The programme looks like a normal news broadcast at first. A series of ordinary people are filmed sitting in their living rooms or standing in parks, giving testimony in straightforward but subtly grave tones. They’ve all narrowly survived death after being struck by lightning. An expert is called on to explain how electricity enters the body and give statistics for surviving such phenomena. But then, a ticker tape enters the frame, telling us the titles of plays that feature lightning — Macbeth, The Tempest, The Seagull — as though it is breaking news. There’s a blast of Michael Nyman strings and interstitial cards with unremarkable archival stories. One of the interviewees recreates his attack using a synthesiser, and there’s a montage of all the participants inexplicably telling the camera their height.

Peter Greenaway’s short documentary Act of God was made in 1980 for Thames Television, the company that owned the London franchise for ITV between the late 1960s and early 1990s. Like Greenaway’s feature film from the same year, The Falls, it is an imaginative collation of data — somewhere between art film and archive — and establishes many of the stylistic flourishes that would become intrinsic to the director’s later films like A Zed & Two Noughts and Drowning by Numbers. Unlike these films, this experimental work by a cinema auteur was commissioned and broadcast by public-service television — a practice which was once more common than is popularly remembered today.

In the 2020s, viewers are used to film adaptions for television — whether it’s director-driven series like Barry Jenkins’ The Underground Railroad or Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake; or episodes of comic book adaptations like Riverdale and The Umbrella Academy shot by New Queer Cinema legends Gregg Araki and Cheryl Dunye, respectively. But along with early examples of auteur TV — like Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1980 series Berlin Alexanderplatz — there are examples of more experimental work made for television: a kind of democratised public art made for the most common of settings.

Many of these publicly funded works originate from mainland Europe. Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog series of films, commissioned by Polish public network Telewizja Polska, suits television storytelling thanks to its parable-like narrative, while introducing avant-garde image-making and allegory. Some works experiment with the nature of television itself, like Lars Von Trier’s turn-of-the-millennium heist drama D-Dag. This story of a bank robbery on New Year’s Eve was broadcast across four Danish channels, with viewers invited to ‘edit’ the film by switching channels. A standard packaged ‘Final Film’ version of D-Dag proves that the story isn’t very compelling in its own right; but as a one-off spectacle, it was audacious.

Several of Werner Herzog’s early films were made for television. How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck, co-produced by former German broadcaster Südwestrundfunk in 1976, revealed his interest in spoken language as poetry, through footage of a livestock auction in Pennsylvania and in nearby Amish communities, where the hybrid language Pennsylvania German is spoken. The footage of the rapid-fire livestock auctioneers — speaking what Herzog termed ‘the poetry of capitalism’ — is especially surreal, blurring the line between documented fact and filmed performance art. Playing with the television documentary format proved ideal for Herzog’s philosophy of ‘ecstatic truth’, where he plays with reality to reveal the essential nature of a subject or idea.

Another filmmaker similarly suited to the TV context was Peter Watkins, whose pseudo-documentarian style peaked with 1974’s Edvard Munch, a three-part biopic of the expressionist painter co-produced by Norwegian and Swedish state networks. The film is both emotionally devastating and stylistically bold, made in a docu-drama format that riffs on direct cinema, but also alludes to the emotional beats and ensemble casts of television soap opera — as David Lynch would over a decade later with Twin Peaks.

Watkins also made a pseudo-documentary about nuclear war, The War Game, for the BBC in 1965, but it was deemed too frightening for audiences and ended up with a cinematic release — and an Academy Award — instead. Its first TV broadcast came two decades later — notably the night before a repeat transmission of Threads, the notoriously scary TV film about a hypothetical nuclear explosion which The War Game undoubtedly influenced.

By 1989, the network showed more bravery in broadcasting what remains one of the most striking examples of art film on TV: Alan Clarke’s Elephant. Shot on 16 mm, the mostly dialogue-free film depicts a gunman in Northern Ireland shooting and killing eighteen people — its relentless Steadicam shots mirroring the methodical execution on screen. The plain presentation of murder on television at the time was shocking to some; but it was an effective metaphor for the everyday nature of violence for others. ‘It is said that for those living in Northern Ireland the “Troubles” are as easy to ignore as an elephant in your living room,’ read the logline. It would go on to greatly influence another film also named Elephant, Gus Van Sant’s 2003 post-Columbine film.

In today’s landscape of precarious funding and streaming-service junk, public networks are less likely to take a financial and reputational chance on such experimental work in such a publicly available context. A notable exception is Jonathan Glazer’s The Fall, a typically foreboding short film broadcast without introduction on BBC Two around Hallowe’en 2019. Inspired by Goya’s Disasters of War series, the film depicts the hanging of a man by a masked mob, an allegory of Nazi violence that terrified unsuspecting viewers tuning in for the popular comedy variety show Live at the Apollo. ‘I didn’t want to frame it with any expectation,’ Glazer said of the decision.

His follow-up feature, this year’s The Zone of Interest, mined similar themes more directly. It was also programmed alongside light entertainment — hitting multiplexes at the same time as Madame Web and Argylle — but there’s something about seeing such an unflinching, artful vision almost against one’s will, in the most public of cultural contexts, that is uniquely affecting.

In 2024, experimental work by auteurs is more likely to be funded by a luxury fashion house or an arthouse streaming service like MUBI, hidden on specialist platforms, only to be seen by those making the effort to seek it out. Imagine if it struck us from the corner of our living rooms — like the lightning in Greenaway’s Act of God — unsuspecting, shocking, and life-changing.