Cityscapes, trance states, and women walking: embodied practices of walking in experimental film and video

Commonly associated with the cinema of Béla Tarr and Gus Van Sant, walking on screen has received relatively little attention from researchers despite the ongoing popularity of wayfaring films and videos. Unsurprisingly, even less is known about how walking functions in experimental film and video or responds to avant-garde storytelling. To fill this gap, I take a phenomenological stance on walking to discuss the pedestrian’s embodied experience in a few stylistically distinct works: Crowdog (Vanessa Renwick, 1984/1998), A Walk (Jonas Mekas, 1990), Ordinary Matter (Hollis Frampton, 1972), and Death Songs & Car Bombs (Brendan and Jeremy Smyth, 2013). Despite having different formats and narrative foci, which, respectively, explore walking in a structural-diaristic framework and as a trance state or turn it into a social commentary on female liberation and the culture clash, all of these films echo the phenomenological turn in film studies, demonstrating how pedestrians relate to the multisensorial, kinaesthetic practice and space of walking. Compared to the itinerant mode of art cinema, experimental film and video usually challenge the representational nature of walking and present it as a more complex, disorientating, and unconventional experience, linking the sensation of walking to social mobility, personal freedom, feminism, or place and urban memory.