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Screen Writings: Texts and Scripts from Independent Films
"Ask audience to cut the part of the image on the screen that they don't like. Supply scissors."―Yoko Ono, Tokyo, June 1964
A dazzling range of unconventional film scripts and texts, many published for the first time, make up Scott MacDonald's newest collection. Illustrated with nearly 100 film stills, this fascinating book is at once a reference work of film history and an unparalleled sampling of experimental "language art." It contributes to the very dissipation of boundaries between cinematic, literary, and artistic expression thematized in the films themselves. Each text and script is introduced and contextualized by MacDonald; a filmography and a bibliography round out the volume.
This is a readable―often quite funny―literature that investigates differences between seeing and reading. Represented are avant-garde classics such as Hollis Frampton's Poetic Justice and Zorns Lemma and Morgan Fisher's Standard Gauge , and William Greaves's recently rediscovered Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One . Michael Snow turns film loose on language in So Is This ; Peter Rose turns language loose on theory in Pressures of the Text .
Some of the most influential feminist filmscripts of recent decades―Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's Riddles of the Sphinx , Su Friedrich's Gently Down the Stream , Trinh T. Minh-ha's Reassemblage , Yvonne Rainer's Privilege ―confirm this book's importance for readers in gender and cultural studies as well as for filmmakers and admirers of experimental writing, independent cinema, and the visual arts in general.
A dazzling range of unconventional film scripts and texts, many published for the first time, make up Scott MacDonald's newest collection. Illustrated with nearly 100 film stills, this fascinating book is at once a reference work of film history and an unparalleled sampling of experimental "language art." It contributes to the very dissipation of boundaries between cinematic, literary, and artistic expression thematized in the films themselves. Each text and script is introduced and contextualized by MacDonald; a filmography and a bibliography round out the volume.
This is a readable―often quite funny―literature that investigates differences between seeing and reading. Represented are avant-garde classics such as Hollis Frampton's Poetic Justice and Zorns Lemma and Morgan Fisher's Standard Gauge , and William Greaves's recently rediscovered Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One . Michael Snow turns film loose on language in So Is This ; Peter Rose turns language loose on theory in Pressures of the Text .
Some of the most influential feminist filmscripts of recent decades―Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's Riddles of the Sphinx , Su Friedrich's Gently Down the Stream , Trinh T. Minh-ha's Reassemblage , Yvonne Rainer's Privilege ―confirm this book's importance for readers in gender and cultural studies as well as for filmmakers and admirers of experimental writing, independent cinema, and the visual arts in general.
- GenresFilm
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1995
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
May 4, 2025
i like d this book a lot, came in expecting something completely different but this is art like actual visual art. i struggle to see the connection of these screen writings and films
February 26, 2008
Another great bk edited by Scott MacDonald. This includes text relevant to William Greaves' "Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One" - just about as original a film as a person like myself can hope to experience.
November 13, 2014
Essential collection of scripts, notes and stills from avant-garde films. Great notes on Zorns Lemma, transcripts of Frampton's other text-based films. Pleased to read Yoko's scripts, much more succinct than her movies. I read the whole thing straight through, like a film festival.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews