Annotation Few aspects of American military history have been as vigorously debated as Harry Truman's decision to use atomic bombs against Japan. In this carefully crafted volume, Michael Kort describes the wartime circumstances and thinking that form the context for the decision to use these weapons, surveys the major debates related to that decision, and provides a comprehensive collection of key primary source documents that illuminate the behavior of the United States and Japan during the closing days of World War II. Kort opens with a summary of the debate over Hiroshima as it has evolved since 1945. He then provides a historical overview of thye events in question, beginning with the decision and program to build the atomic bomb. Detailing the sequence of events leading to Japan's surrender, he revisits the decisive battles of the Pacific War and the motivations of American and Japanese leaders. Finally, Kort examines ten key issues in the discussion of Hiroshima and guides readers to relevant primary source documents, scholarly books, and articles.

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 past thirty years have seen the proliferation of forms of independent cinema that challenge the conventions of mass-market commercial movies from within the movie theatre. Avant-Garde Film examines fifteen of the most suggestive and useful films from this film tradition. The films discussed include No. 4 (Bottoms) by Yoko Ono, Wavelength by Michael Snow, Serene Velocity by Ernie Gehr, Print Generation by J. J. Murphy, Standard Gauge by Morgan Fisher, Zorns Lemma by Hollis Frampton, The Ties that Bind by Su Friedrich, From the Pole to the Equator by Yervant Gianikian and The Carriage Trade by Warren Sonbert. Through in-depth readings of these works, Scott MacDonald takes viewers on a critical circumnavigation of the conventions of movie going as seen by filmmakers who have rebelled against the conventions. MacDonald's discussions do not merely analyse the films; they provide a useful, accessible, jargon-free critical apparatus for viewing avant-garde film and communicate the author's pleasure in exploring 'impenetrable' works.

Based on lectures that Brakhage gave at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago, this volume portrays eight artists who have electrified American independent cinema across four decades. With characteristic directness, anecdotal style, and wry humor, Brakhage, himself an influential American independent filmmaker, brings into sharp focus the life and work of Jerome Hill, Marie Menken, James Brouhgton, Maya Deren, Ken Jacobs, Sidney Peterson, Bruce Conner, and Christopher MacLaine. He also portrays the art scenes of New York and San Francisco during times of ferment and controversy. ISBN 0-914232-99-1: $20.00.

Austrian avant-garde cinema bears a resemblance to materialist and visionary aspects of the American avant-garde, while also manifesting a subversive social critique kindred in spirit to European auteur cinema. This 'third way', staked out by Austrian filmmakers and revealed by this volume, is a unique brand of anti-traditional tradition, equally devoted to rigor and precision as it is to fomenting chaos and liberating energy. It is a counter-universe that uses cinema to penetrate new realms of experience. This book helps us enter its delights and dangers.

"In the 1920s, the European avant-garde embraced the cinema, experimenting with the medium in radical ways. Painters including Hans Richter and Fernand Leger as well as filmmakers belonging to such avant-garde movements as Dada and surrealism made some of the most enduring and fascinating films in the history of cinema. In The Filming of Modern Life, Malcolm Turvey examines five films from the avant-garde canon and the complex, sometimes contradictory, attitudes toward modernity they express: Rhythm 21 (Hans Richter, 1921), Ballet mecanique (Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger, 1924), Entr'acte (Francis Picabia and René Clair, 1924), Un chien Andalou (Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel, 1929), and Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929). All exemplify major trends within European avant-garde cinema of the time, from abstract animation to "cinema pur."

Historians and students of American avant-garde cinema often overlook the films of the 1920s through the early 1940s, considering them mere derivatives of their European counterparts. In fact, the American films possess an eclecticism, innovation, and naivete all their own. Marshaling his broad cinematic and cultural knowledge, editor Jan-Christopher Horak has compiled in Lovers of Cinema a ground-breaking group of articles on this neglected film period. With one exception, all are original to this volume, and many are the first to treat comprehensively such early filmmakers as Mary Ellen Bute, Theodore Huff, and Douglass Crockwell.

Expanded cinema: avant-garde moving image works that claim new territory for the cinematic, beyond the bounds of familiar filmmaking practices and the traditional theatrical exhibition space. First emerging in the 1960s amidst seismic shifts in the arts, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light art, kinetic art, video, and computer-generated imagery - all placed under expanded cinema's umbrella - re-emerged at the dawn of the 2000s, opening a vast new horizon of possibility for the moving image, and perhaps even heralding the end of cinema as we know it. Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia offers a bold new account of its subject, breaking from previous studies and from larger trends in film and art scholarship. Author Jonathan Walley argues that expanded cinema's apparent departure from the traditions and forms of cinema as we know it actually radically asserts cinema's nature and artistic autonomy. Walley also resituates expanded cinema within the context of avant-garde film history, linking it to a mode of filmmaking that has historically investigated and challenged the nature and limits of cinematic form. As an outgrowth of this tradition, expanded cinema offered a means for filmmakers within the avant-garde, regardless of their differing styles, formal concerns, and politics, to stake out cinema's unique aesthetic terrain - its ontology, its independence, its identity. In addition to reconsidering the better-known expanded cinema works of the 1960s and 70s by artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Whitman, and Nam June Paik, Cinema Expanded also provides the first scholarly accounts of scores of lesser-known works across more than 50 years. Making new arguments about avant-garde cinema in general and its complex meditations on the nature of cinema, it urgently addresses current and crucial debates about the fate of the moving image amidst a digital age of near-constant technological change.

The first decades of the twentieth century were pivotal for the historical and formal relationships between early cinema and Cubism, mechanomorphism, abstraction, and Dada. To examine these relationships, Jennifer Wild’s interdisciplinary study grapples with the cinema’s expanded identity as a modernist form defined by the concept of horizontality. Found in early methods of projection, film exhibition, and in the film industry’s penetration into cultural life by way of film stardom, advertising, and distribution, cinematic horizontality provides a new axis of inquiry for studying early twentieth-century modernism. Shifting attention from the film to the horizon of possibility around, behind, and beyond the screen, Wild shows how canonical works of modern art may be understood as responding to the changing characteristics of daily life after the cinema. Drawing from a vast popular cultural, cinematic, and art-historical archive, Wild challenges how we have told the story of modern artists’ earliest encounter with cinema and urges us to reconsider how early projection, film stardom, and film distribution transformed their understanding of modern life, representation, and the act of beholding. By highlighting the cultural, ideological, and artistic forms of interpellation and resistance that shape the phenomenology of a wartime era, The Parisian Avant-Garde in the Age of Cinema, 1900–1923 provides an interdisciplinary history of radical form. This book also offers a new historiography that redefines how we understand early cinema and avant-garde art before artists turned to making films themselves.

Narrative comprehension, memory, motion, depth perception, synesthesia, hallucination, and dreaming have long been objects of fascination for cognitive psychologists. They have also been among the most potent sources of creative inspiration for experimental filmmakers. Lessons in Perception melds film theory and cognitive science in a stimulating investigation of the work of iconic experimental artists such as Stan Brakhage, Robert Breer, Maya Deren, and Jordan Belson. In illustrating how avant-garde filmmakers draw from their own mental and perceptual capacities, author Paul Taberham offers a compelling account of how their works expand the spectator’s range of aesthetic sensitivities and open creative vistas uncharted by commercial cinema.