A Critical Cinema 5 is the fifth volume in Scott MacDonald's Critical Cinema series, the most extensive, in-depth exploration of independent cinema available in English. In this new set of interviews, MacDonald engages filmmakers in detailed discussions of their films and of the personal experiences and political and theoretical currents that have shaped their work. The interviews are arranged to express the remarkable diversity of modern independent cinema and the interactive community of filmmakers that has dedicated itself to producing forms of cinema that critique conventional media.

Adapted from classroom lectures, Brakhage's profiles of eight avant-garde filmmakers have a conversational, relaxed flow. If the tone is chummy and the frequent superlatives annoying, the narratives are nevertheless coherent. Among those we meet are Maya Deren, Voodoun priestess of Greenwich Village and well-known personality of the 1940s and '50s; Christopher MacLaine, chronicler of San Francisco's Beat movement; and Ken Jacobs, whose films include Soft Rain , Blonde Cobra , and Little Stabs at Happiness .

The Memo Book contains specially commissioned essays on different aspects of Müller\'s work as well as an extensive interview by Scott MacDonald. Matthias Müller, born in 1961, is a filmmaker as well as a visual artist working in video and photography