Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video

by Akira Mizuta Lippit

What does it mean for film and video to be experimental? In this collection of essays framed by the concept “ex-” — meaning from, outside, and no longer — Akira Mizuta Lippit explores the aesthetic, technical, and theoretical reverberations of avant-garde film and video. Ex-Cinema is a sustained reflection on the ways in which experimental media artists move outside the conventions of mainstream cinema and initiate a dialogue on the meaning of cinema itself.

Genres: Film

201 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Akira Mizuta Lippit is Professor and Chair of Critical Studies in the School of Cinematic Arts, and Professor in the Departments of Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Cultures in the USC Dornsife College. His interests are in world cinemas, critical theory, Japanese film and culture, experimental film and video and visual studies. Lippit’s published work reflects these areas and includes three books, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005) and Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife (2000), and his most recent book, Ex-Cinema: From a Theory of Experimental Film and Video (2012). At present, Lippit is completing a book on contemporary Japanese cinema, which looks at the relationship of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century Japanese culture to the concept of the world, and another on David Lynch’s baroque alphabetics.

His work appears widely in journals and anthologies, and has been translated into Croatian, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and Spanish. He is past recipient of the Fulbright-Hays and Japan Foundation awards.

Lippit is the General Editor of the journal Discourse, and is active in the independent film community where he programs events, serves on festival juries, and interviews filmmakers. He regularly teaches, lectures, and publishes in Japan, where he is a founding editor of the visual culture journal Ecce.