Noël Carroll: Theorizing the Moving Image (1996)

Theorizing the Moving Image brings together a selection of essays written by one of the leading critics of film over the past two decades. In this volume, Noël Carroll examines theoretical aspects of film and television through penetrating analyses of such genres as soap opera, documentary, and comedy, and such topics as sight gags, film metaphor, point-of-view editing, and movie music. Throughout, individual films are considered in depth. Carroll’s essays, moreover, represent the cognitivist turn in film studies, containing in-depth criticism of existing approaches to film theory, and heralding a new approach to film theory.

Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1996
Cambridge Studies in Film
ISBN 0521460492, 9780521460491
Length 426 pages

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Jeffrey Skoller: Shadows, Specters, Shards. Making History in Avant-Garde Film (2005)

Demonstrates how avant-garde films better reflect the complexity of history than conventional film.

Avant-garde films are often dismissed as obscure or disconnected from the realities of social and political history. Jeffrey Skoller challenges this myth, arguing that avant-garde films more accurately display the complex interplay between past events and our experience of the present than conventional documentaries and historical films.

Shadows, Specters, Shards examines a group of experimental films, including work by Eleanor Antin, Ernie Gehr, and Jean-Luc Godard, that take up historical events such as the Holocaust, Latin American independence struggles, and urban politics. Identifying a cinema of evocation rather than representation, these films call attention to the unrepresentable aspects of history that profoundly impact the experience of everyday life. Making use of the critical theories of Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, among others, Skoller analyzes various narrative strategies—allegory, sideshadowing, testimony, and multiple temporalities—that uncover competing perspectives and gaps in historical knowledge often ignored in conventional film. In his discussion of avant-garde film of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Skoller reveals how a nuanced understanding of the past is inextricably linked to the artistry of image making and storytelling.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2005
ISBN 081664232X, 9780816642328
Length 233 pages

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Sean Cubitt: Videography. Video Media as Art and Culture (1993)

Videography is an attempt to discover the conditions under which it is possible to speak, write and teach about the electronic media. It provides a materialist account of video and computer media as they are practised and used today. A theoretical section tests the claims of various theses in art history, media and cultural theory to account for the variety of video practice in the contemporary scene. The remainder of the book is devoted to close analysis of work, from amateur video to computer graphics.

Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 1993
ISBN 0312102968, 9780312102968
Length 239 pages

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Alexander Graf, Dietrich Scheunemann (eds.): Avant-garde Film (2007)

This volume on avant-garde film has emerged as part of a wider reassessment of 20th century avant-garde art, literature and film carried out in the framework of a research project at the University of Edinburgh. It paves the way for a fresh assessment of avant-garde film and develops its theory as an integral part of a newly defined conception of the avant-garde as a whole, by closing the gap between theoretical approaches towards the avant-garde as defined on the basis of art and literature on the one hand and avant-garde cinema on the other. It gathers contributions by the most esteemed scholars in the field of avant-garde studies relating to the żclassicalż avant-garde cinema of the 1920s, to new trends emerging in the 1950s and 1960s and to the impact that innovative technologies have recently had on the further development of avant-garde and experimental film. The contributions reflect the broad range of different moving-image media that make up what we refer to today simply as żfilmż, at the same time as reconsidering the applicability of the label żavant-gardeż, to offer a comprehensive and updated framework that will prove invaluable to scholars of both Moving Image Studies and Art History disciplines.

Publisher Rodopi, 2007
ISBN 9042023058, 9789042023055
Length 405 pages

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P. Adams Sitney: Visionary Film: the American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000 (2002)

Visionary Film has remained the standard text on the American avant-garde since the publication of its first edition in 1974. It has been hailed as the most complete work written on the exciting, often puzzling and always controversial genre of American avant-garde film. In this book P. Adams Sitney discusses the principle genres and the major filmmakers since Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid made their dreamlike film “Meshes of the Afternoon” in 1943. Sitney also identifies the emergence and flowering of a new genre, which he calls Menippean Satire. This edition also includes a chapter on the films of Gregory J. Markopoulos which had been dropped from the second edition.

Edition 3, illustrated
Publisher Oxford University Press US, 2002
ISBN 019514886X, 9780195148862
Length 462 pages

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P. Adams Sitney: Eyes Upside Down. Visonary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (2008)

Sitney analyzes in detail the work of eleven American avant-garde filmmakers as heirs to the aesthetics of exhilaration and innovative vision articulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson and explored by John Cage and Gertrude Stein. The films discussed span the sixty years since the Second World War. With three chapters each devoted to Stan Brakhage and Robert Beavers, two each to Hollis Frampton and Jonas Mekas, and single chapters on Marie Menken, Ian Hugo, Andrew Noren, Warren Sonbert, Su Friedrich, Ernie Gehr, and Abigail Child, Eyes Upside Down is the fruit of Sitney’s lifelong study of visionary aspirations of the American avant-garde cinema. Sitney’s earlier book and critical essays defined the field of serious criticism of the American film avant-garde. He supplies a unique approach, critical, formal and intellectual, rather than sociological, ideological or institutional. Like his earlier book, Eyes Upside Down is a dense, sustained blast of convincing criticism which unfolds through a compelling personal vision. It makes a serious contribution to cinema studies and it is sure to remain in circulation for many years to come.

Publisher Oxford University Press US, 2008
ISBN 0195331141, 9780195331141
Length 417 pages

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A. L. Rees: A History of Experimental Film and Video: From Canonical Avant-garde to Contemporary British Practice (1999)

Avant-garde film is almost indefinable. It is in a constant state of change and redefinition. In this book A.L. Rees tracks the movement of the film avant-garde between, on the one hand, the cinema, and, on the other hand, modern art (with its post-modern coda). But he also reconstitutes the film avant-garde as an independent form of art practice with its own internal logic and aesthetic discourse.

This is the first major history of avant-garde film and video to be published in more than twenty years. Ranging from Cezanne and dada, via Cocteau, Brakhage and Le Grice, to the new wave of British video artists in the 90s, this remarkable study will introduce a generation of new readers to avant-garde film as well as provoking students and specialists to further reflection and debate.

Publisher BFI Publishing, 1999
Original from the University of Michigan
ISBN 0851706843, 9780851706849

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