Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia

by Jonathan Walley

Expanded avant-garde moving image works that claim new territory for the cinematic, beyond the bounds of familiar filmmaking practices and the traditional theatrical exhibition space. First emerging in the 1960s amidst seismic shifts in the arts, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light art, kinetic art, video, and computer-generated imagery - all placed under expanded cinema's umbrella - re-emerged at the dawn of the 2000s, opening a vast new horizon of possibility for the moving image, and perhaps even heralding the end of cinema as we know it.

Cinema Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia offers a bold new account of its subject, breaking from previous studies and from larger trends in film and art scholarship. Author Jonathan Walley argues that expanded cinema's apparent departure from the traditions and forms of cinema as we know it actually radically asserts cinema's nature and artistic autonomy. Walley also resituates expanded cinema within the context of avant-garde film history, linking it to a mode of filmmaking that has historically investigated and challenged the nature and limits of cinematic form. As an outgrowth of this tradition, expanded cinema offered a means for filmmakers within the avant-garde, regardless of their differing styles, formal concerns, and politics, to stake out cinema's unique aesthetic terrain - its ontology, its independence, its identity.

In addition to reconsidering the better-known expanded cinema works of the 1960s and 70s by artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Whitman, and Nam June Paik, Cinema Expanded also provides the first scholarly accounts of scores of lesser-known works across more than 50 years. Making new arguments about avant-garde cinema in general and its complex meditations on the nature of cinema, it urgently addresses current and crucial debates about the fate of the moving image amidst a digital age of near-constant technological change.

570 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2020

Reviews

[SY · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had some minor issues as a reader with how information was organized - the same moments / artworks / films will get close-read or mentioned in multiple places, which feels like a lot of repeated information and creates a kind of mind-stutter that makes for a slightly frustrating experience. There is also little sense of development from one group of work to another (though, I think this is deliberate) within a chapter, rather works are grouped thematically and films from the 60s or 2015 would be discussed one after another as though the cultural context for their viewing hadn't changed. All that said, this had been an essential deep dive into a narrower subset of expanded cinema before digitalization. The guy obviously loves these films, and he painstakingly advocated for them. Many of these films are minimal, performative, and involved audience participation, which is a perfect combination of features that make for impossible description, so I really appreciated the effort.

I also appreciated the inclusion of lesser known artists, though almost all of them are from North America. I look forward to the day when I don't have to supplement my research on broad, global art currents with books that have an explicitly "regional" focus...(ok, after I wrote this, I checked again, and the publisher's book description definitely led me to believe that this book would have addressed works from many more places than it actually did...).

All that said, very convincingly argued. Love the elasticity of a cinema that expanded and contracted. A great text for teaching.