Elizabeth Legge: Michael Snow: Wavelength (2009)

“In 1966 Michael Snow made the film Wavelength, a masterful exploration of the nature of perception. Throughout the film’s forty-five minutes, the camera slowly zooms from one end of a New York City loft space to its far wall, accompanied by the sound of a rising sine wave.

In this critical study, Elizabeth Legge describes Wavelength as a film of expertly managed tensions, sensuous beauty, subtle light and colour and recession into perspectival depth. Wavelength was crucial to critics’ efforts to establish a vocabulary for the experimental film movement emerging a the time, and has functioned ever since as a blue screen in front of which a range of ideological and intellectual dramas have been played.”

Publisher Afterall Books, 2009
One Work series
ISBN 1846380561, 9781846380563
112 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2020-7-13)

Tanya Leighton (ed.): Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader (2008)

“The mutual fascination between art and cinema has had a great influence on contemporary culture. For the past fifty years, the love/hate affair between the two has triggered vital aesthetic, social and political responses that constantly renew the way we understand our age. This book traces the story from early spatial experiments with film and video technologies to the current widespread use of projected images in museums and galleries. Why has there been a turn to the cinematic in contemporary art? What happens to the moving image when it shifts from the black box to the white cube, when cinema is exhibited? How does this challenge the traditional mediums of film, painting and sculpture? Art and the Moving Image gathers together key texts including new, translated and previously unpublished essays by eminent writers and theorists including Giorgio Agamben, Beatriz Colomina, Serge Daney, Rosalind Krauss, Maurizio Lazzaratto, and Peter Wollen. It offers an essential introduction to the complex field of art and the projected image for both students and general readers.”

Publisher Tate Publishing, in association with Afterall, London, 2008
ISBN 185437625X, 9781854376251
496 pages

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Publisher

PDF (no OCR; updated on 2023-9-18)

Claire Huot: China’s New Cultural Scene: A Handbook of Changes (2000)

The Cultural Revolution of China’s Maoist era has come and gone, yet another cultural revolution of a different sort has been sweeping through China in the 1990s. Although recently much interest has been focused on China’s economy, few Westerners are aware of the remarkable transformations occurring in the culture of ordinary people’s daily lives. In China’s New Cultural Scene Claire Huot surveys the wide spectrum of art produced by Chinese musicians, painters, writers, performers, and filmmakers today, portraying an ongoing cultural revolution that has significantly altered life in the People’s Republic.

Western observers who were impressed by the bravery of the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square—and stunned at the harshness of their suppression—will learn from this book how that political movement led to changes in cultural conditions and production. Attending to all the major elements of this vast nation’s high and low culture at the end of a landmark decade, Huot’s discussion ranges from the cinematic works of Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, and others to emerging musical forms such as rock, punk, and rap. Other topics include television, theater, and avant-garde art, the new electronic media, and subversive trends in both literature and the visual arts.

With a comprehensive index of artists and works, as well as a glossary of Chinese words, China’s New Cultural Scene will enlighten students of Chinese culture and general readers interested in contemporary Asia.

Publisher Duke University Press, 2000
ISBN 0822324458, 9780822324454
258 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (no OCR; updated on 2012-7-14)