Dziga Vertov was one of the greatest innovators of Soviet cinema. The radical complexity of his work - in both sound and silent forms - has given it a central place within contemporary theoretical inquiry. Vertov's writings, collected here, range from calculated manifestos setting forth his heroic vision of film's potential to dark ruminations on the inactivity forced upon him by the bureaucratization of the Soviet state.

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.

A critical primer on the work of Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol (1928-1987), one of the most celebrated artists of the last third of the twentieth century, owes his unique place in the history of visual culture not to the mastery of a single medium but to the exercise of multiple media and roles. A legendary art world figure, he worked as an artist, filmmaker, photographer, collector, author, and designer. Beginning in the 1950s as a commercial artist, he went on to produce work for exhibition in galleries and museums. The range of his efforts soon expanded to the making of films, photography, video, and books. Warhol first came to public notice in the 1960s through works that drew on advertising, brand names, and newspaper stories and headlines. Many of his best-known images, both single and in series, were produced within the context of pop art. Warhol was a major figure in the bridging of the gap between high and low art, and his mode of production in the famous studio known as "The Factory" involved the recognition of art making as one form of enterprise among others. The radical nature of that enterprise has ensured the iconic status of his art and person. Andy Warhol contains illustrated essays by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Thomas Crow, Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, and Nan Rosenthal, plus a previously unpublished interview with Warhol by Buchloh. The essays address Warhol's relation to and effect on mass culture and the recurrence of disaster and death in his art.

The more than 40 writings that make up this intellectual autobiography reveal a rare conjunction of personal candor and political commitment. Nagisa Oshima is generally regarded as the most important Japanese film. director after Kurosawa and is one of Japan's most productive and celebrated postwar artists. His early films represent the Japanese New Wave at its zenith, and the films he has made since (including In the Realm of the Senses and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence) have won international acclaim. The more than 40 writings that make up this intellectual autobiography reveal a rare conjunction of personal candor and political commitment. Entertaining, concise, disarmingingly insightful, they trace in vivid and carefully articulated detail the development of Oshima's theory and practice.The writings are arranged in chronological order and cover the period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s. Following a historical overview of the contemporary Japanese cinema, a substantial section articulates the theoretical and political rationale of 0shima's film production. Among many other topics considered in his essays, Oshima questions the economics of film production, the ethics of the documentary film, censorship (both political and sexual), and the relation of aesthetics and social taboos.