Compelling interviews with notables in avant-garde cinema offer insights into moving image art--its creative processes, formative influences, and hidden psychic effects. Through interviews with George Manupelli, Chick Strand, Tom Gunning, Lynne Sachs, Jay Rosenblatt, Martha Colburn, Evan Meaney, Mike Hoolboom, Robert Nelson, and Nina Menkes, Strange Questions links powerful personal stories with the contemporary media-scape.

Questions addressed in this collection include:

What role does the audience play in the creative process?

Intermedia and Expanded Cinema, both as critical approach and artistic practice, left an indelible mark in a period of Japanese art history that is broadly considered to be one of its most dynamic moments in the wake of its postwar reemergence.

Despite the burgeoning interest in academic and curatorial circles in this segment of Japanese art history, the paucity of readily available material in a language other that Japanese has meant the local context, particularly the ways in which the terms were critically debated, was relatively neglected.

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.

“This past summer I began to look through my album of personal snapshots, ones that I had sent out to accompany my email correspondences over the last decade. I was thinking of the possibility of doing some test printings of these images for a potential show when it was suggested to me by my printer, Nina Zurier, that a small book might be a more appropriate context for this project.