Peter Gidal: Materialist Film (1989)

“A polemical introduction to the avant-garde and experimental in film (including making and viewing), Materialist Film is a highly original, thought-provoking book.

Thirty-seven short chapters work through a series of concepts which will enable the reader to deal imaginatively with the contradictory issues produced by experimental film. Each concept is explored in conjunction with specific films by Andy Warhol, Malcolm LeGrice, Lis Rhodes, Jean-Luc Goddard, Rose Lowder, Kurt Kren, and others.

Peter Gidal draws on important politico-aesthetic writings, and uses some of his own previously published essays from Undercut, Screen, October, and Millennium Film Journal to undertake this concrete process of working through abstract concepts.”

Publisher Routledge, 1989
ISBN 0415003822, 9780415003827
189 pages
via maxp

Review: Wheeler Winston Dixon (Prairie Schooner, 1990)

PDF (10 MB, updated on 2016-12-24)

Pavle Levi: Cinema by Other Means (2012–) [EN, SR]

“Cinema by Other Means explores avant-garde endeavors to practice the cinema by using the materials and the techniques different from those commonly associated with the cinematographic apparatus. Using examples from both the historical and the post-war avant-garde — Dada, Surrealism, Lettrism, “structural-materialist” film, and more — Pavle Levi reveals a range of peculiar and imaginative ways in which filmmakers, artists, and writers have pondered and created, performed and transformed, the “movies” with or without directly grounding their work in the materials of film. The study considers artists and theorists from all over Europe — France, Italy, Soviet Union, Germany, Hungary — but it particularly foregrounds the context of the Yugoslav avant-garde. Cinema by Other Means offers the English-language reader a thorough explication of an assortment of distinctly Yugoslav artistic phenomena, such as the Zenithist cine-writings of the 1920s, the proto-structural Antifilm movement of the early 1960s, and the “ortho-dialectical” film-poetry of the 1970s.”

Publisher Oxford University Press, 2012
ISBN 019984142X, 9780199841424
224 pages

Reviews: Matilde Nardelli (Oxford Art Journal, 2013), Greg DeCuir (Jump Cut, 2013), Bojan Jovic (Biblid, 2013, SR).
Exh. review: De Cuir (ARTMargins, 2013).

Publisher

Cinema by Other Means (English, 2012, updated on 2024-4-26)
Kino drugim sredstvima (Serbian, trans. Đorđe Tomić, 2013, added on 2024-4-26)

R. Bruce Elder: Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century (2008)

“R. Bruce Elder argues that the authors of many of the manifestoes that announced in such lively ways the appearance of yet another artistic movement shared a common aspiration: they proposed to reformulate the visual, literary, and performing arts so that they might take on attributes of the cinema. The cinema, Elder argues, became, in the early decades of the twentieth century, a pivotal artistic force around which a remarkable variety and number of aesthetic forms took shape.

To demonstrate this, Elder begins with a wide-ranging discussion that opens up some broad topics concerning modernity’s cognitive (and perceptual) regime, with a view to establishing that a crisis within that regime engendered some peculiar, and highly questionable, epistemological beliefs and enthusiasms. Through this discussion, Elder advances the startling claim that a crisis of cognition precipitated by modernity engendered, by way of response, a peculiar sort of “pneumatic (spiritual) epistemology.” Elder then shows that early ideas of the cinema were strongly influenced by this pneumatic epistemology and uses this conception of the cinema to explain its pivotal role in shaping two key moments in early-twentieth-century art: the quest to bring forth a pure, “objectless” (non-representational) art and Russian Suprematism, Constructivism, and Productivism.”

Publisher Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Waterloo, 2008
ISBN 1554580285, 9781554580286
480 pages

Review: David Sterritt (Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2011).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2019-12-14)