This critical anthology of newly commissioned essays by established and emerging scholars examines the work and legacy of Annette Michelson (1922–2018), pioneering critic and theorist of avant-garde cinema. Michelson’s insights transformed our understanding of cinema through her provocative and profoundly original analyses. As a contributor and editor for Artforum in the 1960s and early 1970s, then founding editor of the journal October, Michelson defined the terms of moving image art and its relation to painting, sculpture, and performance. Enriched by her deep, first-hand knowledge of emerging discourses of phenomenology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, and post-structuralism, Michelson’s writings heralded a new paradigm of philosophical, interdisciplinary film scholarship that reverberates today. This book chronicles how that paradigm emerged, its effects, and its decisive consequences for cinema studies. While Michelson is among the great film critics and theorists of the twentieth century, her work remains largely unexamined. The book provides a critical apparatus, informed by in-depth primary research, to reveal Michelson’s singular place as a defining figure in American film theory and criticism.

Luis A. Recoder holds an MFA in Film and PhD in Philosophy. He is the author of Zwangsanalyse: An Essay on Adorno and the Compulsion of the Dialectic (xenomoi, 2025). His projection performances and installations with Sandra Gibson have been featured in major exhibitions, including Expanded Cinema: Film als Spektakel, Ereignis und Performance (HMKV, 2004), Expanded Cinema: Activating the Space of Reception (TATE Modern, 2009), and Celluloid (EYE Filmmuseum, 2016). He is based in New York City.

Kenneth White is Program Director in Visual Studies and Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and Visual Studies at The New School. He is editor of the books Carolee Schneemann: Unforgivable (Black Dog, 2015) and, with Annette Michelson, Michael Snow (MIT Press, 2019).