{"product_id":"9780809319206","title":"Direct Theory: Experimental Film\/Video as Major Genre","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"Art is thinking in images.\"—Victor Shklovsky\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eUndulating water patterns; designs etched directly into exposed film; computer- generated, pulsating, multihued light tapestries—the visual images that often constitute experimental film and video provide the basis for Edward S. Small’s argument for a new theory defining this often overlooked and misunderstood genre. In a radical revision of film theory incorporating a semiotic system, Small contends that experimental film\/video constitutes a mode of theory that bypasses written or spoken words to directly connect Ferdinand de Saussure’s \"signifier\" and \"signified,\" the image and the viewer. This new theory leads Small to develop a case for the establishment of experimental film\/video as a major genre.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSmall contends that the aesthetic of experimental film\/video would best be understood as a coordinate major genre separate from genres such as fictive narrative and documentary. He employs eight experimental technical\/structural characteristics to demonstrate this thesis: the autonomy of the artist or a-collaborative construction; economic independence; brevity; an affinity for animation and special effects that embraces video technology and computer graphics; use of the phenomenology of mental imagery, including dreams, reveries, and hallucinations; an avoidance of verbal language as either dialogue or narration; an exploration of nonnarrative structure; and a pronounced reflexivity—drawing the audience’s attention to the art of the film through images rather than through the mediation of words.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAlong with a theoretical approach, Small provides an overview of the historical development of experimental film as a genre. He covers seven decades beginning in France and Germany in the 1920s with European avant-garde and underground films and ends with a discussion of experimental videos of the 1990s. He highlights certain films and provides a sampling of frames from them to demonstrate the heightened reflexivity when images rather than words are the transmitters: for example, Ralph Steiner’s 1929 \u003ci\u003eH2\u003c\/i\u003e\u003ci\u003eO\u003cb\u003e,\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/i\u003ea twelve-minute, wordless, realistic study of water patterns, and Bruce Conner’s 1958 \u003ci\u003eA Movie, \u003c\/i\u003ewhich unites his themes of war-weapons-death and sexuality not by narrative digesis but by intellectual montage juxtapositions. Small also examines experimental video productions such as Stephen Beck’s 1977 \u003ci\u003eVideo Weavings, \u003c\/i\u003ewhich has a simple musical score and abstract images recalling American Indian rugs and tapestries.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSmall adds classic and contemporary film theory discussions to this historical survey to further develop his direct-theory argument and his presentation of experimental film\/video as a separate major genre. He stresses that the function of experimental film\/video is \"neither to entertain nor persuade but rather to examine the quite omnipresent yet little understood pictos [semiotic symbols] that mark and measure our postmodern milieu.\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Southern Illinois University Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47030958522608,"sku":"9780809319206","price":27.5,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9780809319206_p0.jpg?v=1763740566","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9780809319206","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}