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)

Jeffrey Skoller: Shadows, Specters, Shards. Making History in Avant-Garde Film (2005)

Demonstrates how avant-garde films better reflect the complexity of history than conventional film.

Avant-garde films are often dismissed as obscure or disconnected from the realities of social and political history. Jeffrey Skoller challenges this myth, arguing that avant-garde films more accurately display the complex interplay between past events and our experience of the present than conventional documentaries and historical films.

Shadows, Specters, Shards examines a group of experimental films, including work by Eleanor Antin, Ernie Gehr, and Jean-Luc Godard, that take up historical events such as the Holocaust, Latin American independence struggles, and urban politics. Identifying a cinema of evocation rather than representation, these films call attention to the unrepresentable aspects of history that profoundly impact the experience of everyday life. Making use of the critical theories of Walter Benjamin and Gilles Deleuze, among others, Skoller analyzes various narrative strategies—allegory, sideshadowing, testimony, and multiple temporalities—that uncover competing perspectives and gaps in historical knowledge often ignored in conventional film. In his discussion of avant-garde film of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, Skoller reveals how a nuanced understanding of the past is inextricably linked to the artistry of image making and storytelling.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2005
ISBN 081664232X, 9780816642328
233 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-14)

Gábor Bódy, 1946-1985: A Presentation of His Work (1987) [Hungarian/English]

Gábor Bódy was a Hungarian film director, screenwriter, theoretic, and occasional actor. A pioneer of experimental filmmaking and film language, Bódy is one of the most important figures of Hungarian cinema.

This publication appeared on the occasion of the Gábor Bódy life-work exhibition organized in Budapest at the Ernst Museum, the Tinódi Cinema and the Palace of Exhibitions, 19 January – 8 February 1987.

Project and coordination: László Beke and Miklós Peternák
Publisher Műcsarnok, Budapest, 1987
ISBN 9637162704
335 pages

PDF, PDF (64 MB, updated on 2019-10-30)
JPGs