Sitney analyzes in detail the work of eleven American avant-garde filmmakers as heirs to the aesthetics of exhilaration and innovative vision articulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson and explored by John Cage, Charles Olson and Gertrude Stein. The films discussSitney analyzes in detail the work of eleven American avant-garde filmmakers as heirs to the aesthetics of exhilaration and innovative vision articulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson and explored by John Cage, Charles Olson and Gertrude Stein. The films discussed span the sixty years since the Second World War.

A relational [video] grammar: extrapolation is an editing experiment that uses drawing and the addition/reconfiguration/obliteration of text to examine speech generated during the making of direct address to camera, within a context of artists’ film and video. a relational [video] grammar: extrapolation tests the conceptual relationships between linguistic and technological editing processes.

The publication “...and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens” brings together three of Nina Danino’s early 16mm films—First Memory (1980), Close to Home (1985), Stabat Mater (1990)— which are related to Gibraltar as a real place, and as an imagined geography and history. The publication includes the artist’s recent work Meteorologies (2013).

The book is published on the occasion of Nina Danino’s solo exhibition “...and the figtrees in the Alameda gardens” at the Garrison Library, a magnificent library in Gibraltar—established in 1793. Since then, the venue, with its fine collection of rare books and documents, has been a centre of international cultural life in Gibraltar.

Despite being a consummate polymath, George Kuchar (1942-2011) is best known as a pioneering underground film and video maker with a disarming do-it-yourself aesthetic and a hilariously eccentric sensibility. Quirky and ingenious, heartfelt and campy, Kuchar's movies know no boundaries and are an entirely unique development in the history of cinema. The artist's characteristic instinct for kitsch, his humor and conceptual brilliance, were not confined to the screen alone; they can be glimpsed in all the activities he carried out throughout his life. The George Kuchar Reader, edited by Andrew Lampert, collects a wide swath of previously uncollected and newly unearthed writings and visual work, including essays, comics, drawings, paintings, photographs, film stills, scripts, movie blurbs, correspondence, letters of recommendation for his students, documentation of his UFO sightings, excerpts from his dream journal, selections from his private notebooks and much more.