The first collection of Annette Michelson's influential writings on
film, with essays on work by Marcel Duchamp, Maya Deren, Hollis
Frampton, Martha Rosler, and others.
The celebrated critic and film scholar Annette Michelson saw the
avant-garde filmmakers of the 1950s and 1960s as radically redefining
and extending the Modernist tradition of painting and sculpture, and in
essays that were as engaging as they were influential and as lucid as
they were learned, she set out to demonstrate the importance of the
underappreciated medium of film. On the Eve of the Future collects
more than thirty years' worth of those essays, focusing on her most
relevant engagements with avant-garde production in experimental cinema,
particularly with the movement known as American Independent Cinema.
This volume includes the first critical essay on Marcel Duchamp's film
Anemic Cinema, the first investigation into Joseph Cornell's filmic
practices, and the first major explorations of Michael Snow. It offers
an important essay on Maya Deren, whose work was central to that era of
renewal and reinvention, seminal critiques of Stan Brakhage, Hollis
Frampton, and Harry Smith, and overviews of Independent Cinema. Gathered
here for the first time, these texts demonstrate Michelson's pervasive
influence as a writer and thinker and her role in the establishment of
cinema studies as an academic field.
The postwar generation of Independents worked to develop radically new
terms, techniques, and strategies of production and distribution.
Michelson shows that the fresh new forms they created from the legacy of
Modernism became the basis of new forms of spectatorship and cinematic
pleasure.
