About

Welcome to Experience Film – a visceral, psychological perspective on modern cinema! If heart-pounding Oscar movie montages are your thing, you’ve come to the right place.

If you want to know more about my take on movies, by all means keep reading… Or, you can dive right into the EF Montage Experience to find out what this site is really all about.

I enjoy writing about movies. But I especially enjoy editing montages. Combining film, music, dance and martial arts elements for an immersive, novel experience.

The Kuleshov effect is named after the Russian filmmaker who demonstrated that two sequential images together hold much more meaning than they do separately. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That concept is integral to the montages I make here.

In the montages I use a combination of video, music and lyrics to try and reveal subtle pieces of information about the themes or characters in the films. Sometimes those which can only be understood via inference. For example, how is Bob Harris feeling in Lost in Translation (2003) when he sits expressionless on the bed his first night in Tokyo?

Or, what is Jenny thinking in Forest Gump (1994) as she hurls rocks at her childhood home before collapsing in anguish?

With montages, capturing, understanding, and communicating this tacit plot and character information is my foremost ambition.

Capturing, understanding, and communicating this tacit plot and character information is my foremost ambition.

Have you ever synced up Pink Floyd’s Dark Side The Moon with The Wizard of Oz? Think of EFC music videos like that concept, but evolved to a post-modern “pulp fiction” style art form.

The EF montage experience is sometimes less mellow, especially if the genre is action. At any rate the goal is the same: to get you in touch with and fascinated by your own subjective thoughts, feelings and impressions.  

My Idea of A Good Movie 

Good films make us think, and even better ones make us feel something. However, the best films, for me, are the ones that fundamentally alter how we think and feel about something in the first place. To do this films must successfully tie new ideas to pre-existing ones, so that we have a foundation on which to leap, so to speak, to wherever novel territory a film asks us to go.

Good films make us think, and even better ones make us feel something. However, the best films, for me, are the ones that fundamentally alter how we think and feel about something in the first place.

The Wizard of Oz (1939) not only hurls us to novel terrain, it delivers us back home with a brand new outlook. Stuck with her family on a dull plot of farmland in Kansas, Dorothy dreams of an escape somewhere over the rainbow. Only after landing there and becoming disenchanted does she come to realize there’s no place like home. What once appeared drab and boring is now desirable.

Inside Out (2015) actually changes the way we think about emotions. We all want to be happy, but Joy alone cannot do the job; sometimes we must experience another emotion first.

By challenging our preconceptions, great films like The Wizard of Oz and Inside Out open doors to new possibilities for thought, feeling and behavior within us. These are the movies I’ll tend to favor here. Naturally, I’m inclined to favor the movies that profoundly affect me, but might not profoundly affect or inspire you. Therefore, I need you to balance me out. Please give me suggestions for new movies as you watch them!

The best way to offer your suggestions is to post in the comments section below each episode. I will also pose questions throughout each episode and I hope you will share your answers and feedback with me and other users.

~E.F.