R. Bruce Elder: Dada, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · alchemy, art history, avant-garde, chance, cinema, collage, consciousness, dada, dreams, film, film history, language, mathematics, occultism, sexuality, spiritualism, surrealism, theory
“This book deals with the early intellectual reception of the cinema and the manner in which art theorists, philosophers, cultural theorists, and especially artists of the first decades of the twentieth century responded to its advent. While the idea persists that early writers on film were troubled by the cinema’s lowly form, this work proposes that there was another, largely unrecognized, strain in the reception of it. Far from anxious about film’s provenance in popular entertainment, some writers and artists proclaimed that the cinema was the most important art for the moderns, as it exemplified the vibrancy of contemporary life.
This view of the cinema was especially common among those whose commitments were to advanced artistic practices. Their notions about how to recast the art media (or the forms forged from those media’s materials) and the urgency of doing so formed the principal part of the conceptual core of the artistic programs advanced by the vanguard art movements of the first half of the twentieth century. This book, a companion to the author’s previous, Harmony & Dissent, examines the Dada and Surrealist movements as responses to the advent of the cinema.”
Publisher Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, 2013
Film and Media Studies series
ISBN 9781554586257, 1554586259
x+765 pages
Reviews: John W. Locke (Canadian J of Film Studies 2014), Robin Walz (Canadian J of History 2014), Bart Testa (U Toronto Quarterly 2015).
PDF (8 MB, updated on 2019-12-14)
EPUB (added on 2019-12-14)
Ricardo Greene, Iván Pinto (eds.): La zona Marker (2013) [Spanish]
Filed under book | Tags: · cinema, documentary film, experimental film, film, film criticism, video art
This tribute book to Chris Marker is “divided into three chapters, each one of them dedicated to a different cutting edge point that can be found throughout his life and works: the first is about the committed militant and includes articles by Trevor Stark, Carolina Amaral De Aguiar and Chris Marker himself; the second deals with the explorer who ventures into unknown cultures, with unedited works by María Paz Peirano, Maria Luisa Ortega and Gonzalo De Lucas; the third and last is about his innovative use of the audiovisual language and includes edited essays by Raymond Bellour, Eduardo Russo and Wolfgang Bongers. Furthermore, an introductory piece by the editors and a letter by Patricio Guzmán, besides illustrations and video frames is included. This is a book not just for the fan, but for anyone who wants to delve into the vague fringes of his lasting legacy.”
“El 29 de julio de 2012, día en que cumplía 91 años, Chris Marker muere en Francia por causas desconocidas. Fuera de ambas fechas, nacimiento y muerte, poco puede decirse de él con seguridad; sin ir más lejos, ni siquiera su nombre. Nacido como Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, en Youtube era Kosinski, en Flickr era Sandor Krasna y en sus películas firmó como Jacopo Berenzi, Fritz Markassin y Hayao Yamaneko. Su obra también rehuyó la etiqueta facíl, combinando ficción, documental, experimental, video arte e incluso ciencia ficción, y ensayando con cine, fotografía, caricaturas, instalaciones, animaciones y realidad virtual. Con todas ellas hizo mezclas inesperadas, camuflando y transmutando elementos hasta que sólo quedaran rastros y ruinas.
A través de once ensayos inéditos provenientes de diversas latitudes, el presente libro aborda la compleja y prolífica figura de Marker en sus multiples variantes. Una mirada critica a una obra tan inasible como las sombras del siglo que exploró.”
Publisher FIDOCS, Santiago de Chile, 2013
ISBN 9789569069024
177 pages
via ChrisMarker.org
PDF (6 MB)
Academia.edu
Too Much World: The Films of Hito Steyerl (2014)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, art criticism, cinema, film, film criticism, image, internet, politics, theory
“Hito Steyerl is considered one of the most exciting artists working today who speculates on the impact of the Internet and digitization on the fabric of our everyday lives. Her films and writings offer an astute, provocative, and often funny analysis of the dizzying speed with which images and data are reconfigured, altered, and dispersed, many times over, accelerating into infinity or crashing into oblivion.
Published to accompany the artist’s survey exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Too Much World gathers a series of essays and close readings of Steyerl’s films from 2004-2014. Newly commissioned texts by Sven Lütticken, Karen Archey, Ana Teixeira Pinto, and Nick Aikens, alongside writings by Thomas Elsaesser, Pablo Lafuente, David Riff, and Steyerl, are spliced with over one hundred pages of color stills.”
Edited by Nick Aikens
Publisher Sternberg Press, Berlin; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2014
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License
ISBN 9783956790577
247 pages
Exh. reviews: Amelia Groom (2014), Paula Albuquerque (Necsus 2015), Dylan Rainforth (LEAP 2015), Kate Woodcroft (Artlink 2015), Scott Redford (Ran Dian 2015).
Exhibition (Van Abbemuseum)
Exhibition (IMA)
Publisher (Sternberg)
WorldCat
PDF, PDF (single pages, 4 MB)
PDF, PDF (spreads, 4 MB)