Corra made hand-painted films between 1910 and 1912 that are now lost. In 1916 they published The Futurist Cinema manifesto together with Giacomo Balla, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Remo Chiti, and Emilio Settimelli. They proposed a cinema that "being essentially visual, must above all fulfill the evolution of painting, detach itself from reality, from photography, from the graceful and solemn. It must become antigraceful, deforming, impressionistic, synthetic, dynamic, free-wording." "The most varied elements will enter into the Futurist film as expressive means: from the slice of life to the streak of color, from the conventional line to words-in-freedom, from chromatic and plastic music to the music of objects. In other words it will be painting, architecture, sculpture, words-in-freedom, music of colors, lines, and forms, a jumble of objects and reality thrown together at random." Among the proposed methods were: "Cinematic musical researches", "Daily exercises in freeing ourselves from mere photographed logic" and "Linear, plastic, chromatic equivalences, etc., of men, women, events, thoughts, music, feelings, weights, smells, noises (with white lines on black we shall show the inner, physical rhythm of a husband who discovers his wife in adultery and chases the lover – rhythm of soul and rhythm of legs)." About a month later the short film Vita Futurista was released, directed by Ginna in collaboration with Corra, Balla, and Marinetti. Only a few frames of the film remain and little else of any Futurist Cinema work seems to have been made or preserved. Around 1911 Hans Lorenz Stoltenberg also experimented with direct animation, rhythmically piecing together tinted film in different colors. He published a leaflet about it and claimed that many people growing up with the hand-colored films of Georges Méliès and Ferdinand Zecca would try their hand on painting on film at that time. In 1913 Léopold Survage created his Rythmes colorés: over 100 abstract ink wash / watercolor drawings that he wanted to turn into a film. Unable to raise the funds, the film was not realized and Survage only exhibited the pictures separately. Mary Hallock-Greenewalt used templates and aerosol sprays to create repeating geometrical patterns on hand-painted films. These extant films were probably made around 1916 for her Sarabet color organ, for which she filed 11 patents between 1919 and 1926. The films were not projected, but one viewer at a time could look down into the machine at the film itself. The Sarabet was first publicly demonstrated at John Wanamaker's New York department store in 1922.
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