Film As A Subversive Art

By Amos Vogel. Foreword by Scott MacDonald.

Featuring over 300 rare film stills, this text analyzes how aesthetic, sexual, and ideological subversives use one of the most powerful art forms of our time to exchange or manipulate our conscious and unconscious, demystify visual taboos, destroy dated cinematic forms, and undermine existing value systems and institutions.

FRACTUREDe ^EYE is new large-format annual film journal, edited by well-known authors Stephen Barber and Jack Hunter, who between them have produced around 50 books on global cinema and cultural history. FRACTUREDe ^EYE does not concern itself with either "mainstream" or "cult" cinema, but rather takes its cue from Amos Vogel's seminal 1974 study Film As A Subversive Art. Subjects covered by FRACTUREDe ^EYE Volume One include illegal film pornography in the 1970s, execution film documents of WW2, film documents of extreme performance art, subversive film documentaries, unfilmed surrealist film scenarios, revolutionary Japanese cinema of 1969, the origins of film projection technology, films of urban demolition, surgical films, and various works of renegade, politically prohibited or transgressive cinema. The book is heavily illustrated with unusual and often disquieting photographs, and is recommended for adult readers only. Subjects covered include Vienna Aktion Cinema, Tokyo 1969, Tatsumi Hijikata, Pierre Guyotat, Koji Wakamatsu, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Skladanowsky Brothers, Georges Franju, and much more.

In The Subversive Imagination , professional writers, artists and cultural critics from around the world offer their views on the issue of the artist's responsibility to society. The contributors look beyond censorship and free speech issues and instead emphasize the subject of freedom. More specifically, the contributors question the ethical, mutual responsibilities between artists and the societies in which they live. The original essays address an eclectic range of subjects: censorship, multiculturalism, the transition from communism to capitalism in Eastern Europe, postmodernism, Salman Rushdie, and young black filmmakers' responsibility to the black community.

Just what is 'independent' cinema? D. K. Holm aims to define a term all too carelessly used both by media commentators and marketers, and distinguish it from categories such as avant-garde, underground, experimental or 'art' films, with which it is often confused. By contrasting studio-era Hollywood with changes in the business since the 1970s, and the rise of companies such as Miramax and New Line, it shows the birth of a commercial environment in which the new independent cinema can emerge. Profiles of specific filmmakers suggest how diverse personalities use independent cinema for individual ends; directors such as James Mangold, who found indie cinema to be a stepping stone to more mainstream movies, Jill Sprecher, who uses its flexibility to explore philosophical ideas, and Guy Maddin, one of the few true independent filmmakers, whose films are beholden to his own unique vision rather than financiers or abstract audience markets.

Amos Vogel was one of America's most innovative film historians and curators. An émigré from Austria who arrived in New York just before the Second World War, in 1947 he created Cinema 16, a pioneering film club aimed at audiences thirsty for work "that cannot be seen elsewhere," and in 1963 was instrumental in establishing the New York Film Festival. He later embarked on an ambitious teaching career, synthesizing decades of experience and directing his ideas towards students and, eventually, the wider public. In 1974 he published the culmination of his thoughts - along with an extraordinary collection of stills - in Film as a Subversive Art. On his death, the New York Times wrote that Vogel "exerted an influence on the history of film that few other non-filmmakers can claim." Be Sand, Not Oil is the first book about Vogel, and includes uncollected writings, an unpublished interview, and new essays documenting his never-ending quest for what Werner Herzog, his friend of many decades, has described as "adequate imagery."

How contemporary Chinese art is creating “a philosophy of life, a philosophy of politics, and a natural philosophy,” as artist Qiu Zhijie says it must, is explored in this collection of essays by philosophers and art historians from America and China.

"A writer's search for inspiration, beauty, and solace leads her to birds in this ... meditation on creativity and life"--