1st Edition

Materialist Film

By Peter Gidal Copyright 1989
    208 Pages
    by Routledge

    208 Pages
    by Routledge

    A polemical introduction to the avant-garde and experimental in film (including making and viewing), Materialist Film is a highly original, thought-provoking book.

    Thirty-seven short chapters work through a series of concepts which will enable the reader to deal imaginatively with the contradictory issues produced by experimental film. Each concept is explored in conjunction with specific films by Andy Warhol, Malcolm LeGrice, Lis Rhodes, Jean-Luc Goddard, Rose Lowder, Kurt Kren, and others.

    Peter Gidal draws on important politico-aesthetic writings, and uses some of his own previously published essays from Undercut, Screen, October, and Millennium Film Journal to undertake this concrete process of working through abstract concepts. Originally published in 1989.

    Introduction  1. The One to One Relation between Viewer and Viewed  2. The Concept of Arbitrariness  3. Implicating Materialism with Physicality  4. Presence  5. Content  6. The Subject  7. Film as Film  8. Perception Versus Knowledge  9. Fetishization of Process  10. Deconstruction  11. Deconstruction and Sexuality  12. Denial of Semioticity  13. Andy Warhol’s Kitchen (1965)  14. The Stare and Voyeurism  15. Lis Rhodes’ Light Reading (1978)  16. Questions around Structural/Materialist Film  17. Meaning and Illusion  18. The Close-Up  19. Context  20. History  21. The Literal  22. Artistic Subject/Aesthetic Subject  23. Duration  24. Splice  25. Filmmakers’ Statements  26. Performance  27. Film as Material  28. Cinema Verite  29. Audience Numbers and Sex  30. Rose Lowder’s Composed Recurrence (1981)  31. Kurt Kren’s TV (1966)  32. The London Filmmakers Co-Operative  33. Repetition  34. Humanism and Anti-humanism  35. Socialism/Optimism/Pessimism  36. A Little Polemic on Production  37. Autonomy and Anonymity

    Biography

    Gidal, Peter