This book is a collection of newly commissioned essays by established and emerging scholars that maps out the current landscape of experimental cinema studies and sets agendas for future work in the field. Introducing new critical methodologies and calling overdue attention to neglected artists, regions, and topics, the contributions to this volume reassess and reassert experimental cinema as a site of formal exploration and interrogation as well as resistance to institutional, political, and social norms. This collection articulates what it means for experimental cinema to be these things in the contemporary moment, staking out new directions in thinking about the subject not only as a growing sub-field of cinema studies, but as an artistic and scholarly tradition in dialogue with art history, visual culture, philosophy, and the sciences. The contributions reflect a diversity of voices and perspectives, weaving together theoretical, poetic, and personal modes of writing and traversing questions of form, emotion, materiality, nationality, postcoloniality, the body, and ecology.

Kim Knowles is Senior Lecturer in Alternative and Experimental Film at Aberystwyth University, Wales. She is the author of A Cinematic Artist: The Films of Man Ray (2012) and Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Jonathan Walley is Associate Professor of Cinema at Denison University, USA. He is the author of Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia (2020).

Table of contents

• Introduction (Kim Knowles, Jonathan Walley)
• State of the (Sub)Field: A Roundtable on Experimental Film Studies (Johanna Gosse, Erika Balsom, Erica Levin, Gregory Zinman)
• Forms
• The Practice of “Non-knowing”: Experimental Cinema’s Blurred Aesthetics (Martine Beugnet)
• Cut-Ups: First Blood (Pavle Levi)
• Midnight in Andalusia: Mainstream Cinema and the Avant-Garde (Justin Remes)
• Unframing (Nicky Hamlyn)
• Poetic Procedures in David Gatten’s The Great Art of Knowing and The Extravagant Shadows (Gabriele Jutz)
• Matters of Photochemical Alchemy/Chymistry: On Contemporary Handmade Filmmaking (Charlie Hewison)
• Perception, Dream, Emotion
• A History of Dreams, or, The Experimental Cinema of Georges Perec (Duncan White)
• Experimental Film, DW Winnicott, and Object Relations: A Thought Experiment (James Hansen, Jimena Berzal de Dios)
• Annette Michelson and the Future of the Cognitive Theory of Avant-Garde Film (Malcolm Turvey)
• Strange Feelings: Experimental Film, Cognition, and Emotion (Jonathan Walley)
• Splinter in My Eye: Structural/Materialist Film (Deniz Johns)
• Post-Colonialism and Ethnography
• “If These Lands Could Speak:” Dislocating Archives Through Process Cinema (Janine Marchessault
• Anti-Colonial Cinema Practices: Dialogical, Experimental, Photochemical Film Praxis in Puerto Rico (Kathryn Ramey)
• An Experimental Ethnographic Cinema in Mexico: The Case of Nicolás Echevarría’s Judea (Federico Windhausen)
• Body
• No Sex Please: Film, Feminism and Sex in the 1970s and 1980s (Rachel Garfield)
• Disarticulating Authorship: Vicky Smith’s Direct Animations (Tess Takahashi)
• Processing Problems: Experimental Film, Pornography, Historiography (John Powers)
• Visioning Reproductive Labour in Experimental and Artist Film Representations of Gestation and Birth (Mars da Silva Saude)
• Ecology
• Experimental Film Practice and the Biosphere (Karel Doing)
• Negotiating Human and Non-human Entanglements in Experimental Cinema (Kim Knowles)
• Color Field Film: Post-Painterly Landscapes in Experimental Cinema (Ara Osterweil)
• An Ethics of Place and Ways of Telling: Finding a Feminist Eco-cinema in Moving Image’s Ecological Turn (Lucy Reynolds)
• Larry Gottheim’s Entanglement: “Going Against the Clock” (an Essay Entangled with a Conversation) (Scott MacDonald)
• Placing Experimental Film
• Toward a Practice of Experimental Cinema-Making (Christo Wallers)
• A Space That Breathes: Discotheques, Display and Environment in 1960s Japanese Expanded Cinema (Julian Ross)
• A Defense of Norman McLaren’s Place in Experimental Film History in Canada (Michael Zryd)
• Ghost Writing: Where is Australian Experimental Film? (Louise Curham, Dirk de Bruyn, Danni Zuvela)
•  Minor Dedications (Genevieve Yue)