"Alongside the commercial cinema of narrative and spectacle there has always been another practice--call it avant-garde, experimental, or artists' film. In this provocative book, Nicky Hamlyn, an acclaimed filmmaker in the alternative tradition, investigates the film art phenomenon. Taking cues from modern trends in other artforms, notably painting and sculpture, this type of filmmaking emphasizes the nature of its apparatus and medium in order to bring about a critical, inquisitive state of mind in the viewer.

"In his 1971 short film, (nostalgia) , American artist and writer Hollis Frampton oveturned the conventional narrative roles of words and images. In his account of an artists's transformation from photographer to filmmaker, Frampton burns photographs he had taken and selected from his past along with one found photograph. A calm voice tells a story about an image, but the story is about the following image, not the one shown.

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.