Editions Light Cone is pleased to announce the publication of its first ebook: Jean-Michel Bouhours on Paolo Gioli. Benefitting from the new power of ebooks to integrate video with text, the first title in this new series from Editions Light Cone has been conceived as a dialogue between two important voices in contemporary moving image art. 

Collected in a single volume, and illustrated by extracts from Paolo Gioli's films, are essays and notes written over a twenty year period by Jean-Michel Bouhours, currently a curator of Modern Collections at the Musée national d’art moderne - Centre Pompidou in Paris. For many years, Bouhours directed the museum’s film programme and has long been an active member of Light Cone.

This comprehensive historical account demonstrates the rich diversity in 1970s British experimental filmmaking. It acts as a form of reclamation by integrating films having received inadequate historical and critical recognition and placing these alongside films existing as accepted texts of the decade. This history challenges the problematic 'return to image' thesis, providing examples of written evidence and demonstrating how this has problematically perpetuated a flawed account of the decade. This is the first extensive overview of 1970s filmmaking, contextualizing films within broader aesthetic, theoretical and socio-political frameworks. The detailed textual and comparative analyses offer unique approaches to individual films, shedding light on technical, aesthetic and economic decisions informing filmmaking. As such, it provides a unique understanding of how experimental filmmaking grew from a small handful of films and filmmakers, at the start of the 1970s, to a veritable 'explosion' in filmmaking by the end of the decade.