After stumbling around wikipedia and other resource based sites, I found the link to the formalist film by Torrey Richards and Brad Hutchinson (white base).
Ive identified most of its key features and they are all what you would expect a formalist film to contain. Strange lighting, flashy effects and what I would call an 'imaginative' story line, all make a good formalist film.
In further detail...
- Lighting: mostly outside, but indoor scenes have no artificial light to build an spooky atmosphere from the light coming through gaps outside.
- Sounds/ Music: spooky out of tune violins and other string instrument build to a final climax of distorted sounds. This sound track is key to the films scariness.
- Plot: i don't think it is possible to ever work out the plot from a formalist film. This could be anything from walking school to the path of death. It just isn't worth the hassle spending hours upon hours trying to imagine what the writer could have been doing when he wrote this film. Just let the craziness of the effects make its own 'imaginative' story.
- Camera work: Personally, I think the choice of a wobbly camera was a bad idea and I think that if a still shot was used, the flashing transitions would have been more effective.
- Editing: This is probably the part in which the formalist bit of the film comes together. Changing all the shots into black and white is a very nice effect and the flashy transitions work very nicely with the soundtrack
