The Five Obstructions
What the Bleep Do We Know?
When is an “experimental film” not an experimental film? This might seem a niggling matter to the ordinary paying customer, but it’s a serious issue for artists who’ve devoted their careers and lives to experimental filmmaking, knowing that they’ve given up the possibility of a wide audience by doing so. They’re not likely to be sympathetic when someone with a dilettantish interest in this genre decides to make an experimental film–by which I mean simply a film that experiments with form or content–for the mainstream.
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Of course this bias turns experimental film into a social undertaking rather than an aesthetic one, discounting the value of genuinely experimental work done by figures as formidable as Alfred Hitchcock, Abbas Kiarostami, Stanley Kubrick, Alain Resnais, and Jacques Tati. Experimental filmmaking is often a grim, competitive business. A little over 20 years ago I wrote a book surveying recent experimental and independent work, Film: The Front Line 1983. I quickly discovered that most of the people I devoted chapters to treated me like a personal friend, and many of those I didn’t write about saw me as an enemy of experimental film.
I see two categories of mainstream experimental film. The first–which includes films such as Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1983) along with his Powaqqatsi (1988) and Naqoyqatsi (2002)–can be loosely labeled new age documentaries. The second–which includes Christopher Nolan’s 1998 Memento and Gaspar Noe’s 2002 Irreversible–could be called puzzles that have narratives and characters. The Five Obstructions and What the Bleep Do We Know? straddle these categories: each has documentary elements, and each has a narrative and characters.
What the Bleep Do We Know? is closer to a new age film than to a puzzle. This show-offy stunt credited to three people (Mark Vicente, Betsy Chasse, and William Arntz) plainly aspires to evoke an acid trip, combining all sorts of digital special effects with sound bites from experts talking about quantum physics, neurophysiology, molecular biology, metaphysics, and New Agey subjects, then intercutting them with a fictional narrative about a deaf-mute photographer (Marlee Matlin) that’s meant to illustrate the various far-out concepts. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. But the more the perfunctory plot develops, the less relevant it seems to anything.
