Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image – serie

This book discusses developments and continuities in experimental animation that, since Robert Russet and Cecile Starr’s Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art (1976), has proliferated in the context of expanded cinema, performance and live ‘making’ and is today exhibited in galleries, public sites and online. With reference to historical, critical, phenomenological and inter-disciplinary approaches, international researchers offer new and diverse methodologies for thinking through these myriad animation practices. This volume addresses fundamental questions of form, such as drawing and the line, but also broadens out to encompass topics such as  the inter-medial, post-humanism, the real, fakeness and fabrication, causation, new forms of synthetic space, ecology, critical re-workings of cartoons, and process as narrative. This book will appeal to cross and inter-disciplinary researchers, animation practitioners, scholars, teachers and students from Fine Art, Film and Media Studies, Philosophy and Aesthetics.

This book assesses the contemporary status of photochemical film practice against a backdrop of technological transition and obsolescence. It argues for the continued relevance of material engagement for opening up alternative ways of seeing and sensing the world. Questioning narratives of replacement and notions of fetishism and nostalgia, the book sketches out the contours of a photochemical renaissance driven by collective passion, creative resistance and artistic reinvention. Celluloid processes continue to play a key role in the evolution of experimental film aesthetics and this book takes a personal journey into the work of several key contemporary film artists. It provides fresh insight into the communities and infrastructures that sustain this vibrant field and mobilises a wide range of theoretical perspectives drawn from media archaeology, new materialism, ecocriticism and social ecology.

This book assesses the contemporary status of photochemical film practice against a backdrop of technological transition and obsolescence. It argues for the continued relevance of material engagement for opening up alternative ways of seeing and sensing the world. Questioning narratives of replacement and notions of fetishism and nostalgia, the book sketches out the contours of a photochemical renaissance driven by collective passion, creative resistance and artistic reinvention. Celluloid processes continue to play a key role in the evolution of experimental film aesthetics and this book takes a personal journey into the work of several key contemporary film artists. It provides fresh insight into the communities and infrastructures that sustain this vibrant field and mobilises a wide range of theoretical perspectives drawn from media archaeology, new materialism, ecocriticism and social ecology.

This book addresses the preoccupation with memory in contemporary artists’ moving image installations. It situates artists’ moving image in relation to the transformations of digitalization as hybrid intermedial combinations of analogue film, video and digital video emerge from mid 1990s onwards. While film has always been closely associated with the process of memory, this book investigates new models of memory in artists’ remediation of film with video and other intermedial aesthetics. Beginning with a chapter on the theorization of memory and the moving image and the diverse genealogies of artists’ film and video, the following chapters identify five different mnemonic modes in artists’ moving image: critical nostalgia, database narrative, the ‘echo-chamber’, documentary fiction and mediatized memories. Stan Douglas, Steve McQueen, Runa Islam, Mark Leckey and Elizabeth Price are of a generation that has lived through the transition from analogue to digital. Their emphasis on the nuances of intermediality indicates the extent to which we remember through media.

This book addresses the preoccupation with memory in contemporary artists’ moving image installations. It situates artists’ moving image in relation to the transformations of digitalization as hybrid intermedial combinations of analogue film, video and digital video emerge from mid 1990s onwards. While film has always been closely associated with the process of memory, this book investigates new models of memory in artists’ remediation of film with video and other intermedial aesthetics. Beginning with a chapter on the theorization of memory and the moving image and the diverse genealogies of artists’ film and video, the following chapters identify five different mnemonic modes in artists’ moving image: critical nostalgia, database narrative, the ‘echo-chamber’, documentary fiction and mediatized memories. Stan Douglas, Steve McQueen, Runa Islam, Mark Leckey and Elizabeth Price are of a generation that has lived through the transition from analogue to digital. Their emphasis on the nuances of intermediality indicates the extent to which we remember through media.

This book maps the presence of moving images within the field of public art through encounters with passersby. It argues that far from mere distraction or spectacle, moving images can produce moments of enchantment that can renew, intensify, or challenge our everyday engagement with public space and each other. These artworks also offer frameworks for understanding how moving images operate in public space—how they move viewers and reconfigure the site of the screen. Each chapter explores a mode of address that examines how artists and curators leverage the moving image’s attentional power to engage audiences, create spaces, make place, and challenge assumptions. This book also examines the difficulties and compromises that arise when using urban screens for public art.

This book maps the presence of moving images within the field of public art through encounters with passersby. It argues that far from mere distraction or spectacle, moving images can produce moments of enchantment that can renew, intensify, or challenge our everyday engagement with public space and each other. These artworks also offer frameworks for understanding how moving images operate in public space—how they move viewers and reconfigure the site of the screen. Each chapter explores a mode of address that examines how artists and curators leverage the moving image’s attentional power to engage audiences, create spaces, make place, and challenge assumptions. This book also examines the difficulties and compromises that arise when using urban screens for public art.

This book argues for a durational cinema that is distinct from slow cinema, and outlines the history of its three main waves: the New York avant-garde of the 1960s, the European art cinema in the years after 1968, and the international cinema of gallery spaces as well as film festivals since the 1990s. Figures studied include Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, Chantal Akerman, Marguerite Duras, Claude Lanzmann, James Benning, Kevin Jerome Everson, Lav Diaz, and Wang Bing.Durational cinema is predominantly minimal, but has from the beginning also included a more encompassing or encyclopedic kind of filmmaking. Durational cinema is characteristically representational, and converges on certain topics (the Holocaust, deindustrialization, the experience of the working class and other marginalized people), but has no one meaning, signifying differently at different moments and in different hands. Warhol’s durational cinema of subtraction is quite different from Jacobs’s durational cinema of socialdisgust, while Lav Diaz’ durational sublime is quite different from Kevin Jerome Everson’s unblinking studies of African-American working people.

This book argues for a durational cinema that is distinct from slow cinema, and outlines the history of its three main waves: the New York avant-garde of the 1960s, the European art cinema in the years after 1968, and the international cinema of gallery spaces as well as film festivals since the 1990s. Figures studied include Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, Chantal Akerman, Marguerite Duras, Claude Lanzmann, James Benning, Kevin Jerome Everson, Lav Diaz, and Wang Bing.Durational cinema is predominantly minimal, but has from the beginning also included a more encompassing or encyclopedic kind of filmmaking. Durational cinema is characteristically representational, and converges on certain topics (the Holocaust, deindustrialization, the experience of the working class and other marginalized people), but has no one meaning, signifying differently at different moments and in different hands. Warhol’s durational cinema of subtraction is quite different from Jacobs’s durational cinema of socialdisgust, while Lav Diaz’ durational sublime is quite different from Kevin Jerome Everson’s unblinking studies of African-American working people.

The Videography of Darcy Lange is a critical monograph of a pivotal figure in early analogue video. Trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art, Lange developed a socially engaged video practice with remarkable studies of people at work in industrial, farming, and teaching contexts that drew from conceptual art, social documentary and structuralist filmmaking. Lange saw in portable video a democratic tool for communication and social transformation, continuing the legacy of the revolutionary avant-garde projects that merged art with social life and turned audiences into producers. This book follows Lange's trajectory from his early observational studies to the crisis of representation and socially engaged video and activism, as it is shaped by, and resists, the artistic, cultural and political preoccupations of the 1970s and 1980s. It strikes a balance between being a monographic account providing a close analysis of Lange's oeuvre and drawing from unpublished archival materials—a sort of catalogue raisonné—whilst maintaining a breadth with theoretical discourses around the themes of labour and class, education, and indigenous struggles central to his work. The book's frameworks of Conceptual Art, structuralist and ethnographic film theory, social documentary and the critique of representation, video as social practice and the notion of 'feedback', participatory socially engaged art and postcolonial and indigenous theory,—expand our understanding of video outside the predominant structuralist tendencies. Lange's transnational and nomadic career introduces notions of alterity and challenges nationalistic accounts that excluded him in the past.

The Videography of Darcy Lange is a critical monograph of a pivotal figure in early analogue video. Trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art, Lange developed a socially engaged video practice with remarkable studies of people at work in industrial, farming, and teaching contexts that drew from conceptual art, social documentary and structuralist filmmaking. Lange saw in portable video a democratic tool for communication and social transformation, continuing the legacy of the revolutionary avant-garde projects that merged art with social life and turned audiences into producers. This book follows Lange's trajectory from his early observational studies to the crisis of representation and socially engaged video and activism, as it is shaped by, and resists, the artistic, cultural and political preoccupations of the 1970s and 1980s. It strikes a balance between being a monographic account providing a close analysis of Lange's oeuvre and drawing from unpublished archival materials—a sort of catalogue raisonné—whilst maintaining a breadth with theoretical discourses around the themes of labour and class, education, and indigenous struggles central to his work. The book's frameworks of Conceptual Art, structuralist and ethnographic film theory, social documentary and the critique of representation, video as social practice and the notion of 'feedback', participatory socially engaged art and postcolonial and indigenous theory,—expand our understanding of video outside the predominant structuralist tendencies. Lange's transnational and nomadic career introduces notions of alterity and challenges nationalistic accounts that excluded him in the past.

Barbara Hammer in the Seventies: Or, What a Body Can Do addresses the intersection of experimental film, lesbian sexuality, and the women’s movement in Hammer’s early films. Grounded in an embodied, sexual, and gendered positionality, these films interrogate the politics of visibility and identity and perform a discontinuous repertoire of lesbian images that resist the medium of film’s established constraints and the decade’s broader systems of signification.Hammer’s films offer a critique of the dominant discourse that privileges the discreteness and self-sufficiency of the individualistic human subject. By performing the (lesbian) body in its ‘environment’—in erotic and communal relation to other bodies—and staging the relation of human bodies with the materiality of non-human beings and objects, they create a site of intervention into the humanist project, as it informs film studies, feminism, and queer theory.This rereading of Hammer’s work offers an important contribution to conversations between feminism and queer studies. In remembering the feminist origins of queer studies, it recenters political and ethical questions such as the fundamental relationality of the subject, the subject’s dependency on others, and the resulting ethical responsibility for and towards the other.

Barbara Hammer in the Seventies: Or, What a Body Can Do addresses the intersection of experimental film, lesbian sexuality, and the women’s movement in Hammer’s early films. Grounded in an embodied, sexual, and gendered positionality, these films interrogate the politics of visibility and identity and perform a discontinuous repertoire of lesbian images that resist the medium of film’s established constraints and the decade’s broader systems of signification.Hammer’s films offer a critique of the dominant discourse that privileges the discreteness and self-sufficiency of the individualistic human subject. By performing the (lesbian) body in its ‘environment’—in erotic and communal relation to other bodies—and staging the relation of human bodies with the materiality of non-human beings and objects, they create a site of intervention into the humanist project, as it informs film studies, feminism, and queer theory.This rereading of Hammer’s work offers an important contribution to conversations between feminism and queer studies. In remembering the feminist origins of queer studies, it recenters political and ethical questions such as the fundamental relationality of the subject, the subject’s dependency on others, and the resulting ethical responsibility for and towards the other.

This book explores the emergence of ecological consciousness in the work of contemporary experimental filmmakers. If it can be said that experimental filmmakers are "expanding" the artistic field through an exploration of the potencies, modes of dissemination and performance of the moving image, in the Anthropocene these practices strive for another kind of expansion: to expand our experience of nature. Appending flowers to the film strip or burying it in the ground, inventing observational devices, allowing the camera to be affected by natural forces, engaging one's own filming body in a symbiotic relationship with the environment, reconstituting ecosystems at the moment of projection: the ecologies of experimental cinema presented in this book constitute forms of practice and engagement that awaken a heightened sensibility towards the living world through cooperative links, casting other beings as subjects and agents of filmic processes, and, finally, reshaping the economy of filmmaking. Thus, ecologies of perception, medium, production, and multinaturalism are deployed, contributing to the restoration of our sensory bond with the natural world.Several chapters were translated with the help of artificial intelligence. In each case, the text has subsequently been revised further by the author as well as the translator Charlie Hewison and a professional copy editor.

This book explores the emergence of ecological consciousness in the work of contemporary experimental filmmakers. If it can be said that experimental filmmakers are "expanding" the artistic field through an exploration of the potencies, modes of dissemination and performance of the moving image, in the Anthropocene these practices strive for another kind of expansion: to expand our experience of nature. Appending flowers to the film strip or burying it in the ground, inventing observational devices, allowing the camera to be affected by natural forces, engaging one's own filming body in a symbiotic relationship with the environment, reconstituting ecosystems at the moment of projection: the ecologies of experimental cinema presented in this book constitute forms of practice and engagement that awaken a heightened sensibility towards the living world through cooperative links, casting other beings as subjects and agents of filmic processes, and, finally, reshaping the economy of filmmaking. Thus, ecologies of perception, medium, production, and multinaturalism are deployed, contributing to the restoration of our sensory bond with the natural world.Several chapters were translated with the help of artificial intelligence. In each case, the text has subsequently been revised further by the author as well as the translator Charlie Hewison and a professional copy editor.

This book explores the practice of artist filmmaker William Raban from 1970 to the present.  The trajectory from his early experimental, landscape and expanded cinema works of the 1970s leads into more recent films on the River Thames and London; his techniques are examined and engagingly explained to attract a wide readership including both experts and those with little knowledge of the subject.This is a personal account of what it means to make work in a radical filmmaking context to explore both the political and perceptual/formal qualities of film through a period of immense social and technological change.

This book explores the practice of artist filmmaker William Raban from 1970 to the present.  The trajectory from his early experimental, landscape and expanded cinema works of the 1970s leads into more recent films on the River Thames and London; his techniques are examined and engagingly explained to attract a wide readership including both experts and those with little knowledge of the subject.This is a personal account of what it means to make work in a radical filmmaking context to explore both the political and perceptual/formal qualities of film through a period of immense social and technological change.

This volume presents one of the first systematic inquiries into Italian experimental and avant-garde cinema in English language, thanks to contributions which deepen the history of experimental audio-visual works in Italy. Frameworks of film production, distribution and circulation, as well as theoretical discourses and emblematic case studies are investigated by this edited collection, which tries to provide a broad overview of the complex phenomena that occurred in a century of cinema beyond its industry, its market, and its conventions. The aim of this book is not to offer a comprehensive compendium, but to explore new paths in researching Italian experimental moving image, its history, and new theoretical insights into authors and their works. The volume is structured in thematic sections. Each of them includes different contributions according to two different types: plenary essays, which offer in-depth analyses on historical and theoretical features, and monographic essays, which focus on single authors, collectives, or works.

This critical anthology of newly commissioned essays by established and emerging scholars examines the work and legacy of Annette Michelson (1922–2018), pioneering critic and theorist of avant-garde cinema. Michelson’s insights transformed our understanding of cinema through her provocative and profoundly original analyses. As a contributor and editor for Artforum in the 1960s and early 1970s, then founding editor of the journal October, Michelson defined the terms of moving image art and its relation to painting, sculpture, and performance. Enriched by her deep, first-hand knowledge of emerging discourses of phenomenology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, and post-structuralism, Michelson’s writings heralded a new paradigm of philosophical, interdisciplinary film scholarship that reverberates today. This book chronicles how that paradigm emerged, its effects, and its decisive consequences for cinema studies. While Michelson is among the great film critics and theorists of the twentieth century, her work remains largely unexamined. The book provides a critical apparatus, informed by in-depth primary research, to reveal Michelson’s singular place as a defining figure in American film theory and criticism.

The European Canon Through a Global Lens examines how contemporary artists working in video and photography engage with canonical Western fine art and its institutions. Drawing on a diverse corpus of works by global artists from East Asia, Europe, the African diaspora, and the Middle East, the book maps the centrifugal and centripetal forces operating around the European canon as a persistent hegemonic core. These forces do not alternate or contradict one another; they act concurrently, generating the turbulent conditions within which global artists navigate their relationship to Western cultural tradition. The result is a dynamic body of artistic rewritings that negotiates Eurocentrism through aesthetic intervention rather than rejection.