Eyes upside down : visionary filmmakers and the heritage of Emerson / P. Adams Sitney.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Sitney, P. Adams.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882.

Experimental films--United States--History and criticism.

Experimental films.

United States.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882--Influence.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo.

Physical Description:

xiv, 417 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2008.

Summary:

P. Adams Sitney Analyzes in detail the work of eleven American avant-garde filmmakers as heirs to the aesthetics of exhilaration and innovative vision articulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson and explored by John Cage, Charles Olson, and Gertrude Stein. The films discussed span the sixty years since the Second World War. With three chapters each devoted to Stan Brakhage and Robert Beavers, two each to Hollis Frampton and Jonas Mekas, and single chapters on Marie Menken, Ian Hugo, Andrew Noren, Warren Sonbert, Su Friedrich, Ernie Gehr, and Abigail Child, Eyes Upside Down is the fruit of Sitney's lifelong study of visionary aspirations in the American avant-garde cinema.

Contents:

Introduction: Emersonian Poetics 3

1 Marie Menken and the Somatic Camera 21

2 Ian Hugo and Superimposition 48

3 Stan Brakhage's Autobiography as a Cinematic Sequence 70

4 Jonas Mekas and the Diary Film 83

5 Hollis Frampton and the Specter of Narrative 98

6 Robert Beavers's Winged Distance/Sightless Measure: The Cycle of the Ephebe 123

7 Beavers's Second Cycle: The Past in the Present-the Present in the Past 145

8 Andrew Noren and the Open-Ended Cinematic Sequence 170

9 Ernie Gehr and the Axis of Primary Thought 197

10 Warren Sonbert's Movements in a Concerto 220

11 Brakhage and the Tales of the Tribes 243

12 Frampton's Magellan 259

13 Abigail Child: Textual Self-Reliance 271

14 Su Friedrich: "Giving Birth to Myself" 296

15 Brakhage: Meditative Cinema 321

16 Beavers's Third Cycle: The Theater of Gesture 349

17 Mekas's Retrospection 372

Conclusion: Perfect Exhilaration 392

Appendix Chronology of Films 401.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Chronology of films": pages 401-408.

ISBN:

9780195331141

0195331141

9780195331158

019533115X

OCLC:

163603750