Radical Light: Alternative Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1945-2000 (2010)

4 February 2017, dusan

“This kaleidoscopic collection of essays, interviews, photographs, and artist-designed pages chronicles the vibrant and influential history of experimental cinema in the San Francisco Bay Area. Encompassing historical, cultural, and aesthetic realms, Radical Light features critical analyses of films and videos, reminiscences from artists, and interviews with pioneering filmmakers, curators, and archivists. It explores artistic movements, film and video exhibition and distribution, artists’ groups, and Bay Area film schools. Special sections of ephemera—posters, correspondence, photographs, newsletters, program notes, and more—punctuate the pages of Radical Light, giving a first-hand visual sense of the period. This groundbreaking, hybrid assemblage reveals a complex picture of how and why the San Francisco Bay Region, a laboratory for artistic and technical innovation for more than half a century, has become a global center of vanguard film, video, and new media.

Among the contributors are Rebecca Solnit and Ernie Gehr on Bay Area cinema’s roots in the work of Eadweard Muybridge and others; Scott MacDonald on Art in Cinema; P. Adams Sitney on films by James Broughton and Sidney Peterson; Stan Brakhage, Bruce Conner, Lawrence Jordan, and Yvonne Rainer on the Bay Area film scene in the 1950s; J. Hobeman on films by Christopher Maclaine, Bruce Conner, and Robert Nelson; Craig Baldwin on found footage film; George Kuchar on student-produced melodramas; Michael Wallin on queer film in the 1970s; V. Vale on punk cinema; Dale Hoyt and Cecilia Dougherty on video in the 1980s and 1990s; and Maggie Morse on new media as sculpture.”

Edited by Steve Anker, Kathy Geritz and Steve Seid
Publisher University of California Press, and Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, 2010
ISBN 9780520249103, 0520249100
352 pages

Reviews: Molly H.Cox (Other Cinema, 2011), Lucy Raven (BOMB, 2011), Federico Windhausen (Moving Image, 2012), Mike Leggett (Leonardo, 2012).

Exhibition
Publisher (BAMPFA)
Publisher (UC Press)
WorldCat

multiple formats (on Internet Archive)
PDF (35 MB)

Ricardo Greene, Iván Pinto (eds.): La zona Marker (2013) [Spanish]

7 October 2016, dusan

This tribute book to Chris Marker is “divided into three chapters, each one of them dedicated to a different cutting edge point that can be found throughout his life and works: the first is about the committed militant and includes articles by Trevor Stark, Carolina Amaral De Aguiar and Chris Marker himself; the second deals with the explorer who ventures into unknown cultures, with unedited works by María Paz Peirano, Maria Luisa Ortega and Gonzalo De Lucas; the third and last is about his innovative use of the audiovisual language and includes edited essays by Raymond Bellour, Eduardo Russo and Wolfgang Bongers. Furthermore, an introductory piece by the editors and a letter by Patricio Guzmán, besides illustrations and video frames is included. This is a book not just for the fan, but for anyone who wants to delve into the vague fringes of his lasting legacy.”

“El 29 de julio de 2012, día en que cumplía 91 años, Chris Marker muere en Francia por causas desconocidas. Fuera de ambas fechas, nacimiento y muerte, poco puede decirse de él con seguridad; sin ir más lejos, ni siquiera su nombre. Nacido como Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, en Youtube era Kosinski, en Flickr era Sandor Krasna y en sus películas firmó como Jacopo Berenzi, Fritz Markassin y Hayao Yamaneko. Su obra también rehuyó la etiqueta facíl, combinando ficción, documental, experimental, video arte e incluso ciencia ficción, y ensayando con cine, fotografía, caricaturas, instalaciones, animaciones y realidad virtual. Con todas ellas hizo mezclas inesperadas, camuflando y transmutando elementos hasta que sólo quedaran rastros y ruinas.

A través de once ensayos inéditos provenientes de diversas latitudes, el presente libro aborda la compleja y prolífica figura de Marker en sus multiples variantes. Una mirada critica a una obra tan inasible como las sombras del siglo que exploró.”

Publisher FIDOCS, Santiago de Chile, 2013
ISBN 9789569069024
177 pages
via ChrisMarker.org

Publisher

PDF (6 MB)
Academia.edu

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

7 May 2016, dusan

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