This book assesses the contemporary status of photochemical film practice against a backdrop of technological transition and obsolescence. It argues for the continued relevance of material engagement for opening up alternative ways of seeing and sensing the world. Questioning narratives of replacement and notions of fetishism and nostalgia, the book sketches out the contours of a photochemical renaissance driven by collective passion, creative resistance and artistic reinvention. Celluloid processes continue to play a key role in the evolution of experimental film aesthetics and this book takes a personal journey into the work of several key contemporary film artists. It provides fresh insight into the communities and infrastructures that sustain this vibrant field and mobilises a wide range of theoretical perspectives drawn from media archaeology, new materialism, ecocriticism and social ecology.

This edited collection proposes new directions for understanding cinematic intermediality, mapping out innovative approaches to film's relationship with some of its most influential artistic predecessors in the fields of performance, sculpture, painting, photography and dance. With essays by leading researchers and practitioners, this book investigates cinema's productive synergies and crossovers with the other arts through a broad range of avant-garde and experimental work. Mapping a trajectory from pre-cinema to the digital era, the book considers the impact of technological materiality on intermedial expression, incorporating both mainstream and experimental practice, world cinema and peripheral cinemas. Bridging the gap between theory and practice, it opens up new pathways for thinking about how intermediality, as both a creative method and an interpretative paradigm, might be explored alongside probing questions of what cinema is, has been and can be.

This book assesses the contemporary status of photochemical film practice against a backdrop of technological transition and obsolescence. It argues for the continued relevance of material engagement for opening up alternative ways of seeing and sensing the world. Questioning narratives of replacement and notions of fetishism and nostalgia, the book sketches out the contours of a photochemical renaissance driven by collective passion, creative resistance and artistic reinvention. Celluloid processes continue to play a key role in the evolution of experimental film aesthetics and this book takes a personal journey into the work of several key contemporary film artists. It provides fresh insight into the communities and infrastructures that sustain this vibrant field and mobilises a wide range of theoretical perspectives drawn from media archaeology, new materialism, ecocriticism and social ecology.