Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia

Expanded cinema is an avant-garde form of moving image that pushes the boundaries of traditional filmmaking practices and theatrical exhibition spaces. It emerged in the 1960s and re-emerged in the 2000s, incorporating multi-screen films, live cinematic performances, light art, kinetic art, video, and computer-generated imagery. Author Jonathan Walley argues that expanded cinema asserts cinema's nature and artistic autonomy, and resituates it within the context of avant-garde film history. The book offers new arguments about avant-garde cinema and its complex meditations on the nature of cinema, addressing current debates about the fate of the moving image in the digital age.

\n Format: Paperback / softback
\n Length: 576 pages
\n Publication date: 03 September 2020
\n Publisher: Oxford University Press Inc
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Expanded cinema is a genre of avant-garde moving image works that push the boundaries of traditional filmmaking practices and theatrical exhibition spaces. It emerged in the 1960s amidst seismic shifts in the arts, encompassing multi-screen films, live cinematic performances, light art, kinetic art, video, and computer-generated imagery. In the early 2000s, it re-emerged, offering a vast new horizon for the moving image and potentially heralding the end of cinema as we know it.

Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia, written by Jonathan Walley, offers a fresh perspective on expanded cinema, challenging previous studies and trends in film and art scholarship. Walley argues that expanded cinema's departure from traditional cinema forms actually asserts cinema's nature and artistic autonomy. He also places expanded cinema within the context of avant-garde film history, linking it to a mode of filmmaking that has historically investigated and challenged the nature and limits of cinematic form.

As an outgrowth of this tradition, expanded cinema provided a means for filmmakers within the avant-garde to explore cinema's unique aesthetic terrain, its ontology, independence, and identity. The book reconsiders well-known expanded cinema works of the 1960s and 70s by artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Whitman, and Nam June Paik, as well as provides the first scholarly accounts of numerous lesser-known works spanning over 50 years. It makes new arguments about avant-garde cinema in general and its complex meditations on the nature of cinema.

In conclusion, expanded cinema is a genre that defies conventional filmmaking practices and pushes the boundaries of artistic expression. Through its exploration of multi-screen formats, live performances, and computer-generated imagery, it offers a new perspective on the moving image and challenges the traditional notion of cinema as a medium. Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia provides valuable insights into this genre and its historical context, contributing to our understanding of avant-garde film and its impact on the arts.

\n Weight: 822g\n
Dimension: 157 x 235 x 33 (mm)\n
ISBN-13: 9780190938642\n \n