Books in French are on www.livres-cinema.info
Avant-Doc
Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema
(0 vote)Average rating:
| 0 | rating |  = We can do without |
| 0 | rating |  = Good book |
| 0 | rating |  = Excellent book |
| 0 | rating |  = Unique / a reference |
Your rating: -
Book Presentation:
MacDonald explores the cinematic territory between the traditional categories of "documentary" and "avant-garde" film, through candid, in-depth conversations with filmmakers whose work has challenged these categories. Arranged in an imaginative chronology and written to be accessible to any film-interested reader, the interviews in Avant-Doc chart half a century of thinking by inventive filmmakers such as Robert Gardner, Ed Pincus, Alfred Guzzetti, Ross McElwee, Leonard Retel Helmrich, Michael Glawogger, Susana de Sousa Dias, Jonathan Caouette, Pawel Wojtasik, and Todd Haynes. Recent breakthroughs by Amie Siegel, Jane Gillooly, Jennifer Proctor, Betzy Bromberg, and Godfrey Reggio are discussed; and considerable attention is paid to Harvard's innovative Sensory Ethnography Lab, producer of Sweetgrass, Leviathan, and Manakamana. A rare interview with pioneering scholar Annette Michelson begins Avant-Doc's meta-conversation.
About the Author:
Scott MacDonald teaches film history at Hamilton College and Harvard University. He is the author of several books, most recently, American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary.
Press Reviews:
"A compelling achievement, Avant-Doc diagrams a new fluid geography of cinema, where traditional categories such as "experimental," "documentary," and "fiction" dissolve. The insightful, probing conversations assembled so deftly here vaporize fixed cinematic modes. These filmmakers describe cinema as a living organism, pulsating in networks of politics, arts, philosophies, teachers, literature, communities, technologies, and aesthetics." --Patricia R. Zimmermann, author of States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracy
"Scott MacDonald's groundbreaking and seminal new volume, Avant-Doc, illuminates correspondences between avant-garde cinema and documentary through a series of compelling interviews with major independent filmmakers and noted scholar Annette Michelson. This intimate and probing follow-up to MacDonald's Critical Cinema series creates a lively and deeply personal oral history. Avant-Doc broadens our understanding of connections between avant-garde and documentary film, while providing a rich treasure trove of research material that current and future scholars will find invaluable." --J.J. Murphy, author of The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol
See the publisher website: Oxford University Press
> Books with the same or similar title:
> From the same author:
William Greaves (2021)
Filmmaking as Mission
Dir. Scott MacDonald and Jacqueline Najuma Stewart
Subject: Director > William Greaves
Flash Flaherty (2021)
Tales from a Film Seminar
Dir. Scott MacDonald and Patricia R. Zimmermann
Subject: Festivals
American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary (2013)
The Cambridge Turn
Subject: Genre > Documentary
The Garden in the Machine (2001)
A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place
Subject: Genre > Independent cinema
> On a related topic:
Marcel Broodthaers and Film (2024)
A Second of Eternity
Dir. Steven Jacobs and Raf Wollaert
Subject: Genre > Experimental
Seeing Symphonically (2022)
Avant-Garde Film, Urban Planning, and the Utopian Image of New York
by Erica Stein
Subject: Genre > Experimental
The Melancholy Lens (2021)
Loss and Mourning in American Avant-Garde Cinema
by Tony Pipolo
Subject: Genre > Experimental
Back
