This project applies computational image-analysis methods to a large corpus of approximately 120 American experimental short films from the 1960s to the early 2000s. It forms part of the broader research project Negotiating Place, Body, and Ground: Jewish Experimental Filmmakers in the American Film Avant-Garde (1960s–2000s). Alongside films by Jewish-American filmmakers, the study also examines a control corpus drawn from filmmakers of other backgrounds, enabling systematic comparison across groups. The project begins from the claim that American experimental cinema contains overlooked visual expressions of migration, ethnic otherness, and bodily unease in space. While Jewish filmmakers’ contribution to Hollywood cinema has been widely discussed, their role in the American avant-garde has received less attention, particularly in relation to questions of place, belonging, and embodied disorientation.
The analysis focuses on recurring formal features such as unstable horizons, obstructed depth, surface textures, blurred figure-ground relations, and the visual treatment of the human body. Films by artists including Phil Solomon, Ken Jacobs, Saul Levine, and Ernie Gehr illustrate visual strategies of obstruction, spatial instability, and perceptual disorientation. Methodologically, the project combines large-scale frame analysis with machine-learning-based visual classification. Film frames are analyzed computationally to identify recurring visual patterns and formal structures across the corpus, alongside human interpretation and evaluation. The project contributes to the study of experimental cinema by introducing computational methods into formal film analysis, enabling systematic comparison across film corpora, and offering new ways to investigate how otherness, migration, bodily presence, and spatial instability are expressed through moving images.