Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture

Technology and the Making of Experimental Film Culture examines how the avant-garde embraced small-gauge media technologies such as the Bolex camera, 16mm reversal film stocks, commercial film laboratories, and low-budget optical printers, investing them with meaning and value. This book uses technology as a lens for examining the process of making: where ideas come from, how they are put into practice, and how arguments about those ideas foster cultural and artistic commitments and communities.

John Powers is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. His writing has appeared in Cinema Journal, Screen, October, Discourse, and numerous edited volumes dedicated to experimental film and video.

- List of Illustrations
- Introduction: Proscriptive Orientations
- Chapter 1. The Twitters of the Machine: The Bolex H-16 Camera In and Out of Control
- Chapter 2. Untrue Truisms: The Paradoxes of Reversal Film Stock
- Chapter 3. A Lab of One's Own: Personal Cinema Invades the Film Laboratory
- Chapter 4. Holding the Jalopy Together: The Optical Printer and DIY Culture
- Epilogue: Midwives for Existence
- Notes
- Selected Bibliography
- Index