books February 2013

Gabriele Pedullà’s In Broad Daylight

In Broad Daylight: Movies and Spectators After the Cinema, by Gabriele Pedullà, translated by Patricia Gaborik. London: Verso, 2012. 192 pages.

GABRIELE PEDULLÀ’S charming and highly readable if ultimately frustrating little book In Broad Daylight tackles a crucial subject—and one that demands more attention: the recent transformation of film spectatorship and of the places where we watch movies. Indeed, at this point, even to say places is to invoke old-fashioned habits: Situations or platforms may be more evocative of contemporary trends in moving-image viewing. Perdullà’s book traces the

film September 2010

the Oberhausen Film Festival

MAN RAY ONCE SAID, “The worst films I’ve ever seen, the ones that send me to sleep, contain ten or fifteen marvelous minutes. The best films I’ve ever seen only contain ten or fifteen valid minutes.” A T-shirt for sale at the Fifty-sixth International Short Film Festival in Oberhausen, Germany, puts it even more succinctly, if less elegantly: “Fuck Feature Films.” The dominance of the feature-length form for film has lasted a hundred years and has determined (and been supported by) systems of distribution and funding and, perhaps even more crucially, has controlled cultural attitudes toward what

books April 2009

Hollis Frampton’s Collected Writings

THE LEGACY OF HOLLIS FRAMPTON—as a filmmaker, photographer, video and computer artist, critic, and theorist of the visual media he worked in—has continued to define itself and expand in the more than two decades that have passed since his death in 1984, at the age of forty-eight. From the late ’60s to the early ’80s, Frampton created a series of films—Lemon (1969), Zorns Lemma (1970), the seven films that make up Hapax Legomena (1971–72), and the roughly two dozen works conceived as parts of his unfinished Magellan project, including Magellan at the Gates of Death (1976), Otherwise Unexplained

film March 2007

Kenneth Anger

THE FILMS OF KENNETH ANGER occupy the dark heart of American cinema. Along with Maya Deren (who slightly preceded him) and Stan Brakhage (who began making films roughly a decade after Anger), the director of Lucifer Rising (1972) remains the best known and most influential of the founding figures of American avant-garde film. But whereas Deren and Brakhage envisioned a homegrown avant-garde cinema that would scorn the Hollywood behemoth, Anger emerged from the dragon’s lair itself. While his films—especially the five early works collected on Fantoma’s glorious new DVD release The Films of

Tom Gunning