Daniel Barnett: Movement as Meaning: In Experimental Film (2008)

This book offers sweeping and cogent arguments as to why analytic philosophers should take experimental cinema seriously as a medium for illuminating mechanisms of meaning in language. Using the analogy of the movie projector, Barnett deconstructs all communication acts into functions of interval, repetition and context. He describes how Wittgenstein’s concepts of “family resemblance and language games” provide a dynamic perspective on the analysis of acts of reference. He then develops a hyper-simplified formula of “movement as meaning” to discuss, with true equivalence, the process of reference as it occurs in natural language, technical language, poetic language, painting, photography, music, and of course, cinema. Barnett then applies his analytic technique to an original perspective on cine-poetics based on Paul Valery’s concept of omnivalence, and to a projection of how this style of analysis, derived from analog cinema, can help us clarify our view of the digital mediasphere and its relation to consciousness. Informed by the philosophy of Quine, Dennett, Merleau-Ponty as well as the later work of Wittgenstein, among others, he uses the film work of Stan Brakhage, Tony Conrad, A.K. Dewdney, Nathaniel Dorsky, Ken Jacobs, Owen Land, Saul Levine, Gregory Markopoulos Michael Snow, and the poetry of Basho, John Cage, John Cayley and Paul Valery to illustrate the power of his unique perspective on meaning.

Key words and phrases
language game, phi phenomenon, Maltese cross, Otto Muehl, Saul Levine, Kinesics, haiku, optical printer, Cross Movement, meme, movie projector, Ken Jacobs, mesostic, digital cinema, polyvalence, Bolex, ontological, P-frame, persistence of vision, George Landow

Publisher Rodopi, 2008
ISBN 9042023856, 9789042023857
Length 240 pages

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Scott MacDonald: A Critical Cinema 5: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers (2006)

A Critical Cinema 5 is the fifth volume in Scott MacDonald’s Critical Cinema series, the most extensive, in-depth exploration of independent cinema available in English. In this new set of interviews, MacDonald engages filmmakers in detailed discussions of their films and of the personal experiences and political and theoretical currents that have shaped their work. The interviews are arranged to express the remarkable diversity of modern independent cinema and the interactive community of filmmakers that has dedicated itself to producing forms of cinema that critique conventional media.

Publisher University of California Press, 2006
ISBN 0520245954, 9780520245952
451 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2013-1-23)

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.