Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film

by William C. Wees

To view a film is to see another's seeing mediated by the technology and techniques of the camera. By manipulating the cinematic apparatus in unorthodox ways, avant-garde filmmakers challenge the standardized versions of seeing perpetuated by the dominant film industry and generate ways of seeing that are truer to actual human vision.

Beginning with the proposition that the images of cinema and vision derive from the same basic elements—light, movement, and time—Wees argues that cinematic apparatus and human visual apparatus have significant properties in common. For that reason they can be brought into a dynamic, creative relationship which the author calls the dialectic of eye and camera. The consequences of this relationship are what Wees explores.

Although previous studies have recognized the visual bias of avant-garde film, this is the first to place the visual aesthetics of avant-garde film in a long-standing, multidisciplinary discourse on vision, visuality, and art.

Genres: Film, Media Tie In, Art

211 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 1992

Reviews

[Mr Disco · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the greatest books ever written about American avant-garde cinema and film's incorporation of light and evocation of the workings of the eye, both literal and inner.

[Evan Pincus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wees' writing is extremely "university professor" (pejorative), which is to say, a touch dry and overwrought - he's the sort of person who will title a chapter "Dialectics of a Metaphor," which gets adequately elaborated upon, but still, a hell of a phrase lol - but this is a compact lil' book on a/g film that sets out explicitly to address my primary concerns with Sitney's Visionary Film and Youngblood's Expanded Cinema and does a damn good job at it. Good chapter on the late Kenneth Anger that approaches him as a visual/sensual/experiential artist rather than the pop-cultural mystick wizard he so often gets discussed as - the two things aren't exactly separable when it comes to his work, and frankly, I'm not so sure there's a huge difference between experimental cinema and magick (both are esoteric ways of understanding, interpreting and interacting with the world around us, are they not?), but it's refreshing to see someone look at Anger as a great filmmaker first and a Crowleyite second.