Includes bibliographical references and index.

Preliminary material / Editors Avant-Garde Film -- Hans Richter and Viking Eggeling: The Dream of Universal Language and the Birth of The Absolute Film / R. Bruce Elder -- Frames and Windows: Visual Space in Abstract Cinema / A.L. Rees -- Paris – Berlin – Moscow: On the Montage Aesthetic in the City Symphony Films of the 1920s / Alexander Graf -- Man Ray’s Films: From Dada to Surrealism / Rudolf E. Kuenzli -- On Mário Peixoto’s Limite / Michael Korfmann -- Dancing with Light: Choreographies of Gender in the Cinema of Germaine Dulac / Tami M. Williams -- Mayakovsky: Film: Futurism / Marina Burke -- The Interiority of Space: Desire and Maya Deren / Maureen Turim -- Stan Brakhage’s Film Testament: The Four Faust Films / Inez Hedges -- Light-Play and the Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film / William C. Wees -- Paul Sharits: from Cinematic Movement to Nondirectional Motion / Yvonne Spielmann -- Changes in experimental filmmaking between the 1920s and the 1960s: On Luis Buñuel / Pierre Sorlin -- It’s a Kind of Magic: World Construction in French Surrealist and Belgian Magical Realist Fiction and Cinema / Bart Keunen and Sascha Bru -- Peter Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer / Nicky Hamlyn -- Danish Avant-Garde Filmmakers of the 1960s: Technology, Cross-aesthetics and Politics / Tania Ørum -- French Experimental Cinema: the Figural and the Formless – Nicolas Rey’s Terminus for you (1996) and Pip Chodorov’s Charlemagne 2: Piltzer (2002) / Martine Beugnet -- The Stammering Frame: on recent French and Austrian Film Experiments / Frédérique Devaux -- Inscriptions of Light and The ‘Calligraphy of Decay’: Volatile Representation in Bill Morrison’s Decasia / Ursula Böser -- From Video Art to Video Performance: The Work of Ulrike Rosenbach / Günter Berghaus -- New Media and Feminist Interventions: Valie Export’s Medial Anagrams / Margit Grieb -- The Paracinema of Anthony McCall and Tony Conrad / Jonathan Walley -- List of Illustrations / Editors Avant-Garde Film -- Contributors to this volume / Editors Avant-Garde Film -- Index / Editors Avant-Garde Film.

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This volume on avant-garde film has emerged as part of a wider reassessment of 20th century avant-garde art, literature and film carried out in the framework of a research project at the University of Edinburgh. It paves the way for a fresh assessment of avant-garde film and develops its theory as an integral part of a newly defined conception of the avant-garde as a whole, by closing the gap between theoretical approaches towards the avant-garde as defined on the basis of art and literature on the one hand and avant-garde cinema on the other. It gathers contributions by the most esteemed scholars in the field of avant-garde studies relating to the “classical” avant-garde cinema of the 1920s, to new trends emerging in the 1950s and 1960s and to the impact that innovative technologies have recently had on the further development of avant-garde and experimental film. The contributions reflect the broad range of different moving-image media that make up what we refer to today simply as “film”, at the same time as reconsidering the applicability of the label “avant-garde”, to offer a comprehensive and updated framework that will prove invaluable to scholars of both Moving Image Studies and Art History disciplines.