Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia

Humor & Entertainment

Walley, Jonathan

Movies

Oxford University Press

Expanded cinema: avant-garde moving image works that claim new territory for the cinematic, beyond the bounds of familiar filmmaking practices and the traditional theatrical exhibition space. First emerging in the 1960s amidst seismic shifts in the arts, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light art, kinetic art, video, and computer-generated imagery - all placed under expanded cinema's umbrella - re-emerged at the dawn of the 2000s, opening a vast new horizon of possibility for the moving image, and perhaps even heralding the end of cinema as we know it. Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia offers a bold new account of its subject, breaking from previous studies and from larger trends in film and art scholarship. Author Jonathan Walley argues that expanded cinema's apparent departure from the traditions and forms of cinema as we know it actually radically asserts cinema's nature and artistic autonomy. Walley also resituates expanded cinema within the context of avant-garde film history, linking it to a mode of filmmaking that has historically investigated and challenged the nature and limits of cinematic form. As an outgrowth of this tradition, expanded cinema offered a means for filmmakers within the avant-garde, regardless of their differing styles, formal concerns, and politics, to stake out cinema's unique aesthetic terrain - its ontology, its independence, its identity. In addition to reconsidering the better-known expanded cinema works of the 1960s and 70s by artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Whitman, and Nam June Paik, Cinema Expanded also provides the first scholarly accounts of scores of lesser-known works across more than 50 years. Making new arguments about avant-garde cinema in general and its complex meditations on the nature of cinema, it urgently addresses current and crucial debates about the fate of the moving image amidst a digital age of near-constant technological change.

Anthony McCall's Line Describing a Cone has long been a classic of American avant-garde cinema, but because it was most often screened in dusty Soho lofts in the past, the piece was little known to a wider audience. The inclusion of Line Describing a Cone,1973 in the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition "Into the Light: the Projected Image in American Art, 1964-1977" has opened McCall's work to a great deal of interest both in America and abroad. While curators are only now beginning to mine the history of the projected image in art, McCall continues to be one of the most important of the Post-Minimalist artists to use projected film. This book includes a major essay by Branden Joseph, an interview with the artist by Jonathan Walley, and the first photo-documentation ever made of his pieces as well as diagrams of related works. Additional biographical and bibliographic materials are included in the book to provide a baseline for further scholarly research in the area, as well as 100 never-before-seen reproductions of historical photographs, sketches, and diagrams from the artist's archive. New photography of the never-before-photographed Long Film For Four Projectors, 1974 was commissioned for this book. Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and Related Works is a co-publication with the New Art Trust in San Francisco, California.

Anthony McCall: The Solid Light Films and Related Works

Arts & Photography

Joseph, Branden W.

Eamon, Christopher

Individual Artists

Northwestern University Press

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