"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.

Indiscretions follows the path of U.S. avant-garde film and video from the underground of the 1960s to the academy of the 1980s. Patricia Mellencamp traces and charts the intersections of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the desiring male subject, Roland Barthes and texts of pleasure, Michel Foucault and the disciplinary society, the grotesque body and Mikhail Bakhtin, the rhizomatic alogic of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and the female subject of feminist film theory.