In recent years the use of film and video by British artists has come to widespread public attention. Jeremy Deller, Douglas Gordon, Steve McQueen and Gillian Wearing all won the Turner Prize (in 2004, 1996, 1999 and 1997 respectively) for work made on video. This fin-de-siecle explosion of activity represents the culmination of a long history of work by less well-known artists and experimental film-makers. Ever since the invention of film in the 1890s, artists have been attracted to the possibilities of working with moving images, whether in pursuit of visual poetry, the exploration of the art form's technical challenges, the hope of political impact, or the desire to re-invigorate such time-honoured subjects as portraiture and landscape. Their work represents an alternative history to that of commercial cinema in Britain - a tradition that has been only intermittently written about until now. This major new book is the first comprehensive history of artists' film and video in Britain. Structured in two parts ('Institutions' and 'Artists and Movements'), it considers the work of some 300 artists, including Kenneth Macpherson, Basil Wright, Len Lye, Humphrey Jennings, Margaret Tait, Jeff Keen, Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Malcolm Le Grice, Peter Gidal, William Raban, Chris Welsby, David Hall, Tamara Krikorian, Sally Potter, Guy Sherwin, Lis Rhodes, Derek Jarman, David Larcher, Steve Dwoskin, James Scott, Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey, Peter Greenaway, Patrick Keiller, John Smith, Andrew Stones, Jaki Irvine, Tracy Emin, Dryden Goodwin, and Stephanie Smith and Ed Stewart. Written by the leading authority in the field, A History of Artists' Film and Video in Britain, 1897-2004 brings to light the range and diversity of British artists' work in these mediums as well as the artist-run organisations that have supported the art-form's development. In so doing it greatly enlarges the scope of any understanding of 'British cinema' and demonstrates the crucial importance of the moving image to British art history.

This comprehensive historical account demonstrates the rich diversity in 1970s British experimental filmmaking, acting as a form of reclamation for films and filmmakers marginalized within established histories. An indispensable book for practitioners, historians and critics alike, it provides new interpretations of this rich and diverse history.

Avant-garde film is almost indefinable. It is in a constant state of change and redefinition. In his highly-acclaimed history of experimental film, A.L. Rees tracks the movement of the film avant-garde between the cinema and modern art (with its postmodern coda). But he also reconstitutes the film avant-garde as an independent form of art practice with its own internal logic and aesthetic discourse. In this revised and updated edition, Rees introduces experimental film and video to new readers interested in the wider cinema, as well as offering a guide to enthusiasts of avant-garde film and new media arts. Ranging from Cézanne and Dada, via Cocteau, Brakhage and Le Grice, to the new wave of British film and video artists from the 1990s to the present day, this expansive study situates avant-garde film between the cinema and the gallery, with many links to sonic as well as visual arts. The new edition includes a review of current scholarship in avant-garde film history and includes updated reading and viewing lists. It also features a new introduction and concluding chapter, which assess the rise of video projection in the gallery since the millennium, and describe new work by the latest generation of experimental film-makers. The new edition is richly illustrated with images of the art works discussed.

This book situates the film-maker Patrick Keiller alongside the writers W.G. Sebald and Iain Sinclair as the three leading voices in 'English psychogeography', offering new insights to key works including London, The Rings of Saturn, and Lights Out for the Territory. Excavating social and political contexts while also providing plentiful close analysis, it examines the cultivation of a distinctive 'affective' mode or sensibility especially attuned to the cultural anxieties of the twentieth century's closing decades. Landscape and Subjectivity explores motifs including essayism, the reconciliation of creativity with market forces, and the foregrounding of an often agonised or melancholic. It asks whether the work can, collectively, be seen to constitute a 'critical theory of contemporary space' and suggests that Keiller, Sebald, and Sinclair's contributions represent a highly significant moment in English culture's engagement with landscape, environment, and itself. The book's analyses are fuelled by archival and topographical research and are responsive to various interdisciplinary contexts, including the tradition of the 'English Journey', the set of ideas associated with the 'spatial turn', critical theory, the so-called 'heritage debate', and more recent theorisation of the 'anthropocene'.

Based on new archival evidence and interviews, and setting out a new theoretical framework for music video analysis, Emily Caston presents a major new analysis of music videos from 1966-2016, identifying not only their distinctive British traits, but their parallels with British film genres and styles. By analysing the genre, craft and authorial voice of music video within the context of film and popular music, the book sheds new light on existing theoretical and historical questions about audiences, authorship, art and the creative industries. Far from being an American cultural form, the book reveals music video's roots in British and European film traditions, and suggests significant ways in which British video has impacted popular film and music culture.

The London FilmMakers Cooperative was founded in 1966 by a group of artists who sought to explore the possibilities of the moving image whilst maintaining autonomy over the production, distribution, and exhibition of their work. Although their films were not overtly political, artists nevertheless expressed their political attitudes by creating nonnarrative films, thereby rejecting conventional narrative structures associated with mainstream, commercial cinema, which they perceived as supporting the dominant ideology in society. A return to narrative in the 1980s coincided with the introduction of British Art Cinema and the art-house films of Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway, and Sally Potter, all of whom made experimental films in the early days of the London Co-op.

Including essays from established and up-and-coming scholars, Cinema, Television and History: New Approaches rethinks, recontextualises and reviews the relationship between cinema, television and history. This volume incorporates a wide range of methods to a variety of topics, welcoming both empirical and theoretical approaches, as well as studies which merge the two. It is a book about how historical events are interpreted and adapted across cinema and television as the basis of a story, as much as it is about the endeavours of the practising historian through the exploration of the archive. Divided into five parts—“New meanings, new methods”, “Re-contextualising cinema and television history”, “Rethinking histories of cinema and television”, “Rethinking history through cinema and television”, and “The impact of new technologies”—the book is knowingly broad and diverse in terms of the case studies featured within it, and the means through which these examples are examined, explored, and utilised in their respective chapters.

This book illustrates a distinctive lineage of critical interventions in moving image culture and in the public sphere through the trajectories of a small number of film and video organizations established between the 1970s and the early 1980s in Western Europe and North America mainly by women and still operative today. The six case studies examined (Drac Màgic, Women Make Movies, Groupe Intervention Vidéo, Leeds Animation Workshop, bildwechsel, Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir) have maintained a discrete yet continuing presence within an audiovisual industry and a cultural system dominated by institutionalized and corporate forms of production and distribution. Their longevity – quite a rarity in the independent circuit – makes a strong case for the sustainability of feminist/LGBTQ media activism in the public sphere, in spite of its low-key profile. This volume will be of interest to academicians of history and communication studies, feminist and LGBTQ topics, and gender-related cinematic culture.

This volume draws a map of British film culture in the 1970s and provides a wide-ranging history of the period. It examines the cross-cultural relationship between British cinema and other media, including popular music and television. The analysis covers mainstream and experimental film cultures, identifying their production contexts and the economic, legislative and censorship constraints on British cinema throughout the decade.The essays in Part I contextualise the study and illustrate the diversity of 1970s moving image culture. In Part II, Sue Harper and Justin Smith examine how gender relations and social space were addressed in film. They show how a shared visual manner and performance style characterises this fragmented cinema, and how irony and anxiety suffuse the whole film culture. This volume charts the shifting boundaries of permission in 1970s film culture and changes in audience taste. This book is the culmination of an AHRC-funded project at the University of Portsmouth, For more information about 1970s British Cinema, Film and Video: Mainstream and Counter-Culture (2006-2009) please visit the project website at www.1970sproject.co.uk.

Introduction to Film Studies is a comprehensive textbook for students of cinema. This completely revised and updated fifth edition guides students through the key issues and concepts in film studies, traces the historical development of film and introduces some of the worlds key national cinemas. A range of theories and theorists are presented from Formalism to Feminism, from Eisenstein to Deleuze. Each chapter is written by a subject specialist, including two new authors for the fifth edition. A wide range of films are analysed and discussed. It is lavishly illustrated with 150 film stills and production shots, in full colour throughout. Reviewed widely by teachers in the field and with a foreword by Bill Nichols, it will be essential reading for any introductory student of film and media studies or the visual arts worldwide. Key features of the fifth edition are: updated coverage of a wide range of concepts, theories and issues in film studies in-depth discussion of the contemporary film industry and technological changes new chapters on Film and Technology and Latin American Cinema new case studies on films such as District 9, Grizzly Man, Amores Perros, Avatar, Made in Dagenham and many others marginal key terms, notes, cross-referencing suggestions for further reading, further viewing and a comprehensive glossary and bibliography a new, improved companion website including popular case studies and chapters from previous editions (including chapters on German Cinema and The French New Wave), links to supporting sites, clips, questions and useful resources. Individual chapters include: The Industrial Contexts of Film Production · Film and Technology · Getting to the Bigger · Picture Film Form and Narrative · Spectator, Audience and Response · Cinematic authorship and the film auteur · Stardom and Hollywood Cinema · Genre, Theory and Hollywood Cinema The Documentary Form · The Language of Animation · Gender and Film · Lesbian and Gay Cinema · Spectacle, Stereotypes and Films of the African Diaspora · British Cinema · Indian Cinema · Latin American Cinema · Soviet Montage Cinema of the 1920s Contributors: Linda Craig, Lalitha Gopalan, Terri Francis, Chris Jones, Mark Joyce, Searle Kochberg, Lawrence Napper, Jill Nelmes, Patrick Phillips, Suzanne Speidel, Paul Ward, Paul Watson, Paul Wells and William Wittington