An extensive overview of the oeuvre of one of the masters of experimental cinema, including a complete chronology of the cineast's work and life as well as newly commissioned contributions by Andrea Bellini, Ken Eisenstein, John Hanhardt, and a visual essay by the artist.
Published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the Centre d'Art Contemporain Genève from January to April 2015.
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.
Over the past twenty years, Bill Morrison has built a filmography of more than thirty striking and original works which have been presented in cinemas, museums, galleries and concert halls worldwide. Making use of rare archival footage, which has often been decayed by the passing of time, Morrison explores the power of film as a medium which is evocative of memory and gives rise to a sense of collective mythology. Morrison's exquisite and timeless films are scored by the cream of the US underground / avant-garde music scene, including Dave Douglas, Henryk Górecki and Bill Frisell.
The Lettrist movement is unique in the history of avant-garde formations. Founded by Isidore Isou in Paris immediately after World War II, it remains active to this day, having lost none of its radicalism, either aesthetic or ethical. In this book, Nicole Brenez presents the key figures and the basic concepts of Lettrist cinema, the art form within which their formal innovations proved the most far-reaching, prefiguring the breakthroughs of the nouvelle vague and the experiments of expanded cinema.
This 3-volume set brings together for the first time the complete film works of Jack Chambers (1931-78), largely regarded as one of Canada’s most important visual artists. With a well-established career as a painter, he embarked on a short-lived but significant career as a filmmaker in the mid-1960s. Chambers’ artistic practice was described as “perceptual realism” and stood in counterpoint to the dominant abstract styles of his day. He completed five films in his lifetime.
This 3-volume set brings together for the first time the complete film works of Jack Chambers (1931-78), largely regarded as one of Canada’s most important visual artists. With a well-established career as a painter, he embarked on a short-lived but significant career as a filmmaker in the mid-1960s. Chambers’ artistic practice was described as “perceptual realism” and stood in counterpoint to the dominant abstract styles of his day. He completed five films in his lifetime.
"Passion is a personal film-journey in which Reble accompanies his unborn child through a ritual, following the seasons until his birth. Reble's unfamiliar chemistry generates slowly pulsating structures and colors. Micro- and macroscopic imagery build a near-abstract, hypnotic landscape -- an intimate perception of creation..."
Jurgen Reble, former member of the German filmmaking group "Schmelzdahin" (dissolved in 1989), focuses on exploring the film material through bacterial processes, weathering and chemical treatment during and after development.
The basic idea is that it is impossible to fix film. Film is something, which is always in a state of flux...The images, ‘real’ in the beginning, gradually disintegrate and the gelatine layer, where the chemicals are embedded, dissolves. All that’s left in the end is the ‘raging of the elements’. -Jürgen Reble
In 1965, the experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek (1927–1984) unveiled his Movie-Drome, made from the repurposed top of a grain silo. VanDerBeek envisioned Movie-Drome as the prototype for a communications system—a global network of Movie-Dromes linked to orbiting satellites that would store and transmit images. With networked two-way communication, Movie-Dromes were meant to ameliorate technology’s alienating impulse.
Conducting the first comprehensive study of films that do not move, Justin Remes challenges the primacy of motion in cinema and tests the theoretical limits of film aesthetics and representation. Reading experimental films such as Andy Warhol's Empire (1964), the Fluxus work Disappearing Music for Face (1965), Michael Snow's So Is This (1982), and Derek Jarman's Blue (1993), he shows how motionless films defiantly showcase the static while collapsing the boundaries between cinema, photography, painting, and literature.
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