In search of the Third man

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Nicky Hamlyn

Alongside the commercial cinema of narrative and spectacle there has always been another practice--call it avant-garde, experimental, or artists' film. In this provocative book, Nicky Hamlyn, an acclaimed filmmaker in the alternative tradition, investigates the film art phenomenon. Taking cues from modern trends in other artforms, notably painting and sculpture, this type of filmmaking emphasizes the nature of its apparatus and medium in order to bring about a critical, inquisitive state of mind in the viewer. It deconstructs, anatomizes, and reimagines what film images are it builds new machines it recreates the setting of cinema or expands into new kinds of performance and exhibition. And it often has a political dimension--urging audiences to make a free and active response,not a passive, consumerist one. Hamlyn treats artists' film conceptually in order to explore key categories that connect different works and filmmakers: from framing to digital media, installation to interactivity, point of view, to sound. In so doing he considers the work of Stan Brakhage, Malcolm Le Grice, and Michael Snow, as well as younger artists such as Karen Mirza and Brad Butler, Jennifer Nightingale, and Colin Crockatt, among many others.

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Melanie Wallace

'I will not live among you,' says Abigail Buwell when she is taken from her life among the savages and returned, against her will, to 'civilisation' the last military outpost on the frontier's hostile edge.

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Irving Fang, Ann Norris

Traces the story of recording from the time that Thomas Edison shouted "Whooo" into a funnel, to the iPod and downloading piracy.

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Robert Flynn and Susan Russell

As they reminisce about their childhood, thirteen interviewees chronicle life in Texas and other parts of the West during the early part of the twentieth century.