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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Essential, very personal look at some key avant-garde filmmmakers circa 1960-1980,
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This review is from: Film: The Front Line 1983 (Paperback)
I remember having a hard time finding this book some years ago, but apparently some remaindered copies have found there way out of a warehouse and back into print. One would think that the market for a book covering an idiosyncratic slice of an idiosyncratic area in film - the avant-garde narrative - would be pretty tiny, and I suppose it is, but to those few out there reading this I can heartily recommend it. Many of you probably already know Rosenbaum's work as a critic, most notably for 20 years at the "Chicago Reader" and if you do you'll probably need no pushing from me; this is as passionate and provocative as most of his other published work.
For those who want a few more specifics, I can tell you that this is a rundown of 20 filmmakers who were active in the avant garde/experimental world in the early 1980s. Typically each piece begins with a filmography and then an analysis of the filmmaker(s)' aims and achievements thus far. Sometimes there are interviews with the subjects. Directors covered: Chantal Akerman Beth and Scott B. James Benning Robert Breer Manuel de Landa Sara Driver Peter Gidal Louis Hock Jon Jost Jonas Mekas Ulrike Ottinger Yvonne Rainer Mark Rappaport Jackie Raynal Jacques Rivette Michael Snow Jean-Marie Straub and Danielle Huillet Leslie Thornton JR usually does an excellent job of giving even the novice a real idea of what kind of filmmaking s/he might be getting into when exploring any of these interesting mavericks - I found his analysis of cranky Amercian ultra-low-budget provacateur Jon Jost spot-on, for example and Jost has since become one of my favorite directors. Not that there are many relatively as or more famous filmmakers that are excluded - Jean-Luc Godard, Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs, etc. This wasn't an attempt to be comprehensive, merely a quick overview, and some figures don't appear either because they are in fact already well-covered elsewhere, or because their work was just too hard to see at the time. There's a last chapter that does give brief rundowns on the careers/recent works by 22 other other filmmakers including some of those I just mentioned. Essential for the avant-garde devotee. |
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Film: The Front Line 1983 by Jonathan Rosenbaum (Paperback - Oct. 1983)
$10.95
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