From: Jack Sargeant (email suppressed)
Date: Tue Oct 16 2007 - 20:09:11 PDT
hmmmmmmmm.......
for histories i'd suggest people read duncan reekie's book SUBVERSION
which is out soon (details below)
freya, if you're broke (i know the feeling!) order it from your local
library, or sneak into a local university library and read it there....
jack
SUBVERSION
The Definitive History of Underground Cinema
Duncan Reekie
Subversion is the first complete history of underground cinema,
tracing the hidden life of subterranean filmmaking from its pre-
history of Bohemian cabaret through the early cinematic avant-gardes
of the 1920s to the worldwide blossoming of microcinema festivals in
the 1990s. Part cultural history, part radical polemic, Subversion
provides historic background and social context to such influential
yet rarely discussed scenes such as the London Film Makers Collective
of the 1960s, the New York Cinema of Transgression of the 1980s and
the New London Undergound of the 1990s, plus original research into
the world of amateur ciné culture from the 1930s onwards.
Contextualising these movements within a broader historical and
theoretical background of experimental media, and locating
underground cinema as a popular and radical subculture distinct from
both mainstream cinema and institutionalised avant-garde film,
Subversion is set to become an essential text for all independent and
guerrilla filmmakers.
Duncan Reekie is a filmmaker, performer and underground cinema
activist, and a founder member of the Exploding Cinema Collective, a
radical open-access screening group.
reviews
‘Underground film is a messy business and few writers have attempted
histories; those who have tend to toe the line and respect the
classic avant-garde at the expense of the loud, exciting, vivid,
unruly and sexy underground. Enter Duncan Reekie who has produced a
gleefully anarchic and rightly biased schizo-history that examines
not just the filmmakers but crucially also considers the
dissemination of the work and the responses of audiences galvanised
by a cinema that embraces
everything from radical structuralism to mysticism, revolutionary
politics to pop culture, and from auteurism to collectivism. An
established filmmaker and part of the legendary Exploding Cinema
collective, Reekie is not afraid to demand that underground film is
seen as the revolutionary form it always was.’
– Jack Sargeant, author of Deathtripping and Naked Lens
‘A must for makers, critics and lovers of underground film ... a book
written with in-depth knowledge of filmmaking, film criticism and
exhibition practices in this vital but unconventional realm of
moviemaking. This authoritative volume takes a broad-ranging but
accessible approach to the celluloid underground that combines
consideration of its trash and transgressive, pulp and political,
comic and countercultural influences, as well as profiling all the
key movements from documentary, free cinema, structural film, digital
practices and beyond.’
– Xavier Mendik, Director of the Cult Film Archive, Brunel University
'Duncan Reekie’s book, Subversion: The Definitive History of
Underground Cinema, sheds light upon the world of underground film,
exploring the movement as far back as the Bohemian cabaret of the
late nineteenth century and with an especially strong emphasis on the
avant-garde cinema of 1920s Paris and the counterculture explosion of
the 1960s. Reekie delves deep into a subject matter that many
independent filmmakers choose to ignore.'
Filmmaker Magazine, 2007
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
On 16 Oct 2007, at 19:39, Freya wrote:
__________________________________________________________________
For info on FrameWorks, contact Pip Chodorov at <email suppressed>.
