The most recommended avant garde books

Who picked these books? Meet our 24 experts.

24 authors created a book list connected to avant garde, and here are their favorite avant garde books.
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Book cover of Cinema by Other Means

Nicky Hamlyn Author Of Film Art Phenomena

From my list on artistsā€™ film and video.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am an artist-filmmaker, writer, and Professor of Experimental Film at the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury, Kent, UK. I have worked at the London Filmmakersā€™ Co-op and BBC TV. I have been making films since 1974 and teaching since 1988. I have published extensively on Artistsā€™ Film / Experimental Cinema. I have edited and contributed chapters to numerous other books and journals, including Millennium Film Journal, MIRAJ, Film Quarterly, Sequence, and others. I have completed over 70 single screen works in 16mm and video, gallery film and video installations, and multi-projector film performances. These have been screened worldwide.

Nicky's book list on artistsā€™ film and video

Nicky Hamlyn Why did Nicky love this book?

While written from a Yugoslav perspective, this book is a fascinating study of films made using unconventional methods, materials, and equipment, including ā€˜written filmsā€™: films that exist as texts and that would be impossible to make as films. Levi draws on the historical and the post-war avant-garde; Dada, Surrealism, Lettrisme, Structural-Materialist film, and other movements that constitute a material and ideological rejection of conventional cinema and the way it treats the medium as a mere means to an end. In these works, produced in Japan, Europe, and the USA, the technology is turned on itself, interrogated, and repurposed to anti-illusionistic ends.

By Pavle Levi,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Cinema by Other Means as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Cinema by Other Means explores an extraordinary history, stretching from the 1910s to the present: it is a study of various avant-garde endeavors to practice the cinema by using the tools, the materials, the technology, and the techniques, which either modify or are entirely different from those associated with the standard film apparatus. Using examples from both the historical and the post-war avant-garde-Dada, Surrealism, Letterism,
"structural-materialist" film, and more-the book tells the tale of the multiple conditions of cinema; of a range of peculiar and imaginative ways in which filmmakers, artists, and writers have pondered and created, performed and transformed,ā€¦


Book cover of Cinema by Other Means

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