Experimental Cinema, The Film Reader brings together key writings on American avant-garde cinema to explore the long tradition of underground filmmaking from its origins in the 1920s to the work of contemporary film and video artists.

"Taka iimura has been making films since the
early 1960s. His work has gone through a series of relatively clear,
consistent developments: from 1962 to 1968, iimura was largely involved
with surreal imagery, with eroticism, and with social criticism; from
1968 through 1971, he continued to use photographic imagery, but worked
with it in increasingly formal ways; from 1972 until 1978, he devoted
himself very largely to a series of minimalist explorations of time and

Women’s Experimental Cinema provides lively introductions to the work of fifteen avant-garde women filmmakers, some of whom worked as early as the 1950s and many of whom are still working today. In each essay in this collection, a leading film scholar considers a single filmmaker, supplying biographical information, analyzing various influences on her work, examining the development of her corpus, and interpreting a significant number of individual films.

Acting as a corrective to the skewed avant-garde history that neglects women, Women and Experimental Filmmaking gathers essays by some of the top scholars in cinema studies dealing with women experimental filmmakers.