"Malcolm Le Grice, an important experimental filmmaker from England, film journalist for Studio International, and teacher ... gives us a lucid account, both historical and theoretical, of the main preoccupations of abstract filmmakers.... "Le Grice begins with a painter, Cezanne, to show how his preoccupation with pictorial space is a key to any understanding of the notion of abstraction. He goes on to discuss the Futurists' cinema, the early abstract film experiments by Eggeling, Duchamp and others in Germany and France of the '20s, the West Coast filmmakers of the '40s, and a stimulating view of the experimental film movement after WW II, including the works of Brakhage, Snow, Gidal and Sharits." - Art Direction "Whether or not one agrees with Le Grice's valuation of an alternate cinema, Abstract Film and Beyond clearly demonstrates that the cinema, that great twentieth-century art, is no mere entertainment, but an event of tremendous importance and implication." - The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

"Malcolm Le Grice, an important experimental filmmaker from England, film journalist for Studio International, and teacher ... gives us a lucid account, both historical and theoretical, of the main preoccupations of abstract filmmakers.... "Le Grice begins with a painter, Cezanne, to show how his preoccupation with pictorial space is a key to any understanding of the notion of abstraction. He goes on to discuss the Futurists' cinema, the early abstract film experiments by Eggeling, Duchamp and others in Germany and France of the '20s, the West Coast filmmakers of the '40s, and a stimulating view of the experimental film movement after WW II, including the works of Brakhage, Snow, Gidal and Sharits." - Art Direction "Whether or not one agrees with Le Grice's valuation of an alternate cinema, Abstract Film and Beyond clearly demonstrates that the cinema, that great twentieth-century art, is no mere entertainment, but an event of tremendous importance and implication." - The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

This groundbreaking collection of thirteen original essays analyzes connections between film and two highly influential twentieth-century movements.

VOLUME 2: "Movies and Methods," Volume II, captures the developments that have given history and genre studies imaginative new models and indicates how feminist, structuralist, and psychoanalytic approaches to film have achieved fresh, valuable insights. In his thoughtful introduction, Nichols provides a context for the paradoxes that confront film studies today. He shows how shared methods and approaches continue to stimulate much of the best writing about film, points to common problems most critics and theorists have tried to resolve, and describes the internal contraditions that have restricted the usefulness of post-structuralism. Mini-introductions place each essay in a larger context and suggest its linkages with other essays in the volume. A great variety of approaches and methods characterize film writing today, and the final part conveys their diversity--from statistical style analysis to phenomenology and from gay criticisms to neoformalism. This concluding part also shows how the rigorous use of a broad range of approaches has helped remove post-structuralist criticism from its position of dominance through most of the seventies and early eighties. -- Publisher description.

Offering historical and theoretical positions from a variety of art historians, artists, curators, and writers, this groundbreaking collection is the first substantive sourcebook on abstraction in moving-image media. With a particular focus on art since 2000, Abstract Video addresses a longer history of experimentation in video, net art, installation, new media, expanded cinema, visual music, and experimental film. Editor Gabrielle JenningsÑa video artist herselfÑreveals as never before how works of abstract video are not merely, as the renowned curator Kirk Varnedoe once put it, Òpictures of nothing,Ó but rather amorphous, ungovernable spaces that encourage contemplation and innovation. In explorations of the work of celebrated artists such as Jeremy Blake, Mona Hatoum, Pierre Huyghe, Ryoji Ikeda, Takeshi Murata, Diana Thater, and Jennifer West, alongside emerging artists, this volume presents fresh and vigorous perspectives on a burgeoning and ever-changing arena of contemporary art.

Beyond Spatial Montage: Windowing, or the Cinematic Displacement of Time, Motion, and Space offers an extended discussion of the morphology and structure of compositing, graphic juxtapositions, and montage employed in motion pictures. Drawing from the history of avant-garde and commercial cinema, as well as studio-based research, here media artist and theorist Michael Betancourt critiques cinematic realism and spatial montage in motion pictures. This new taxonomic framework for conceptualizing linkages between media art and narrative cinema opens new areas of experimentation for today’s film editors, motion designers, and other media artists.

Making Images Move reveals a new history of cinema by uncovering its connections to other media and art forms. In this richly illustrated volume, Gregory Zinman explores how moving-image artists who worked in experimental film pushed the medium toward abstraction through a number of unconventional filmmaking practices, including painting and scratching directly on the film strip; deteriorating film with water, dirt, and bleach; and applying materials such as paper and glue. This book provides a comprehensive history of this tradition of “handmade cinema” from the early twentieth century to the present, opening up new conversations about the production, meaning, and significance of the moving image. From painted film to kinetic art, and from psychedelic light shows to video synthesis, Gregory Zinman recovers the range of forms, tools, and intentions that make up cinema’s shadow history, deepening awareness of the intersection of art and media in the twentieth century, and anticipating what is to come.

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Beyond Observation is structured by the argument that the ‘ethnographicness’ of a film should not be determined by the fact that it is about an exotic culture – the popular view – nor because it has apparently not been authored – a long-standing academic view – but rather because it adheres to the norms of ethnographic practice more generally. On these grounds, the book covers a large number of films made in a broad range of styles across a 120-year period, from the Arctic to Africa, from the cities of China to rural Vermont. Paul Henley discusses films made within reportage, exotic melodrama and travelogue genres in the period before the Second World War, as well as more conventionally ethnographic films made for academic or state-funded educational purposes. The book explores the work of film-makers such as John Marshall, Asen Balikci, Ian Dunlop and Timothy Asch in the post-war period, considering ideas about authorship developed by Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner and Colin Young. It also discusses films authored by indigenous subjects themselves using the new video technology of the 1970s and the ethnographic films that flourished on British television until the 1990s. In the final part of the book, Henley examines the recent work of David and Judith MacDougall and the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, before concluding with an assessmentof a range of films authored in a participatory manner as possible future models.

In order to understand Bruce Lee, we must look beyond Bruce Lee to the artist's intricate cultural and historical contexts. This work begins by contextualising Lee, examining his films and martial arts work, and his changing cultural status within different times and places. The text examines Bruce Lee's films and philosophy in relation to the popular culture and cultural politics of the 1960s and 1970s, and it addresses the resurgence of his popularity in Hong Kong and China in the twenty-first century. The study also explores Lee's ongoing legacy and influence in the West, considering his function as a shifting symbol of ethnic politics and the ways in which he continues to inform Hollywood film-fight choreography. Beyond Bruce Lee ultimately argues Lee is best understood in terms of "cultural translation" and that his interventions and importance are ongoing.

This collection of essays interrogates the most contested social, political, and aesthetic concept in Chicana/o cultural studies—resistance. If Chicana/o culture was born of resistance amid assimilation and nationalistic forces, how has it evolved into the twenty-first century? This groundbreaking volume redresses the central idea of resistance in Chicana/o visual cultural expression through nine clustered discussions, each coordinating scholarly, critical, curatorial, and historical contextualizations alongside artist statements and interviews. Landmark artistic works—illustrations, paintings, sculpture, photography, film, and television—anchor each section. Contributors include David Avalos, Mel Casas, Ester Hernández, Nicholas Herrera, Luis Jiménez, Ellen Landis, Yolanda López, Richard Lou, Delilah Montoya, Laura Pérez, Lourdes Portillo, Luis Tapia, Chuy Treviño, Willie Varela, Kathy Vargas, René Yañez, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, and more. Cara a cara, face-to-face, encounters across the collection reveal the varied richness of resistant strategies, movidas, as they position crucial terms of debate surrounding resistance, including subversion, oppression, affirmation, and identification. The essays in the collection represent a wide array of perspectives on Chicana/o visual culture. Editors Scott L. Baugh and Víctor A. Sorell have curated a dialog among the many voices, creating an important new volume that redefines the role of resistance in Chicana/o visual arts and cultural expression.