Shelley Green: Radical Juxtaposition: The Films of Yvonne Rainer (1994)

“This volume examines the work of one of the central figures of the avant-garde from her first feature-length film in 1972, Lives of Performers, through Film About a Woman Who… (1974), Kristina Talking Pictures (1976), Journeys from Berlin/1971 (1980), The Man Who Envied Women (1985), to Privilege (1990). The comprehensive study surveys critical reaction and includes Rainer’s critical writings, photos, full biographical information, a complete filmography and bibliography.

The book also investigates dominant structural elements which enliven Rainer’s filmic texts: her complex and disjunctive use of language, speech, repetition, interpolated texts, fragmentation, self-conscious camera movement, autobiography and the formulation of alternative narrative codes. A focal point is the unique relationship established between the filmmaker and the spectator.

Rainer’s narrative strategies have been considered in a radical political context; the author specifically analyzes Rainer’s aggressive reexamination of form as it contributes to the politics of the personal and the political. Resonances created in complex construction of sound, image, editing, characterization, camera movement, and the obliteration and calculated reevaluation of these techniques often directly lead to a new construction of the female subject as well as the female spectator. By creating a cinema that may both construct and include its audience, Rainer’s work has vast implications. The author develops this significant aspect and addresses issues of race, age, and class, especially in later films.” (from the back cover)

Publisher Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, N.J., 1994
The Scarecrow Filmmakers Series, 41
ISBN 0810828634, 9780810828636
174 pages

Commentary: Strictly Film School (2005).

WorldCat

PDF (20 MB, no OCR)

See also Rainer’s films on UbuWeb.

Konstantin Akinsha: The Second Life of Soviet Photomontage, 1935-1980s (2012)

“This dissertation explores the development of Soviet photomontage from the second half of the 1930s to the end of the 1970s. Until now, the transformation of the modernist medium and its incorporation into the everyday practice of Soviet visual propaganda during and after the Second World War has not attracted much scholarly attention. The firm association of photomontage with the Russian avant-garde in general, and with Constructivism in particular, has led art historians to disregard the fact that the medium was practised in the USSR until the final days of the Soviet system. The conservative government organisations in control of propaganda preserved satirical photomontage in its post-Dadaist phase and Heartfield-like form, finding it useful in the production of negative propaganda.”

Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation
University of Edinburgh, 2012
328 pages + 368 pages of illustrations

Publisher
Author

PDF (29 MB)

Scott MacKenzie (ed.): Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology (2014)

“This is the first book to collect manifestos from the global history of cinema, providing the first historical and theoretical account of the role played by film manifestos in filmmaking and film culture. Focusing equally on political and aesthetic manifestos, Scott MacKenzie uncovers a neglected, yet nevertheless central history of the cinema, exploring a series of documents that postulate ways in which to re-imagine the cinema and, in the process, re-imagine the world.

This volume collects the major European “waves” and figures (Eisenstein, Truffaut, Bergman, Free Cinema, Oberhausen, Dogme ‘95); Latin American Third Cinemas (Birri, Sanjinés, Espinosa, Solanas); radical art and the avant-garde (Buñuel, Brakhage, Deren, Mekas, Ono, Sanborn); and world cinemas (Iimura, Makhmalbaf, Sembene, Sen). It also contains previously untranslated manifestos co-written by figures including Bollaín, Debord, Hermosillo, Isou, Kieslowski, Painlevé, Straub, and many others. Thematic sections address documentary cinema, aesthetics, feminist and queer film cultures, pornography, film archives, Hollywood, and film and digital media. Also included are texts traditionally left out of the film manifestos canon, such as the Motion Picture Production Code and Pius XI’s Vigilanti Cura, which nevertheless played a central role in film culture.”

Publisher University of California Press, 2014
ISBN 0520276744, 9780520276741
xxi+651 pages
via slowrotation

Author’s talk (video, 2017, 20 min).

Reviews: Wheeler Winston Dixon (Film International), Matthew Hunt, Bill Nichols (Film Quarterly).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (updated on 2019-7-14)