Kim Knowles: Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices (2020)

“This book assesses the contemporary status of photochemical film practice against a backdrop of technological transition and obsolescence. It argues for the continued relevance of material engagement for opening up alternative ways of seeing and sensing the world. Questioning narratives of replacement and notions of fetishism and nostalgia, the book sketches out the contours of a photochemical renaissance driven by collective passion, creative resistance and artistic reinvention. Celluloid processes continue to play a key role in the evolution of experimental film aesthetics and this book takes a personal journey into the work of several key contemporary film artists. It provides fresh insight into the communities and infrastructures that sustain this vibrant field and mobilises a wide range of theoretical perspectives drawn from media archaeology, new materialism, ecocriticism and social ecology. ”

Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2020
ISBN 3030443094, 9783030443092
xv+255 pages

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (removed on 2020-11-5 upon request from author)

Andrew V. Uroskie: Between the Black Box and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema and Postwar Art (2014)

“Today, the moving image is ubiquitous in global contemporary art. The first book to tell the story of the postwar expanded cinema that inspired this omnipresence, Between the Black Box and the White Cube travels back to the 1950s and 1960s, when the rise of television caused movie theaters to lose their monopoly over the moving image, leading cinema to be installed directly alongside other forms of modern art.

Explaining that the postwar expanded cinema was a response to both developments, Andrew V. Uroskie argues that, rather than a formal or technological innovation, the key change for artists involved a displacement of the moving image from the familiarity of the cinematic theater to original spaces and contexts. He shows how newly available, inexpensive film and video technology enabled artists such as Nam June Paik, Robert Whitman, Stan VanDerBeek, Robert Breer, and especially Andy Warhol to become filmmakers. Through their efforts to explore a fresh way of experiencing the moving image, these artists sought to reimagine the nature and possibilities of art in a post-cinematic age and helped to develop a novel space between the “black box” of the movie theater and the “white cube” of the art gallery. Packed with over one hundred illustrations, Between the Black Box and the White Cube is a compelling look at a seminal moment in the cultural life of the moving image and its emergence in contemporary art.”

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2014
ISBN 9780226842981, 0226842983
x+273 pages

Reviews: Amanda Egbe (Leonardo, 2014), Rick Sieber (ARLIS/NA Reviews, 2014), Matilde Nardelli (Visual Studies, 2015), Kenneth White (CAA Reviews, 2015), Michael Zryd (Millennium Film Journal, 2015), Riccardo Venturi (Critique d’art, 2016, French).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF

XSCREEN. Materialien über den Underground-Film (1971) [German]

Publication documenting four years of the alternative projections space XSCREEN founded by Birgit and Wilhelm Hein and others in Cologne in 1968.

Reprinted on the occasion of Wilhelm Hein’s You Killed the Underground Film and Bettina Koester’s The Sisters, Amsterdam, March 2012.

Edited by W & B Hein, Christian Michelis, and Rolf Wiest
Publisher Phaidon, Cologne, 1971
Reprinted in Amsterdam, 2012
ISBN 3876350387, 9783876350387
128 pages
HT FCR, via Sly Pro Potter

WorldCat

PDF (35 MB)

See also a short documentary of Wilhelm Hein’s underground film screening at Sly Prop Otter X, Amsterdam