The Most Typical Avant-Garde

The Most Typical Avant-Garde PDF Author: David James
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520938199
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 572

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Book Description
Los Angeles has nourished a dazzling array of independent cinemas: avant-garde and art cinema, ethnic and industrial films, pornography, documentaries, and many other far-flung corners of film culture. This glorious panoramic history of film production outside the commercial studio system reconfigures Los Angeles, rather than New York, as the true center of avant-garde cinema in the United States. As he brilliantly delineates the cultural perimeter of the film business from the earliest days of cinema to the contemporary scene, David James argues that avant-garde and minority filmmaking in Los Angeles has in fact been the prototypical attempt to create emancipatory and progressive culture. Drawing from urban history and geography, local news reporting, and a wide range of film criticism, James gives astute analyzes of scores of films—many of which are to found only in archives. He also looks at some of the most innovative moments in Hollywood, revealing the full extent of the cross-fertilization the occurred between the studio system and films created outside it. Throughout, he demonstrates that Los Angeles has been in the aesthetic and social vanguard in all cinematic periods—from the Socialist cinemas of the early teens and 1930s; to the personal cinemas of psychic self-investigation in the 1940s; to attempts in the 1960s to revitalize the industry with the counterculture’s utopian visions; and to the 1970s, when African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, women, gays, and lesbians worked to create cinemas of their own. James takes us up to the 1990s and beyond to explore new forms of art cinema that are now transforming the representation of Southern California’s geography.

The Most Typical Avant-Garde

The Most Typical Avant-Garde PDF Author: David James
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520938199
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 572

Get Book Here

Book Description
Los Angeles has nourished a dazzling array of independent cinemas: avant-garde and art cinema, ethnic and industrial films, pornography, documentaries, and many other far-flung corners of film culture. This glorious panoramic history of film production outside the commercial studio system reconfigures Los Angeles, rather than New York, as the true center of avant-garde cinema in the United States. As he brilliantly delineates the cultural perimeter of the film business from the earliest days of cinema to the contemporary scene, David James argues that avant-garde and minority filmmaking in Los Angeles has in fact been the prototypical attempt to create emancipatory and progressive culture. Drawing from urban history and geography, local news reporting, and a wide range of film criticism, James gives astute analyzes of scores of films—many of which are to found only in archives. He also looks at some of the most innovative moments in Hollywood, revealing the full extent of the cross-fertilization the occurred between the studio system and films created outside it. Throughout, he demonstrates that Los Angeles has been in the aesthetic and social vanguard in all cinematic periods—from the Socialist cinemas of the early teens and 1930s; to the personal cinemas of psychic self-investigation in the 1940s; to attempts in the 1960s to revitalize the industry with the counterculture’s utopian visions; and to the 1970s, when African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, women, gays, and lesbians worked to create cinemas of their own. James takes us up to the 1990s and beyond to explore new forms of art cinema that are now transforming the representation of Southern California’s geography.

Power Misses II

Power Misses II PDF Author: David E. James
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0861969766
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
Like David James' earlier collection of essays, Power Misses: Essays Across (Un)Popular Culture (1996), the present volume, Power Misses II: Cinema, Asian and Modern is concerned with popular cultural activity that propose alternatives and opposition to capitalist media. Now with a wider frame of reference, it moves globally from west to east, beginning with films made during the Korean Democracy Movement, and then turning to socialist realism in China and Taiwan, and to Asian American film and poetry in Los Angeles. Several other avant-garde film movements in L.A. created communities resistant to the culture industries centered there, as did elements in the classic New York avant-garde, here instanced in the work of Ken Jacobs and Andy Warhol. The final chapter concerns little-known films about communal agriculture in the Nottinghamshire village of Laxton, the only one where the medieval open-field system never suffered enclosure. This survival of the commons anticipated resistance to the extreme and catastrophic forms of privatization, monetization, and theft of the public commonweal in the advanced form of capitalism we know as neoliberalism.

Allegories of Cinema

Allegories of Cinema PDF Author: David E. James
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780691047553
Category : Experimental films
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
Discusses avant garde films produced during the sixties, and considers the work of Stan Brakhage and Andy Warhol

Stan Brakhage

Stan Brakhage PDF Author: David James
Publisher: Temple University Press
ISBN: 1439905290
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
The art and legacy of a towering figure in the independent film movement.

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries Since 1975

A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries Since 1975 PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 900451595X
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 1060

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Book Description
The Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries Since 1975 brings the series of cultural histories of the avant-garde in the Nordic countries up to the present. It discusses revisions and continuations of historical practices since 1975.

The Most Typical Avant-garde

The Most Typical Avant-garde PDF Author: David E. James
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520242579
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 548

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Book Description
" The Most Typical Avant-Garde transforms our sense of the history and geography of American independent cinema, by demonstrating the many and varied contributions of filmmakers who have worked in and around LA. James's range and thoroughness are astonishing. Indeed, those who have worked at chronicling independent cinema will be disappointed with only one thing: the fact that we didn't write this remarkable book!"--Scott MacDonald, author of the Critical Cinema Series

Theorizing Art Cinemas

Theorizing Art Cinemas PDF Author: David Andrews
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292747764
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
The term “art cinema” has been applied to many cinematic projects, including the film d’art movement, the postwar avant-gardes, various Asian new waves, the New Hollywood, and American indie films, but until now no one has actually defined what “art cinema” is. Turning the traditional, highbrow notion of art cinema on its head, Theorizing Art Cinemas takes a flexible, inclusive approach that views art cinema as a predictable way of valuing movies as “art” movies—an activity that has occurred across film history and across film subcultures—rather than as a traditional genre in the sense of a distinct set of forms or a closed historical period or movement. David Andrews opens with a history of the art cinema “super-genre” from the early days of silent movies to the postwar European invasion that brought Italian Neorealism, the French New Wave, and the New German Cinema to the forefront and led to the development of auteur theory. He then discusses the mechanics of art cinema, from art houses, film festivals, and the academic discipline of film studies, to the audiences and distribution systems for art cinema as a whole. This wide-ranging approach allows Andrews to develop a theory that encompasses both the high and low ends of art cinema in all of its different aspects, including world cinema, avant-garde films, experimental films, and cult cinema. All of these art cinemas, according to Andrews, share an emphasis on quality, authorship, and anticommercialism, whether the film in question is film festival favorite or a midnight movie.

Alternative Projections

Alternative Projections PDF Author: David E. James
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 086196909X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
A collection of papers discussing Los Angeles’s role in avant-garde, experimental, and minority filmmaking. Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980 is a groundbreaking anthology that features papers from a conference and series of film screenings on postwar avant-garde filmmaking in Los Angeles sponsored by Filmforum, the Getty Foundation, and the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, together with newly-commissioned essays, an account of the screening series, reprints of historical documents by and about experimental filmmakers in the region, and other rare photographs and ephemera. The resulting diverse and multi-voiced collection is of great importance, not simply for its relevance to Los Angeles, but also for its general discoveries and projections about alternative cinemas. “Alternative Projections provides a useful corollary and often a corrective to what has become a somewhat unilateral approach to experimental cinema in the period taken up here.” —Millennium Film Journal “[T]here are enough examples of ingenuity and achievement contained in this volume to unite a new generation of independent artists, exhibitors, and audiences in maintaining a viable outlet for cinematic creativity in Los Angeles.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

Ex-centric Cinema

Ex-centric Cinema PDF Author: Janet Harbord
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1628922427
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 273

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Book Description
"Demonstrates how Agamben's ideas can enrich and extend our understanding of film as a medium and the cinema as an apparatus, constantly being remade"--

The Theory of the Avant-garde

The Theory of the Avant-garde PDF Author: Renato Poggioli
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674882164
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 262

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Book Description
Convinced that all aspects of modern culture have been affected by avant-garde art, Renato Poggioli explores the relationship between the avant-garde and civilization. Historical parallels and modern examples from all the arts are used to show how the avant-garde is both symptom and cause of many major extra-aesthetic trends of our time, and that the contemporary avant-garde is the sole and authentic one.