The artistic movement of avant-garde filmmaking traditionally refrains from a standard narrative approach to storytelling to further favor uses of visual experimentation and emotional expression in this filmmaking medium. Choreographed dance films specifically use movement, rhythm, and the expressive capabilities of the human body to communicate meaning, rather than use much dialogue or plot. Dance specifically becomes this powerful artistic language that allows filmmakers to convey their meaning in emotional states that words can easily fail to explain. In short film, des rêves des rives, directed by Harry Bracho and Louise Luck these choreographed and stylized movements reflect the character’s inner feelings and brings in the audience along for the ride, transforming the body itself as a host for such statements to be made visible emotionally and psychologically.  

 

Dance Film, directed by Kelly Gallagher and HOWW TO WAYT, directed by Johanna Winters provide different aspects to dance and other choreographed bodily expression in avant-garde cinema. These films play with the constraints of what exactly is “dance” and how it can be expanded in avant-garde cinema. The human body becomes a canvas, its own artistic medium where choreographed movements can evoke emotion, feelings and a personal connection. HOWW TO WAYT does this by providing precise choreographed movements that make us follow along in a conscious mind feeling the emotions conveyed in these movements. Dance Film takes a different approach and provides the reaction to a dance instead of showing its performance.

 

Avant-garde cinema can treat dance as a form of pure expression, using the human body as a symbolic tool rather than a subject for traditional storytelling. The film des rêves des rives highlights this idea of choreographed expressionism. The film provides us with enough information about what we are looking at, a young woman leaves the city and walks along the riverbank, as she dances with this free spirit in the open public where we get sucked in her mindset, feeling her in her own little world. However, in her movement itself there’s this repetitive push and pull as if she drowns in these moments of doubt and melancholy, an ironic sense of the idea of dancing freely in public but providing this feeling of a pushing and pulling as if she hesitates to move forward. This film provides such a perfect example of how dance in avant-garde can become this gateway to a direct translation of the inner self and reflecting those emotions to create reactions from others that exceeds verbal explanation. Through this emphasis of bodily expression, avant-garde cinema transforms dance into a language of emotion, identity and artistic statement. 

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Similarly, Dance Film provides an external dance off-camera to the subject of the film, her baby. We see the outcome of dance and how movement provided by the mother is introducing an emotion to the baby, as we cannot see the movement specifically, we are left with how it is making the baby feel and that is the expression of the outcome of dancing. This film specifically reflects how avant-garde ideas about expressionism where the body is not only a moving subject but also a source of emotional energy that affects others. This unseen dance turns movement into this abstract concept that allows viewers to experience its impact instead of the form.

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 The body as an artistic medium itself transforms dance into a form of visual art in motion. Avant-garde cinema may use the human body as a moving shape within the frame of the camera which could be like a brushstroke a painter would paint. The body itself becomes the canvas on how emotion, rhythm, and abstract concepts are expressed. The combination of cinematic techniques such as composition, editing, lighting, and movement of the camera can turn a dancer’s movement into compositions that are similar to live paintings. In a sense, the body is a canvas, considering that avant-garde cinema is blurring the line between cinema and visual arts, akin to turning movement into color, texture, and lines. This idea is taken literally in HOWW TO WAYT; the film quite literally provides us with the subject as a canvas, a literal paper-maché canvas. This is a great example of literally and metaphorically demonstrating the body as a canvas and artistic medium. The use of close-ups in the camera and how the body is placed and how it is moving, creates the visual art of cinema where we follow the subject where they are, where they are place, and how they move. The movement is careful, precise, and controlled, it is asking to be looked at and is asking to be observed. Through observing this piece, the canvas then provides us with emotions and feelings that dance expressionism through movement and body language becomes apparent.

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 Whether the dance is choreographed or off-screen or even used to turn the body into a canvas, these films demonstrate how avant-garde filmmakers use movement of the body to express feelings that words often cannot describe.