A history of experimental film and video : from the canonical avant-garde to contemporary British practice / A.L. Rees.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 178-183) and index.

Introduction: Sitting the avant-garde -- Vision machine -- Time base -- Point of view -- Modernisms -- The canonical avant-garde: Origins of the moving image (1780-1880) -- Photography -- Art and the avant-garde : summary 1909-20 -- The Cubists -- Primitives and pioneers (1880-1915) -- Futurists -- Abstract film -- The comic burlesque -- The art cinema and its circuit -- Cine-poems and lyric abstraction -- Origins of abstract film -- The absolute film -- Cubism and popular film -- Dada and surrealist film -- The French avant-garde 1924-32 -- Voice and vision in the pre-war avant-garde -- Transition : into the 1930s and documentary -- Reviewing the first avant-garde -- Underground -- Two avant-gardes (mark 1)? -- Structural -- Britain, 1966-98: English structuralists -- Primitives and post-structuralists -- Video stirs -- Art and politics -- A cinema of small gestures -- Rebel waves -- Art cinema's odd couple : Derek Jarman and Peter Greenaway -- New pluralism -- Black British -- Electronic arts -- yBa -- Where are we now? -- Points of resistance -- Conclusion: In the gallery and on the air: The migrating frame from film to video -- Topologies -- The origins of the avant-garde and current practice.

"This new edition covers the history of avante-garde film and video, ranging from Cezanne and dada, via Cocteau, Brakhage and Le Grice, to the new wave of British video artists in the 1990s. The author also reconstitutes the avante-garde film as an independent form of art practice with its own internal logic and aesthetic discourse"-- Provided by publisher.