David E. James (ed.): Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker (2005)

“Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker is a collection of essays, photographs, personal statements, and reminiscences about the celebrated avant-garde filmmaker who died in 2003. The director of nearly four hundred short films, including Dog Star Man, Parts I-IV, and the Roman Numeral Series, Brakhage is widely recognized as one of the great artists of the medium. His shorts eschewed traditional narrative structure, and his innovations in fast cutting, hand-held camerawork, and multiple superimpositions created an unprecedentedly rich texture of images that provided the vocabulary for the explosion of independent filmmaking in the 1960s.

Stan Brakhage: Filmmaker chronicles both the director’s personal and formal development. The essays in this book—by historians, filmmakers, and other artists—assess Brakhage’s contributions to the aesthetic and political history of filmmaking, from his emergence on the film scene and the establishment of his reputation, to the early-1980s. The result is a remarkable tribute to this lyrical, visionary artist.”

Publisher Temple University Press, 2005
Wide Angle Books series
ISBN 1592132723, 9781592132720
240 pages

Publisher

PDF (36 MB, updated on 2016-12-23)

Zdeněk Pešánek: Kinetismus: Kinetika ve výtvarnictví – barevná hudba (1941) [Czech]

Zdeněk Pešánek (1896-1965) was one of the most inventive and original Czech sculptors of the 20th century, who pioneered experiments in light- and kinetic sculptures. His works, highly abstract and biomorphic, made use of neon and incandescent lighting as part of the sculptural elements. He also was a designer for both architectural and interior structures, and worked with the fusion of light and music, developing the use of “clavieres a lumieres” and light-organs. His aesthetic was more informed by sound and tonality than visual precedent, and is quite original. At this date almost no sculptures exist in private hands and the public sculptures have been largely damaged or destroyed. The book Kineticism: Kinetics in Fine Arts – Color Music is the only publication in his lifetime in which his theories were given exposition and is his creative credo as well, replete with b/w and color illustrations. Amazingly published during the Nazi occupation.

Edited by Josef Vydra
Publisher: Česká grafická unie, Prague, October 1941
Edice výtvarné výchovy, svazek 8
144 pages

PDF (no OCR, updated on 2013-2-12)

Noël Carroll: Theorizing the Moving Image (1996)

“Theorizing the Moving Image brings together a selection of essays written by one of the leading critics of film over the past two decades. In this volume, Noël Carroll examines theoretical aspects of film and television through penetrating analyses of such genres as soap opera, documentary, and comedy, and such topics as sight gags, film metaphor, point-of-view editing, and movie music. Throughout, individual films are considered in depth. Carroll’s essays, moreover, represent the cognitivist turn in film studies, containing in-depth criticism of existing approaches to film theory, and heralding a new approach to film theory.”

Publisher Cambridge University Press, 1996
Cambridge Studies in Film
ISBN 0521460492, 9780521460491
426 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-7-14)