Our third and final installment of this three-part series devoted to Gene Youngblood’s 1970 book Expanded Cinema explores the outermost reaches of technological innovation spanning the late ‘60s to early ‘70s, highlighting creative connectivity through exceptional investigations of the cathode ray tube and other far-out forms of aesthetic-synesthetic interactivity.

“The artist is always an anarchist, a revolutionary, a creator of new worlds imperceptibly gaining on reality.” (Gene Youngblood)

Jonathan Schwartz made films as he lived his life.  His short works are gestures of appreciation and awe towards the world and for those he loved.   They are often also dialogs with texts and ideas he found compelling.  In all his 16mm films, he gives expression to both the beauties of the concrete and the transience and potency of ineluctable time. A flower, a face, melting ice, a shift in light — Jonathan’s lens holds them with generosity and care, for his and our gaze.  Time becomes a palpable preoccupation through his filming of the seasons and their variations, and in his own cinematic processes.  These include his physical movements with the camera and the in-camera winding and re-winding of filmstock to embody both his and the world’s fortuitous memory.