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)

Michel Chion: Film, a Sound Art (2003/2009)

“French critic and composer Michel Chion argues that watching movies is more than just a visual exercise—it enacts a process of audio-viewing. The audiovisual makes use of a wealth of tropes, devices, techniques, and effects that convert multiple sensations into image and sound, therefore rendering, instead of reproducing, the world through cinema.

The first half of Film, A Sound Art considers developments in technology, aesthetic trends, and individual artistic style that recast the history of film as the evolution of a truly audiovisual language. The second half explores the intersection of auditory and visual realms. With restless inventiveness, Chion develops a rhetoric that describes the effects of audio-visual combinations, forcing us to rethink sound film. He claims, for example, that the silent era (which he terms “deaf cinema”) did not end with the advent of sound technology but continues to function underneath and within later films. Expanding our appreciation of cinematic experiences ranging from Dolby multitrack in action films and the eerie tricycle of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to the way actors from different nations use their voices and words, Film, A Sound Art showcases the vast knowledge and innovative thinking of a major theorist.”

First published as Art sonore, le cinema, 2003

Translated by Claudia Gorbman
Publisher Columbia University Press, 2009
ISBN 0231137761, 9780231137768
536 pages
via johnsonleow

Reviews: Knakkergaard (MedieKultur, 2010), Whittington (Music, Sound, and the Moving Image, 2010), Jaeckle (Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 2011).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (Index missing, 58 MB, no OCR, updated on 2023-3-9)

Series of Monographs on Cinema, 10 vols. (1931–33) [NL]

This set of monographs on early twentieth-century film is as important for the discourses on cinema, as it is for the graphic design.

Each volume has a cover created by the Dutch “typotekt” Piet Zwart, who had multiple careers as an interior designer, industrial design, commercial typographer, photographer, critic and lecturer. At the close of the twentieth century, Zwart was named ‘Designer of the Century’ by the Association of Dutch Designers.

Originally planned in twelve volumes, the last two in the series were not published: De techniek van de kunstfilm by M.T.H. Franken and Joris Ivens and Filmreclame by Piet Zwart.

Film: die serie monografieën over filmkunst
Series edited by C.J. Graadt van Roggen
Cover design Piet Zwart
Publisher W.L. & J. Brusse’s Uitgeversmaatschappij, Rotterdam, 1931-33
via Bibliothèque Kandinsky

Wikipedia (NL)

1 Het linnen venster, by C.J. Graadt van Roggen (1931, 72 pp, 71 MB)
2 Dertig jaar film [Thirty Years of Film], by L.J. Jordan (1932, 79 pp, 73 MB)
3 Nederlandsche filmkunst, by Henrik Scholte (1933, 64 pp, 63 MB)
4 Russische filmkunst, by Th. B.F. Hoyer (1932, 84 pp, 85 MB)
5 Duitsche filmkunst [German Cinema], by Simon Koster (1931, 75 pp, 71 MB)
6 Fransche filmkunst, by Elisabeth de Roos (1931, 59 pp, 61 MB)
7 Amerikaansche filmkunst, by Jo Otten (1931, 70 pp, 71 MB)
8 De absolute film, by Menno ter Braak (1931, 50 pp, 50 MB), HTML (at DBNL)
9 De komische film, by Constant van Wessem (1931, 56 pp, 49 MB)
10 De geluidsfilm [Sound Film], by Lou Lichtveld (1933, 79 pp, 76 MB), HTML (at DBNL)