Alexander Graf, Dietrich Scheunemann (eds.): Avant-garde Film (2007)

This volume on avant-garde film has emerged as part of a wider reassessment of 20th century avant-garde art, literature and film carried out in the framework of a research project at the University of Edinburgh. It paves the way for a fresh assessment of avant-garde film and develops its theory as an integral part of a newly defined conception of the avant-garde as a whole, by closing the gap between theoretical approaches towards the avant-garde as defined on the basis of art and literature on the one hand and avant-garde cinema on the other. It gathers contributions by the most esteemed scholars in the field of avant-garde studies relating to the żclassicalż avant-garde cinema of the 1920s, to new trends emerging in the 1950s and 1960s and to the impact that innovative technologies have recently had on the further development of avant-garde and experimental film. The contributions reflect the broad range of different moving-image media that make up what we refer to today simply as żfilmż, at the same time as reconsidering the applicability of the label żavant-gardeż, to offer a comprehensive and updated framework that will prove invaluable to scholars of both Moving Image Studies and Art History disciplines.

Publisher Rodopi, 2007
ISBN 9042023058, 9789042023055
405 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-31)

P. Adams Sitney: Visionary Film: the American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000 (1974–)

“Visionary Film has remained the standard text on the American avant-garde since the publication of its first edition in 1974. It has been hailed as the most complete work written on the exciting, often puzzling and always controversial genre of American avant-garde film. In this book P. Adams Sitney discusses the principle genres and the major filmmakers since Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid made their dreamlike film “Meshes of the Afternoon” in 1943. Sitney also identifies the emergence and flowering of a new genre, which he calls Menippean Satire. This edition also includes a chapter on the films of Gregory J. Markopoulos which had been dropped from the second edition.”

First published as Visionary Film: the American Avant-Garde, Oxford University Press, 1974.

Second edition
Visionary Film: the American Avant-Garde, 1943-1978
Publisher Oxford University Press, 1979
xiv+463 pages

Third edition
Visionary Film: the American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000
Publisher Oxford University Press, 2002
ISBN 019514886X, 9780195148862
xvi+462 pages

Publisher

2nd edition: PDF (73 MB, added on 2020-9-18)
3rd edition: PDF, EPUB (updated on 2019-11-15)

See also Sitney’s Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson, 2008.

P. Adams Sitney: Eyes Upside Down: Visionary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson (2008)

“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 and Gertrude Stein. The films discussed span the sixty years since the Second World War. With three chapters each devoted to Stan Brakhage and Robert Beavers, two each to Hollis Frampton and Jonas Mekas, and single chapters on Marie Menken, Ian Hugo, Andrew Noren, Warren Sonbert, Su Friedrich, Ernie Gehr, and Abigail Child, Eyes Upside Down is the fruit of Sitney’s lifelong study of visionary aspirations of the American avant-garde cinema. Sitney’s earlier book and critical essays defined the field of serious criticism of the American film avant-garde. He supplies a unique approach, critical, formal and intellectual, rather than sociological, ideological or institutional. Like his earlier book, Eyes Upside Down is a dense, sustained blast of convincing criticism which unfolds through a compelling personal vision. It makes a serious contribution to cinema studies and it is sure to remain in circulation for many years to come.”

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2008
ISBN 0195331141, 9780195331141
xiv+417+[32] pages

Publisher
Worldcat

PDF (updated on 2019-11-15)

See also Sitney’s Visionary Film: the American Avant-Garde, 1943-2000, 1974/2002.