Here are 100 books that A History of Video Art fans have personally recommended if you like
A History of Video Art.
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I am an artist-filmmaker, writer, and Professor of Experimental Film at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury, Kent, UK. I have worked at the London Filmmakers’ Co-op and BBC TV. I have been making films since 1974 and teaching since 1988. I have published extensively on Artists’ Film / Experimental Cinema. I have edited and contributed chapters to numerous other books and journals, including Millennium Film Journal, MIRAJ, Film Quarterly, Sequence, and others. I have completed over 70 single screen works in 16mm and video, gallery film and video installations, and multi-projector film performances. These have been screened worldwide.
David Curtis’ copiously illustrated book is a wide-ranging yet detailed introduction to the world of artists’ film, with over 400 filmmakers discussed. The survey is rooted in the historical avant-garde of the 1920s and ‘30s but covers work up to the present day. While major figures such as Steve McQueen and Bill Viola are mentioned, equal space is devoted to little-known filmmakers from France, Poland, and elsewhere.
This detailed survey presents for the first time an alternative history of the moving image, chronicling artists' ever-evolving fascination with filmmaking from the early twentieth century to now.
From early pioneers to key artists of the present, leading authority and film expert David Curtis offers a vivid account of the numerous individuals who have been inspired by the cinematic medium and felt compelled to interpret and respond to it in their own way. In doing so, he discusses artists' widely differing achievements, aspirations, theories and approaches.
Featuring over 400 international moving-image makers and drawing on examples from across the arts,…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
I am an artist-filmmaker, writer, and Professor of Experimental Film at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury, Kent, UK. I have worked at the London Filmmakers’ Co-op and BBC TV. I have been making films since 1974 and teaching since 1988. I have published extensively on Artists’ Film / Experimental Cinema. I have edited and contributed chapters to numerous other books and journals, including Millennium Film Journal, MIRAJ, Film Quarterly, Sequence, and others. I have completed over 70 single screen works in 16mm and video, gallery film and video installations, and multi-projector film performances. These have been screened worldwide.
LeGrice was a founder of the London Filmmakers’ Co-op in 1968 and has worked ever since as a film and video maker, teacher, and writer. His book collects a large number of theoretical and critical essays on a range of topics, from film as material to the way films variously position the spectator as a consumer and/or self-conscious critic, to comparisons between film and digital media, in aesthetic, technological, and ecological terms. The essays are always approachable, even when he is discussing more abstract theoretical problems. Many examples are discussed.
Michael Le Grice, a pioneer of "structural film" in the 1970s and whose first video and computer works were exhibited in the late 1960s, provides a collection of his most notable essays. The essays shed light on the work of other artists and film-makers and documents a period, especially the 70s, when artists' film was at the centre of polemical debate about the nature of avant-garde and the future of radical or experimental film. The book contributes to the contemporary debates about film, video, art and new technology.
I am an artist-filmmaker, writer, and Professor of Experimental Film at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury, Kent, UK. I have worked at the London Filmmakers’ Co-op and BBC TV. I have been making films since 1974 and teaching since 1988. I have published extensively on Artists’ Film / Experimental Cinema. I have edited and contributed chapters to numerous other books and journals, including Millennium Film Journal, MIRAJ, Film Quarterly, Sequence, and others. I have completed over 70 single screen works in 16mm and video, gallery film and video installations, and multi-projector film performances. These have been screened worldwide.
While written from a Yugoslav perspective, this book is a fascinating study of films made using unconventional methods, materials, and equipment, including ‘written films’: films that exist as texts and that would be impossible to make as films. Levi draws on the historical and the post-war avant-garde; Dada, Surrealism, Lettrisme, Structural-Materialist film, and other movements that constitute a material and ideological rejection of conventional cinema and the way it treats the medium as a mere means to an end. In these works, produced in Japan, Europe, and the USA, the technology is turned on itself, interrogated, and repurposed to anti-illusionistic ends.
Cinema by Other Means explores an extraordinary history, stretching from the 1910s to the present: it is a study of various avant-garde endeavors to practice the cinema by using the tools, the materials, the technology, and the techniques, which either modify or are entirely different from those associated with the standard film apparatus. Using examples from both the historical and the post-war avant-garde-Dada, Surrealism, Letterism, "structural-materialist" film, and more-the book tells the tale of the multiple conditions of cinema; of a range of peculiar and imaginative ways in which filmmakers, artists, and writers have pondered and created, performed and transformed,…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I am an artist-filmmaker, writer, and Professor of Experimental Film at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury, Kent, UK. I have worked at the London Filmmakers’ Co-op and BBC TV. I have been making films since 1974 and teaching since 1988. I have published extensively on Artists’ Film / Experimental Cinema. I have edited and contributed chapters to numerous other books and journals, including Millennium Film Journal, MIRAJ, Film Quarterly, Sequence, and others. I have completed over 70 single screen works in 16mm and video, gallery film and video installations, and multi-projector film performances. These have been screened worldwide.
Connolly’s book
traces recent historical shifts in artists’ cinema via a number of overlapping
trends; multi-screen video projections in galleries, work that ‘references an
earlier event through documentation, re-enactment or remaking’ and that which
explores the relationship between cinema, screen architecture, and the museum or
gallery space. The implications of these trends; the mobile as opposed to
seated spectator or the making of work designed to run as continuous short
loops, is considered via detailed discussion of works by a small number of key
artists. Connolly, unusually and refreshingly, is not afraid to criticise, as
in her discussion of Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s film Zidane.
In The Place of Artists' Cinema, Maeve Connolly identifies a recurrent concern with site, space and cinema architecture in film and video works by artists, extending from the late 1960s to the present day. Focusing on developments over the past decade, Connolly provides in-depth readings of selected recent works by twenty-four different artists, ranging from multi-screen projections to site-specific installations and feature-length films. She also explores changing structures of exhibition and curation, tracing the circulation of film and video works within public art contexts, galleries, museums, biennial exhibitions and art fairs. Providing a chapter on the role of public funding…
I am a film buff and history nerd who has brought her two passions together in the study of history on screen. So much of what we know is shaped by what we watch. It is crucial that we don’t dismiss historical TV shows and films as mere entertainment and instead work to understand how history is constructed and represented on screen. I have spent my postgraduate career exploring the screen’s unique capabilities for telling historical stories. I received my PhD from the University of Auckland and currently teach film studies at Media Design School, Aotearoa’s leading digital creativity tertiary provider.
Sets, props, and costumes are not only part of the historical film’s allure but play an important role in the construction of the historical narrative; to ignore this element of screen history is criminal. Sprengler’s book gives “visual pastness” the attention it deserves, delving into the form and function of costumes in Far From Heaven and the cars inSin City (to name just two examples). Sprengler approaches the topic through the lens of nostalgia, adding another layer to the examination of history on screen. As someone who is fascinated by 1950s history and the representation of the 1950s on screen, Sprengler’s focus on this decade is a bonus.
"In this fascinating in-depth study of the impact of nostalgia on contemporary American cinema, Christine Sprengler unpicks the history of the concept and explores its significance in theory and practice. She offers a lucid analysis of the development of nostalgia in American society and culture, navigating a path through the key debates and aligning herself with recent attempts to recuperate its critical potential. This journey opens up the myriad permutations of nostalgia across visual and material culture and their interface with cinema, with the 1950s emerging as a privileged moment. Four case studies (Sin City, Far From Heaven, The Aviator…
I’ve been interested in classic Hollywood movies for as long as I can remember, starting especially with the MGM musicals, the comedies of Abbott and Costello, and anything by Alfred Hitchcock. When I became a musicologist, I started to understand more about how the music of these films contributed to my interest in them, so it seemed like a natural research project for me to explore the music in more depth. I slowly realized that what made the films of the 1950s unique was the combination of new styles of acting with new styles of music. The films continued to suck me in and now my interest has resulted in this book.
Chion’s book is seminal in the study of film sound (not just music). He challenges the orthodoxy of favoring the visual aspects of film when we talk about it, arguing that we need to consider the sound of a film as well as its images.
He says that we don’t just watch films; we “audio-view” them. Chion draws his examples from an extraordinarily wide range of films. On the same page he might go from Godard to Indiana Jones to Singin’ in the Rain.
He doesn’t judge: if a popular action film is the best example for a point about sound-image relationships, he uses it. Chion introduces a lot of new terminology, but it is all carefully explained and illustrated with examples.
In Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, French critic and composer Michel Chion reassesses audiovisual media since the revolutionary 1927 debut of recorded sound in cinema, shedding crucial light on the mutual relationship between sound and image in audiovisual perception. Chion argues that sound film qualitatively produces a new form of perception: we don't see images and hear sounds as separate channels, we audio-view a trans-sensory whole. Expanding on arguments made in his influential books The Voice in Cinema and Sound in Cinema, Chion provides lapidary insight into the functions and aesthetics of sound in film and television. He considers the effects…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I was lucky enough not only to get published in my thirties, I also got a film deal for those first two books. I was flown to Hollywood and it was all very grand. However, what they did to my stories in translating them into film scripts horrified me. And ruined them. And the films never got made. I started to look deeper into what ‘experts’ did, and it was awful. I became obsessed with how stories work, developed my own ‘knowledge gap’ theory, proved it through my Ph.D. research, and became a story consultant in the industry. Story theory has completely taken over my life and I love it!
Bordwell is an academic who is encyclopedic on Hollywood.
He has written several definitive works on Hollywood and despite their depth and learnedness, they are very readable and enjoyable to absorb. So when he turned his attention to ‘classical’ Hollywood story telling, I knew it would be a good one, and I was not disappointed.
Most story theorists have an approach that they are arguing for. Bordwell is analysing from a pure perspective, without ‘skin in the game’, so the result is balanced, critical, and highly enlightening for the aspiring writer.
Hollywood moviemaking is one of the constants of American life, but how much has it changed since the glory days of the big studios? David Bordwell argues that the principles of visual storytelling created in the studio era are alive and well, even in today's bloated blockbusters. American filmmakers have created a durable tradition - one that we should not be ashamed to call artistic, and one that survives in both mainstream entertainment and niche-marketed indie cinema. Bordwell traces the continuity of this tradition in a wide array of films made since 1960, from romantic comedies like "Jerry Maguire" and…
I am the Goldthwaite Professor of Rhetoric and Japanese at Tufts University. I’ve lived in Japan for 8 years beginning when I was 17 when I travelled to Tokyo and lived on my own, teaching English, and studying Japanese. I became a scholar of Japanese literature, and then in the 1990s became interested in Japanese animation (anime) and in animation in general. I’ve written five books on either Japanese literature or anime-related subjects, and I am currently working on a project comparing the animated films of the Walt Disney Studio with the films of Studio Ghibli.
This is a book for animation aficionados who really want to think about the nuts and bolts of animation. As someone with a tendency to revel in the world building of the finished product of animation, be it a Miyazaki movie or a Disney film, this book re-orients me to the materiality of the medium itself. And yes, traditional animation is a material medium! Frank looked at thousands of animation cells, literally frame by frame, and in her book provides us with a glimpse of the enormous labor, expertise, and occasional mistakes that go into creating even a seven-minute short subject. She brings back from the past the many women who were the inkers and in-betweeners in American animation studios and makes us realize the enormous effort (and tedium) that went into producing the fluid and flexible cartoons that Hollywood is known for.
At publication date, a free ebook version of this title will be available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more.
In this beautifully written and deeply researched study, Hannah Frank provides an original way to understand American animated cartoons from the Golden Age of animation (1920-1960). In the pre-digital age of the twentieth century, the making of cartoons was mechanized and standardized: thousands of drawings were inked and painted onto individual transparent celluloid sheets (called "cels") and then photographed in succession, a labor-intensive process that was divided across scores of artists and…
I’ve been interested in classic Hollywood movies for as long as I can remember, starting especially with the MGM musicals, the comedies of Abbott and Costello, and anything by Alfred Hitchcock. When I became a musicologist, I started to understand more about how the music of these films contributed to my interest in them, so it seemed like a natural research project for me to explore the music in more depth. I slowly realized that what made the films of the 1950s unique was the combination of new styles of acting with new styles of music. The films continued to suck me in and now my interest has resulted in this book.
Buhler and Neumeyer’s book is the most comprehensive introduction to film music. While it is meant primarily as a course textbook, it isn’t written in dull texbook-ese; rather, it is readable and engaging.
The authors include chapters on film music history, aesthetics, and theory, drawing from a wide range of films from all over the world. Historical developments and theoretical concepts are described with detailed close readings of various film scenes so that even the tricker ideas are easy to follow through the examples.
The authors will get you interested in all sorts of films you probably weren’t familiar with as they instill a deep understanding of how film music works.
Hearing the Movies, Second Edition, combines a historical and chronological approach to the study of film music and sound with an emphasis on building listening skills. Through engaging, accessible analyses and exercises, the book covers all aspects of the subject, including how a soundtrack is assembled to accompany the visual content, how music enhances the form and style of key film genres, and how technology has influenced the changing landscape of film music.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I’ll admit I’m a terribly picky reader. My specific taste doesn’t seem to fit in one genre and is sometimes hard to nail down—literary prose with genre tropes, softly-integrated worldbuilding, adventure that leaves room for reflection, and a love story subplot that’s more mental than physical. I love anti-heroes and angst and stories that get a bit dark—but not too dark. When I find it, I’m hooked and obsessed, and I feel like I’m twelve years old again, reading late into the night with a flashlight under the covers. That exprience is what I’m always hunting for, and what I attempt to recreate in my own writing.
Unrelenting action and snappy dialogue made this book an instant fav. It contains some of the best things: betrayal, revenge, a mouthy and haunted anti-hero andheroine, spaceships, and sexual tension from page one. The way this book blends all those things—and yes, this is sci-fi, not fantasy—makes a wildly entertaining start to a perfect series. I’ve never loved characters and their banter more. This perfect team both hates and loves each other and won't stop getting up no matter how many times they're knocked down. Impossibly high stakes and a plot that pits hero against heroine until their alliance becomes the key to a universe-sized revolution. What an amazing book. I devoured the whole series and can’t wait for the finale.
WARNING. Rated: R. Restricted. Contains space battles, killer AI, intergalactic ass-kicking. Read at your own risk.
She is programmed to kill. He’ll do anything to survive.
Ex-con Captain Caleb Shepperd believes being good is overrated. All he wants is to smuggle illegal cargo through the nine systems and live a prosperous (likely short) life on the wrong side of the law.
But there's a problem with that plan. The priceless synthetic stowaway on his ship is a distraction he doesn't need.
Torn between selling her and tossing her out the airlock, Shepperd fails to realize the synth is a killer,…
