Kenneth White

Annette Michelson

Essential texts on the work of the influential artist Michael Snow: essays and interviews spanning more than four decades. Few filmmakers have had as large an impact on the recent avant-garde film scene as Canadian Michael Snow (b. 1928). His works in a range of media—film, installation, video, painting, sculpture, sound, photography, drawing, writing, and music—address the fundamental properties of his materials, the conditions of perception and experience, questions of authorship in technologically reproducible media, and techniques of translation through written and pictorial representation. His film Wavelength (1967) is a milestone of avant-garde cinema and possibly the most frequently discussed “structural” film ever made. This volume collects essential texts on Snow's work, with essays and interviews spanning more than four decades. From its earliest issues, October has been a primary interlocutor of Snow's work, and many of these texts first appeared in its pages. Written by such distinguished critics and scholars as Annette Michelson, Hubert Damisch, and Malcolm Turvey, they document Snow's participation in postwar discourses of minimalism, postminimalism, photo-conceptualism, and avant-garde cinema, and examine particular works. Thierry de Duve's essay on linguistics in Snow's work appears alongside Snow's response. The volume also includes other writings by Snow, images from his 1975 work Musics for Piano, Whistling, Microphone, and Tape Recorder, and an interview with the artist conducted by Annette Michelson. Essays and interviews Jean Arnaud, Érik Bullot, Hubert Damisch, Thierry de Duve, Andrée Hayum, Annette Michelson, Michael Snow, Amy Taubin, Malcolm Turvey, Kenneth White

Michael Snow

Malcolm Turvey

New Vertov Studies

Rosalind E. Krauss

Joan Copjec

Douglas Crimp

Essays discuss Marcel Duchamp, the Shroud of Turin, insect mimicry, Russian art, art criticism and theory, and psychoanalysis

The First Decade, 1976-1986

October

Hal Foster

Rosalind Krauss

Denis Hollier

Yve-Alain Bois

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Professor Emeritus Founding Ed October Magazine Annette Michelson

Silvia Kolbowski

October: The Second Decade collects examples of the innovative critical and theoretical work for which the journal October is known. A journal anthology draws a collective portrait; together, the gathered texts demonstrate the journal's ambitions and strengths. From the outset, October's aim has been to consider a range of cultural practices and to assess their place at a particular historical juncture. That task has now taken on an intensified urgency. The catastrophic state of our urban economies and the attendant social crises, as well as the more general predicaments of a postcolonial era, have had an inescapable impact on the cultural and discursive practices that are October's concern. Hence, October in its second decade has had an intensified concern with the role of cultural production within the public sphere and a sharper focus on the intersections of cultural practices with institutional structures. The topics of inquiry include body politics and psychoanalysis, spectacle and institutional critique, art practice and art history, and postcolonial discourse. Contributors: Carol Armstrong, Leo Bersani, Homi Bhabha, Yve-Alain Bois, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Susan Buck-Morss, Lygia Clark, T. J. Clark, Jonathan Crary, Gilles Deleuze, Manthia Diawara, Peter Eisenman, Hal Foster, Group Material, Denis Hollier, Alexander Kluge, Gertrud Koch, Silvia Kolbowski, Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, Helen Molesworth, V. Y. Mudimbe, Oskar Negt, Mignon Nixon.

The Second Decade, 1986-1996

The first collection of Annette Michelson's influential writings on film, with essays on work by Marcel Duchamp, Maya Deren, Hollis Frampton, Martha Rosler, and others. The celebrated critic and film scholar Annette Michelson saw the avant-garde filmmakers of the 1950s and 1960s as radically redefining and extending the Modernist tradition of painting and sculpture, and in essays that were as engaging as they were influential and as lucid as they were learned, she set out to demonstrate the importance of the underappreciated medium of film. On the Eve of the Future collects more than thirty years' worth of those essays, focusing on her most relevant engagements with avant-garde production in experimental cinema, particularly with the movement known as American Independent Cinema. This volume includes the first critical essay on Marcel Duchamp's film Anemic Cinema, the first investigation into Joseph Cornell's filmic practices, and the first major explorations of Michael Snow. It offers an important essay on Maya Deren, whose work was central to that era of renewal and reinvention, seminal critiques of Stan Brakhage, Hollis Frampton, and Harry Smith, and overviews of Independent Cinema. Gathered here for the first time, these texts demonstrate Michelson's pervasive influence as a writer and thinker and her role in the establishment of cinema studies as an academic field. The postwar generation of Independents worked to develop radically new terms, techniques, and strategies of production and distribution. Michelson shows that the fresh new forms they created from the legacy of Modernism became the basis of new forms of spectatorship and cinematic pleasure.

Selected Writings on Film

On the Eve of the Future

Richard Allen

Richard B. Allen

Professor of Film History and Chair of Visual Culture Department Malcolm Turvey

Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson

Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida

Hollis Frampton

Hollis Frampton (1936-1984) construit, à partir de la réfutation de la photographie et du cinéma comme modes de représentation et d'identification, et à la croisée de la théorie et de l'histoire de l'art, une métahistoire dans laquelle prennent place les œuvres cinématographiques majeures qui l'ont fait connaître. Le macrocosme universel est, chez lui, un cinéma infini dont le ruban et les images qui s'y inscrivent viennent rompre la linéarité de l'histoire. Plus que sa simple métaphore, un modèle épistémologique : le cinéma structure le monde et la pensée. Pour étayer sa démonstration, Hollis Frampton, l'érudit, n'hésite pas à transgresser les catégories du savoir, et à faire voyager son lecteur de la philosophie aux mathématiques, de la littérature à l'astronomie, tout en l'envoûtant par ses qualités de conteur et de poète.

l'écliptique du savoir : film, photographie, vidéo

"This posthumous volume, the second of Annette Michelson's long anticipated Collected Writings, gathers her erudite and incisive readings of the revolutionary films of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov and gives readers the opportunity to track her sustained investigations into their work over four decades. Michelson introduced American audiences to Soviet cinema in the early 1970s, extending the interpretative paradigm she had used for American filmmakers of the mid-twentieth century, which stressed phenomenological readings of the work of artists from Stan Brakhage to Michael Snow, to films and writings by Eisenstein and Vertov. She returned again and again to what she calls, following Eisenstein, "intellectual cinema"-the deliberate attempt to create philosophically informed analogues for consciousness. The volume includes Michelson's major essays on Eisenstein's unrealized attempts to make a movie of both Marx's Capital and James Joyce's Ulysses, as well as her key text on Vertov's 1929 masterpiece The Man with a Movie Camera. Together, the texts demonstrate Michelson's pervasive influence as a writer and thinker, and her key role in the establishment of cinema studies as an academic field. The book aims to make these canonical texts available for the next generation of film scholars. As Malcolm Turvey notes in his foreword, "the writings in this volume are indispensable in understanding this quintessentially modernist episode in (Soviet) film history.""--

Collected Writings on Soviet Cinema

On the Wings of Hypothesis

Annette Michelson

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