The Grand Illusion: Tito and 24 Million Metres of Celluloid (2014) [Serbian/English]

“The Grand Illusion is dedicated to the great passion of Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito (1892-1980) for all forms of moving pictures – movies, newsreels and other film and documentary forms. The project is based on the carefully maintained records of films which Tito watched from 15 March 1949 to 16 January 1980.

The Grand Illusion is about Tito as a watcher of films, but also about him as an actor, shadow director and most powerful producer. About a man who watched an average of 280 films a year, in all his residences, on land, sea and rail. About his encounters with the greatest film personalities of the second half of the twentieth century – Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Sophia Loren, Elizabeth Taylor, Vivien Leigh, Orson Welles, Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier. About a statesman who was relaxed and entertained by film, and who could say about films “they simply blow your mind”, but who knew how to promote and sell them to serve him for educational purposes, as well as to prepare for travelling or when someone was coming to visit him.”

Publisher Museum of Yugoslav History, Belgrade, 2014
ISBN 9788684811259, 8684811259
67 pages

Exhibition
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (2 MB)

Too Much World: The Films of Hito Steyerl (2014)

“Hito Steyerl is considered one of the most exciting artists working today who speculates on the impact of the Internet and digitization on the fabric of our everyday lives. Her films and writings offer an astute, provocative, and often funny analysis of the dizzying speed with which images and data are reconfigured, altered, and dispersed, many times over, accelerating into infinity or crashing into oblivion.

Published to accompany the artist’s survey exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Too Much World gathers a series of essays and close readings of Steyerl’s films from 2004-2014. Newly commissioned texts by Sven Lütticken, Karen Archey, Ana Teixeira Pinto, and Nick Aikens, alongside writings by Thomas Elsaesser, Pablo Lafuente, David Riff, and Steyerl, are spliced with over one hundred pages of color stills.”

Edited by Nick Aikens
Publisher Sternberg Press, Berlin; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; and Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2014
Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License
ISBN 9783956790577
247 pages

Exh. reviews: Amelia Groom (2014), Paula Albuquerque (Necsus 2015), Dylan Rainforth (LEAP 2015), Kate Woodcroft (Artlink 2015), Scott Redford (Ran Dian 2015).

Exhibition (Van Abbemuseum)
Exhibition (IMA)
Publisher (Sternberg)
WorldCat

PDF, PDF (single pages, 4 MB)
PDF, PDF (spreads, 4 MB)

Barton Byg: Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (1995)

“Fervently admired and frequently reviled, Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet—who have lived and worked together since the 1950s—may well be the most uncompromising, not to say intransigent, filmmakers in the history of the medium. Their radical and deeply political films placed them as forerunners of the New German Cinema movement in the 1960s and influential figures in the subsequent explosion of the European avant-garde. In Landscapes of Resistance, Barton Byg fills a significant gap in modern German and European cinema studies by tracing the career of the two filmmakers and exploring their connection to German modernism, in particular their relationship to the Frankfurt School.

Although they are not German themselves, Straub and Huillet have used German material as the basis for the majority of their films. They have transcribed prose by Böll and Kafka, operas by Schoenberg, and verse dramas by Hölderlin. Byg explores how their work engages German culture with a critical distance and affection and confronts the artificiality of divisions between high and low culture.”

Publisher University of California Press, 1995
Open access
ISBN 0520089081, 9780520089082
xiii+303 pages

Reviews: Ulrich Kriest (Medienwissenschaft 1997, DE), Margret Eifler (The German Quarterly 2000).

Publisher
WorldCat

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