Visionary Film by
Critics hailed previous editions of Visionary Film as the most complete work written on the exciting, often puzzling, and always controversial genre of American avant-garde film. This book has remained the standard text on American avant-garde film since the publication of its first edition in 1974. Now P. Adams Sitney has once again revised and updated this classic work, restoring a chapter on the films of Gregory J. Markopoulos and bringing his discussion of the principal genres and major filmmakers up to the year 2000.
Women's Experimental Cinema by
Women's Experimental Cinema provides lively introductions to the work of fifteen avant-garde women filmmakers, some of whom worked as early as the 1950s and many of whom are still working today. In each essay in this collection, a leading film scholar considers a single filmmaker, supplying biographical information, analyzing various influences on her work, examining the development of her corpus, and interpreting a significant number of individual films. The essays rescue the work of critically neglected but influential women filmmakers for teaching, further study, and, hopefully, restoration and preservation. Just as importantly, they enrich the understanding of feminism in cinema and expand the terrain of film history, particularly the history of the American avant-garde. The contributors examine the work of Marie Menken, Joyce Wieland, Gunvor Nelson, Yvonne Rainer, Carolee Schneemann, Barbara Rubin, Amy Greenfield, Barbara Hammer, Chick Strand, Marjorie Keller, Leslie Thornton, Abigail Child, Peggy Ahwesh, Su Friedrich, and Cheryl Dunye. The essays highlight the diversity in these filmmakers' forms and methods, covering topics such as how Menken used film as a way to rethink the transition from abstract expressionism to Pop Art in the 1950s and 1960s, how Rubin both objectified the body and investigated the filmic apparatus that enabled that objectification in her film Christmas on Earth (1963), and how Dunye uses film to explore her own identity as a black lesbian artist. At the same time, the essays reveal commonalities, including a tendency toward documentary rather than fiction and a commitment to nonhierarchical, collaborative production practices. The volume's final essay focuses explicitly on teaching women's experimental films, addressing logistical concerns (how to acquire the films and secure proper viewing spaces) and extending the range of the book by suggesting alternative films for classroom use. Contributors. Paul Arthur, Robin Blaetz, Noël Carroll, Janet Cutler, Mary Ann Doane, Robert A. Haller, Chris Holmlund, Chuck Kleinhans, Scott MacDonald, Kathleen McHugh, Ara Osterweil, Maria Pramaggiore, Melissa Ragona, Kathryn Ramey, M. M. Serra, Maureen Turim, William C. Wees
A History of Artists' Film and Video in Britain by
In recent years the use of film and video by British artists has come to widespread public attention. Jeremy Deller, Douglas Gordon, Steve McQueen and Gillian Wearing all won the Turner Prize (in 2004, 1996, 1999 and 1997 respectively) for work made on video. This fin-de-siecle explosion of activity represents the culmination of a long history of work by less well-known artists and experimental film-makers. Ever since the invention of film in the 1890s, artists have been attracted to the possibilities of working with moving images, whether in pursuit of visual poetry, the exploration of the art form's technical challenges, the hope of political impact, or the desire to re-invigorate such time-honoured subjects as portraiture and landscape. Their work represents an alternative history to that of commercial cinema in Britain - a tradition that has been only intermittently written about until now. This major new book is the first comprehensive history of artists' film and video in Britain. Structured in two parts ('Institutions' and 'Artists and Movements'), it considers the work of some 300 artists, including Kenneth Macpherson, Basil Wright, Len Lye, Humphrey Jennings, Margaret Tait, Jeff Keen, Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Malcolm Le Grice, Peter Gidal, William Raban, Chris Welsby, David Hall, Tamara Krikorian, Sally Potter, Guy Sherwin, Lis Rhodes, Derek Jarman, David Larcher, Steve Dwoskin, James Scott, Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey, Peter Greenaway, Patrick Keiller, John Smith, Andrew Stones, Jaki Irvine, Tracy Emin, Dryden Goodwin, and Stephanie Smith and Ed Stewart. Written by the leading authority in the field, A History of Artists' Film and Video in Britain, 1897-2004 brings to light the range and diversity of British artists' work in these mediums as well as the artist-run organisations that have supported the art-form's development. In so doing it greatly enlarges the scope of any understanding of 'British cinema' and demonstrates the crucial importance of the moving image to British art history.
Animation Unlimited by
Featuring 50 seminal short films by key animators from around the world, this book discusses the work of early pioneers such as Oskar Fischinger and Jan Svankmajer as well as contemporary animators such as Larry Cuba, Tim Hope and Run Wrake. All of the films included are independently produced personal work. Most of the featured directors make a living in commercial animation but, freed from the constraints of a client brief, they use their short films to experiment with new ideas and techniques, many of which subsequently find their way into commercial applications. Labors of love, these films can take years to complete - each second of the film may consist of up to 25 frames of animation. Grouped according to four main themes, all forms of animation are covered, including 2D, 3D, Claymation, stop frame and web/Flash animation. Each project is accompanied by a 500-word review including comments from the director. Details of software and method along with the internet address of the production company are given in the technical credits.
Experimental Cinema, the Film Reader by
This volume provides a comprehensive guide to the long tradition of American avant-garde cinema, from its origins in the 1920s to the work of contemporary film and video artists. The Reader addresses major movements and key figures of the avant-garde, including filmmakers such as Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, Isaac Julien and Julie Dash, investigates how underground films have explored issues of gender, sexuality and race, and foreground technical innovations such as the use of Super 8mm and video.
Film Art Phenomena by
Alongside the commercial cinema of narrative and spectacle there has always been another practice - call it avant-garde, experimental or artists' film (as opposed to art cinema). It is this work that Nicky Hamlyn, himself an acclaimed film-maker in the alternative tradition, investigates in Film Art Phenomena. The work takes its cue from modern trends in other artforms, notably painting and sculpture. This is film-making that emphasises the nature of its apparatus and medium in order to bring about a critical, inquisitive state of mind in the viewer. It deconstructs, anatomises and reimagines what film images are; it builds new machines; it recreates the setting of cinema or expands into new kinds of performance and exhibition. It often has a political dimension - urging audiences to make a free and active response not a passive, consumerist one. Hamlyn's major new study treats artists' film conceptually in order to explore key categories that connect different works and film-makers: from framing to digital media, installation to interactivity, point of view to sound. In so doing he considers the work of Stan Brakhage, Malcolm Le Grice and Michael Snow, as well as younger artists such as Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, Jennifer Nightingale, and Colin Crockatt, among many others. Film Art Phenomena is a crucial intervention in debates about the modes of film-making that diverge from and oppose the mainstream.
Experimental Film and Video by
The past 40 years of technological innovation have significantly altered the materials of production and revolutionized the possibilities for experiment and exhibition. Not since the invention of film has there been such a critical period of major change in the imaging technologies accessible to artists. Bringing together key artists in film, video, and digital media, the anthology of Experimental Film and Video revisits the divergent philosophical and critical discourses of the 1970s and repositions these debates relative to contemporary practice. Forty artists have contributed images, and 25 artists reflect on the diverse critical agendas, contexts, and communities that have affected their practice across the period from the late 1960s to date. Along with an introduction by Jackie Hatfield and forewords by Sean Cubitt and Al Rees, this illustrated anthology includes interviews and recent essays by filmmakers, video artists, and pioneers of interactive cinema. Experimental Film and Video opens up the conceptual avenues for future practice and related critical writing.
Experimental Cinema in the Digital Age by
Michael Le Grice, a pioneer of "structural film" in the 1970s and whose first video and computer works were exhibited in the late 1960s, provides a collection of his most notable essays. The essays shed light on the work of other artists and film-makers and documents a period, especially the 70s, when artists' film was at the centre of polemical debate about the nature of avant-garde and the future of radical or experimental film. The book contributes to the contemporary debates about film, video, art and new technology.
A History of Video Art by
No Marketing Blurb
Avant-Garde Film by
Avant-Garde Film: Forms, Themes and Passions examines the variety of concerns and practices that have comprised the long history of avant-garde film at a level appropriate for undergraduate study. It covers the developments of experimental film-making since the modernist explosion in the 1920s in Europe through to the Soviet film experiments, the American Underground cinema and the French New Wave, structuralism and contemporary gallery work of the young British artists. Through in-depth case-studies, the book introduces students not only to the history of the avant-garde but also to varied analytical approaches to the films themselves - ranging from abstraction (Richter, Ruttmann) to surreal visions (Bunuel, Wyn Evans), underground subversion (Jack Smith, Warhol) to experimental narrative (Deren and Antonioni).
Women and Experimental Filmmaking by
Acting as a corrective to the skewed avant-garde history that neglects women, Women and Experimental Filmmaking gathers essays by some of the top scholars in cinema studies dealing with women experimental filmmakers. Tracking the topic across racial, economic, geographic, and even temporal boundaries, Jean Petrolle and Virginia Wexman's selections reflect the deep diversity of methodologies and research. The introduction sets out by addressing the basic difficulties of both historiography and definition before providing a historical overview of how these particular filmmakers have helped shape moviemaking traditions. The essays explore the major theoretical controversies that have arisen around the work of groundbreaking women such as Leslie Thornton, Su Friedrich, Nina Menkes, and Faith Hubley. With the filmmakers re-presentations of women's subjectivity ranging across film, video, digital media, ethnography, animation, and collage, Women and Experimental Filmmaking represents the full spectrum of genres, techniques, and modes. Taken together, these essays comprise a sustained analysis of the conjunction of aesthetics and politics in the work of both pioneer and contemporary experimental women filmmakers.
A History of Experimental Film and Video by
Avant-garde film is almost indefinable. It is in a constant state of change and redefinition. In his highly-acclaimed history of experimental film, A.L. Rees tracks the movement of the film avant-garde between the cinema and modern art (with its postmodern coda). But he also reconstitutes the film avant-garde as an independent form of art practice with its own internal logic and aesthetic discourse.In this revised and updated edition, Rees introduces experimental film and video to new readers interested in the wider cinema, as well as offering a guide to enthusiasts of avant-garde film and new media arts. Ranging from Cézanne and Dada, via Cocteau, Brakhage and Le Grice, to the new wave of British film and video artists from the 1990s to the present day, this expansive study situates avant-garde film between the cinema and the gallery, with many links to sonic as well as visual arts. The new edition includes a review of current scholarship in avant-garde film history and includes updated reading and viewing lists. It also features a new introduction and concluding chapter, which assess the rise of video projection in the gallery since the millennium, and describe new work by the latest generation of experimental film-makers. The new edition is richly illustrated with images of the art works discussed.
The Music and Sound of Experimental Film by
This book explores music/sound-image relationships in non-mainstream screen repertoire from the earliest examples of experimental audiovisuality to the most recent forms of expanded and digital technology. It challenges presumptions of visual primacy in experimental cinema and rethinks screenmusic discourse in light of the aesthetics of non-commercial imperatives. Several themes run through the book, connecting with and significantly enlarging upon current critical discourse surrounding realism and audibility in the fiction film, the role of music in mainstream cinema, and theaudiovisual strategies of experimental film.The contributors investigate repertoires and artists from Europe and the USA through the critical lenses of synchronicity and animated sound, interrelations of experimentation in image and sound, audiovisual synchresis and dissonance, experimental soundscape traditions, found-footage film,re-mediation of pre-existent music and sound, popular and queer sound cultures, and a diversity of radical technological, aesthetic, tropes in film media traversing the work of early pioneers such as Walther Ruttmann and Len Lye, through the mid-century innovations of Norman McLaren, Stan Brakhage,Lis Rhodes, Kenneth Anger, Andy Warhol, and studio collectives in Poland, to latter-day experimentalists John Smith and Bill Morrison, as well as the contemporary practices of Vjing.
Underground Film by
"For the first time brings some critical standards to bear where there is usually only complete condemnation or overblown praise."--New York Times Book Review Parker Tyler (1904-1974), one of the few great American film critics, was intimate with and enormously respected by many of the underground and experimental filmmakers of his time. In this book, Tyler evaluated the Underground in general and the seminal films in particular, covering the history and scope of the genre with insight and verve. Like Tyler's Screening of the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies is one of the masterpieces of cinema literature. Introduction by J. Hoberman Afterword by Charles Boultenhouse "In his excellent book, [Tyler] discusses, among others, Man Ray and the optical film, Brakhage's first beatnik film, Cassavetes, Warhol, and I Am Curious (Yellow) (an astute analysis here). Indispensable for anyone interested in contemporary filmmaking, its history, personalities, and rationale."--Publishers Weekly
The Art of Czech Animation by
The Art of Czech Animation is the first comprehensive English language account of Czech animation from the 1920s to the present, covering both 2D animation forms and CGI, with a focus upon the stop-motion films of Jirí Trnka, Hermína Týrlová, Jan Svankmajer and Jirí Barta. Stop-motion is a highly embodied form of animation and The Art of Czech Animation develops a new materialist approach to studying these films. Instead of imposing top-down Film Theory onto its case studies, the book's analysis is built up from close readings of the films themselves, with particular attention given to their non-human objects. In a time of environmental crisis, the unique way Czech animated films use allegory to de-centre the human world and give a voice to non-human aspects of the natural world points us towards a means by which culture can increase ecological awareness in viewers. Such a refutation of a human-centred view of the world was contrary to communist orthodoxy and it remains so under late-stage consumer-capitalism. As such, these films do not only offer beautiful examples of allegory, but stand as models of political dissent. The Art of Czech Animation is a unique endeavour of film philosophy to provide a materialist appraisal of a heretofore neglected strand of Central-Eastern European cinema.
Bunuel, L. and Dali, S. (dir.) (1929) Un Chien Andalou
Cocteau, J. (dir.) (1930) The Blood of a Poet
Corbijn, A. (dir.) (1993) Some Yo Yo Stuff
Deren, M. (dir.) (1943) Meshes of the Afternoon
Frampton, H. (dir.) (1971) Nostalgia
Gordon, D. and Pareno, P. (dirs.) (2006) Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait
Jarman, D. (dir.) (1986), Caravaggio
Lynch, D. (dir.) (1976) Eraserhead
Marker, C. (dir.) (1962) La Jetée
