Experimental Cinema

This volume offers introductions to the work of fifteen avant-garde American women filmmakers.

Film is the art form of our times. It has formed the background of our lives, informed visual arts practices, and formed our culture's stories, its memory. Moments of Perceptionis a landmark book. The first history of twentieth and early-twenty-first-century Canadian experimental filmmaking, it maps avant-garde films from the 1950s to the present day, including their contradictions and complexities. Experimental film is political in its very existence, critical of the status quo by definition. In Canada, some of the country's best-known artists took up the moving image as a form of artistic expression, allowing them to explore explicitly political themes. Mike Hoolboom's exposure of the horror of AIDS, Josephine Massarella's concern for the environment, and Joyce Wieland's satiric look at US patriotism are just a few examples of work that contributed to social movementsand provided a means to explore issues of race and gender and LGBTQ2S+ and Indigenous identities. Featuring a major essay on the history of the movement by film scholar Mike Zryd and profiles of key filmmakers by film historian Stephen Broomer and editors Jim Shedden and Barbara Sternberg, Moments of Perceptionoffers a fresh perspective on the ever-evolving history of Canada's experimental film and moving-image media arts.

Discussing a variety of independent and experimental Italian films, this book gives voice to a critcically neglected form of Italian cinema. By examining the work of directors such as Marinella Pirelli, Mirko Locatelli and Cesrae Zavattini, the book defines, inspects and studies the cinematic panorama of Italy through a new lens. It thereby explores the character of independent films and their related practices within the Italian historical, cultural and cinematic landscape.

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.

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.

Experimental Filmmaking emerges out of a deep and abiding love of celluloid and artisanal media practices and a personal exploration of the field of avant-garde and experimental film, animation and video produced since the beginnings of cinema. Although there have been many critical and historical books on the subject, with the exception of zines and hand-published volumes, there has never been a comprehensive instructional manual on experimental processes. This book will introduce film students and professional filmmakers alike to various methods of experimental animation, film and video production that involve material interventions into the normative process of the medium while offering brief introductions to artists and their works.

Brings together key writings on American avant-garde cinema to explore the long tradition of underground filmmaking from its origins in the 1920s to the work of contemporary film and video artists.

The award-winning author of the Hexslinger Series “explores the world of film and horror in a way that will leave you reeling” (Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach Trilogy). Former film teacher Lois Cairns is struggling to raise her autistic son while freelancing as a critic when, at a screening, she happens upon a sampled piece of silver nitrate silent footage. She is able to connect it to the early work of Mrs. Iris Dunlopp Whitcomb, the spiritualist and collector of fairy tales who mysteriously disappeared from a train compartment in 1918. Hoping to make her own mark on the film world, Lois embarks on a project to prove that Whitcomb was Canada’s first female filmmaker. But her research takes her down a path not of darkness but of light—the blinding and searing light of a fairy tale made flesh, a noontime demon who demands that duty must be paid. As Lois discovers terrifying parallels between her own life and that of Mrs. Whitcomb, she begins to fear not just for herself, but for those closest to her heart. Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel “One of the standout horror novels of 2015 . . . From an author who has already established herself as one of the genre’s most original and innovative voices, Experimental Film is a remarkable achievement.” —Los Angeles Review of Books “Experimental Film represents the next, significant contribution to what is emerging as one of the most interesting and exciting bodies of work currently being produced in the horror field. Every film, Lois Cairns writes, is an experiment. The same might be said of every novel. This one succeeds, wildly.” —Locus “Experimental Film is sensational. When we speak of the best in contemporary horror and weird fiction, we must speak of Gemma Files.” —Laird Barron “[Experimental Film is] truly unnerving. This is a too-often overlooked postmodern gem.” —Esquire, “The 50 Best Horror Books of All Time”