Fred Camper, Maya Deren, and the Student 7

The Student 7 spoke to me in particular because I value doing all those things but sometimes they get pushed to the back of my head and are sadly forgotten. When writing my goals for this year I'm going to try to incorporate more things that align with these guidelines to get the most out of my senior year. I think many of the rules go hand-in-hand, for example I found a love for French cinema by taking a class spontaneously leading to me viewing a lot more foreign and cult cinema and in turn I began attempting to create my own atypical projects.

Naming, and Defining, Avant-Garde or Experimental Film
The fact that experimental films is undefinable is the pure essence of the mode. There are no parameters or limitations to what can be deemed experimental and that's what I consider to be the main beauty of it. I think as the mode progressive and grows, one term will become more universal. Having said that, I don't see anything wrong with this mode having multiple names. There are many different names for different styles of documentary, why cant there be many names for experimental? From what I know, most experimental films nowadays are shown at films festivals where most people are knowledgable about the terminology of film genres so there wouldn't be a mix up like Camper mentions with the scientists expecting actual science experiments to be shown. I do think that the filmmaker should have the right to refer to their film and write about it the way they chose but the spectators have a right to interpret and call it what they chose as well, i.e. experimental, avant-garde, etc.

Amateur Versus Professional
I like the word "amateur" in Latin a lot better than how it's portrayed in American culture. I think most people associate the word with bad qualities but Deren says the complete opposite. She describes this the same way I would describe the mode of experimental film, with words like; free, poetic, artistic, low-budget. One thing that stuck out to me that Deren said was, "your mistakes won't get you fired". This applies to both Deren's amateurism and experimental film because the filmmaker isn't working for a big production company. I think that's a key component to beginning in filmmaking and not to be cliche but also applies to most of life, don't be afraid of making mistakes and learn from them.