Filmmaker experiments, diminishes plot

It's not hard to find ways to describe the work of experimental filmmaker Leighton Pierce: Ethereal, graceful, impressionistic, hazy and elegant are good places to start. Pierce uses images in his short films that are watery and almost painterly, washing over the viewer and engulfing them in another realm of time and space. The award-winning filmmaker, who has exhibited his work at the Sundance and Rotterdam film festivals, will be screening his fluid films when he comes to campus on Thursday, April 29 to speak about and present his work.

Pierce is coming as a part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Guest Filmmaker series. The series, which has now brought nine filmmakers to Vassar in the last year with a grant from the Academy as well as a donation from the Film Department, works to introduce students to all aspects of production, exposing them to the various facets of the film industry. Leighton Pierce will round out a group of lecturers that has also included writers, directors, actors, cinematographers, sound designers, and production designers.
The addition of experimental filmmaking to the bill is a a welcome and important part of maintaining a diverse curriculum within the Film Department. "Experimental filmmaking is crucial to the development of a film student," explained Assistant Professor of Film Kathleen Man, who founded and heads the speaker series. "The development of the personal voice can come through in narrative or documentary after working in such a highly emotional and personal mode."

The films of Leighton Pierce are no exception to this. Man worked closely with the filmmaker as a graduate student in film at the University of Iowa, where Pierce is a professor. "His films can bring you to a place of memory and emotion...watching Leighton's films is like having a moment with myself," Man said of her mentor.

These experimental films go against the viewer's expectations of narrative in film. Based less on "cause and effect" story telling, Pierce's films open themselves to the audience much like a painting: a continuum of expression, to be taken in as a piece of cohesive artwork. "The more you invite the viewer to a poetic space, the more they can infuse their own emotion," Man expounded.

The nature of experimental films is one that accentuates this personal experience, in both the viewer and the artist. The past speakers who have shared their work represented one aspect of the narrative or documentary mode of filmmaking, highlighting and exposing a certain dimension of the process. Pierce, however, as with most experimental filmmakers, is responsible for every aspect of the production of the film. The emphasis placed on the individual makes Pierce the perfect candidate to cap off a year of wonderfully diverse and exciting speakers in the Film Department. He is able to speak to each step of the process while at the same time providing the perspective of an avant-garde artist in a field which the Department is trying more and more to expose their students to.

A good example of the emphasis on the individual is in one of Pierce's films entitled "Fall," in which he holds a marble up to the lens of the camera and films various scenes of plein air life. The hand of the filmmaker is visible while the marble captures the outside world, relaying it to the camera, accentuating the manifold tasks of a single artist's hands in producing beautiful and innovative approaches to the medium of film.

Leighton Pierce's talk will begin at 7 p.m. in the Vogelstein Center for Drama and Film. He will speak about his work, screen several of his short films and hold a question and answer session with the audience.