Hollis Frampton: Circles of Confusion. Film/Photography/Video Texts 1968-1981 (1983)

Hollis Frampton is most well known as an independent filmmaker, but has been lecturing and writing about photography, film and video for a long time and in many places and publications. Circles of Confusion assembles eleven articles from exhibition catalogs and from October and Artforum. What Frampton does as a critic is much like what he does as a filmmaker, which is to strip the creative process down to its basic elements, then arrange and display the components..

Framptont’s role in this is critic-as-conjurer . He prestidigitates ideas and illusions from everywhere–history, psychology, philosophy, literature, even archaeology, whatever might apply. However much he may circle, though, he always comes back to basic ontological questions. What is photography? Film? Video? What are the properties that make them unique? What has film to do with narrative? Photography with space and time? Beyond a king these questions Frampton also conjectures about the possible ways of asking them and the likelihood of getting an answer. He also plays the role of critic-as-authoritative-voice, but by exposing the jagged mechanisms of thought makes the reader much more than a participant in the process than is usually the case.

Foreword by Annette Michelson
Publisher Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1983
ISBN 0898220203, 9780898220209
200 pages

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Laura U. Marks: Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (2002)

In Touch, Laura U. Marks develops a critical approach more tactile than visual, an intensely physical and sensuous engagement with works of media art that enriches our understanding and experience of these works and of art itself.

These critical, theoretical, and personal essays serve as a guide to developments in nonmainstream media art during the past ten years-sexual representation debates, documentary ethics, the shift from analog to digital media, a new social obsession with smell. Marks takes up well-known artists like experimental filmmaker Ken Jacobs and mysterious animators the Brothers Quay, and introduces groundbreaking, lesser-known film, video, and digital artists.

From this emerges a materialist theory-an embodied, erotic relationship to art and to the world. Marks’s approach leads to an appreciation of the works’ mortal bodies: film’s volatile emulsion, video’s fragile magnetic base, crash-prone Net art; it also offers a productive alternative to the popular understanding of digital media as “virtual” and immaterial. Weaving a continuous fabric from philosophy, fiction, science, dreams, and intimate experience, Touch opens a new world of art media to readers.

Publisher U of Minnesota Press, 2002
ISBN 0816638896, 9780816638895
259 pages

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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

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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.