List of US Avant-Garde Film Histories

story © Michael Betancourt | published January 30, 2015 | permalink |  |  

There are lots of histories published about US avant-garde film. Here's an extended list of some of them, arranged in order of publication year:

Frank Stauffacher and Richard Foster, Art in Cinema (catalog, 1946)

Lewis Jacobs, “Experimental Cinema in America 1921-1947” in The Rise of the American Film (1948)

Roger Manvell, Experiment in the Film (1949)

Robert Pike, A Critical Study of the West Coast Experimental Film Movement (UCLA dissertation, 1960)

read more (584 words)

story © Michael Betancourt | published September 14, 2014 | permalink |  |  

OtherZine 27 is now out!. I have an article in this issue, Motion Pictures- An Expanded Framework, that is a discussion of "formal" approaches to motion pictures.

story © Michael Betancourt | published May 1, 2014 | permalink |  |  

Hans Richter's 1947 film Dreams That Money Can Buy (available for download here) was accompanied by a 24 page soft cover book with a collage on the cover by Max Ernst, and illustrated throughout with photographs from the color film. This book is relatively expensive to own, but is a very valuable source of information on the film, including materials on/by all of Richter's collaborators.

download a pdf here

story © Michael Betancourt | published September 18, 2011 | permalink |  |  

Clement Greenberg’s essay, Modernist Painting, appearing as a Voice of America pamphlet in 1960, then reprinted in 1966, implicitly conditions how artists understood the idea of ‘formal’ during the beginning of the institutional period for the avant-garde film. His basis in philosopher Immanuel Kant’s self-critical approach tempers the construction of Modernism:

read more (648 words)

story © Michael Betancourt | published August 31, 2011 | permalink |  |  

I have been describing my own working process as 'using the computer like an optical printer' since I made the digital transition in 2000. This approach is based on the fundamentals described by Raymond Fielding at the very end of his book Special Effects Cinematography that I read during the two month faculty strike that happened my first semester as an undergraduate at Temple University. Since I wasn't able to take classes, I spent my time reading things that interested me.

With the revolution in digital video that started in the 1990s, the historical basis for these technologies is now quite distant. But these technologies evolved from an application of the digital computer to historical techniques and approaches, thus enabling ever greater control over the image. Writing in 1984, Raymond Fielding considers the optical printer as a variety of mechanical, analog “computer”. We can recognize the limiting factors of analog media—most especially generation loss, grain, and errors (dirt, etc)—that disappear when producing these same effects with digital means:

read more (540 words)