Nora M. Alter

"Having spearheaded the bourgeoning Nouvelle Vague scene in the late 1950s and developed a distinctive style involving still images, Chris Marker (born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve) stands among the most influential filmmakers of the postwar era, yet remains enigmatic. His notorious reclusiveness has led to surprisingly few studies, and Nora M. Alter's Chris Marker presents the first English-language study of the unpredictable and reclusive director who remains politically and artistically influential. Marker's 1953 debut "filmic essay," The Statues Also Die (with Alain Resnais) exposed the European art market's complicity in the former Belgian Congo atrocities, and provided a bold model for other politically committed filmmakers. Thus began Marker's long struggle against global injustice, a trajectory that included his involvement with Night and Fog, La Jetée, Le Joli Mai, Far from Vietnam, Le fond du l'air est Rouge, and Prime Time in the Camps. Alter's careful study includes interviews with the director and investigates the core themes and motivations behind an often unpredictable and transnational career that defies easy classification." -- Publisher's description.

Chris Marker

Brian Kuan Wood

Hito Steyerl

Thomas Elsaesser

Doris Krystof

Teresa Castro

Tom Holert

Mark Terkessidis

Vanessa Joan Müller

Florian Ebner

Marcella Lista

Films and Installations

Hito Steyerl - I Will Survive

Lutz Koepnick

Working across established disciplines & methodological divides, these essays investigate the ways in which texts, artists, & performers in all kinds of media have utilized sound materials in order to enforce or complicate dominant notions of German cultural & national identity.

Essays on the Acoustics of German Culture

Sound Matters

The intersection between social, historical, and political developments in Germany and the emergence of a nonfiction mode of film production

German Nonfiction Cinema, 1967-2000

Projecting History

Timothy Corrigan

The essay—with its emphasis on the provisional and explorative rather than on definitive statements—has evolved from its literary beginnings and is now found in all mediums, including film. Today, the essay film is, arguably, one of the most widely acclaimed and critically discussed forms of filmmaking around the world, with practitioners such as Chris Marker, Hito Steyerl, Errol Morris, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Rithy Panh. Characteristics of the essay film include the blending of fact and fiction, the mixing of art- and documentary-film styles, the foregrounding of subjective points of view, a concentration on public life, a tension between acoustic and visual discourses, and a dialogic encounter with audiences. This anthology of fundamental statements on the essay film offers a range of crucial historical and philosophical perspectives. It provides early critical articulations of the essay film as it evolved through the 1950s and 1960s, key contemporary scholarly essays, and a selection of writings by essay filmmakers. It features texts on the foundations of the essay film by writers such as Hans Richter and André Bazin; contemporary positions by, among others, Phillip Lopate and Michael Renov; and original essays by filmmakers themselves, including Laura Mulvey and Isaac Julien.

Essays on the Essay Film

Nora M. Alter reveals the essay film to be a hybrid genre that fuses the categories of feature, art, and documentary film. Like its literary predecessor, the essay film draws on a variety of forms and approaches; in the process, it fundamentally alters the shape of cinema. The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction locates the genre’s origins in early silent cinema and follows its transformation with the advent of sound, its legitimation in the postwar period, and its multifaceted development at the turn of the millennium. In addition to exploring the broader history of the essay film, Alter addresses the innovative ways contemporary artists such as Martha Rosler, Isaac Julien, Harun Farocki, John Akomfrah, and Hito Steyerl have taken up the essay film in their work.

The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction

Diedrich Diederichsen

Kobena Mercer

Renée Green

Gloria Sutton

Elvan Zabunyan

Julian Renbentisch

Musée cantonal des beaux-arts (Lausanne)

This is the first comprehensive monograph devoted to New York and San Francisco-based artist Renée Green. Over the past 20 years, through film, video, sound art, photographs, prints, banners, texts, websites and ephemera, Green's work has comprised complex, multi-layered archive-like installations, employing a vast array of sources, which always urge viewers to become active participants. Included in this superbly illustrated volume are newly commissioned essays by a host of esteemed media scholars, art historians, critics and curators--Nora Alter, Diedrich Diederichsen, Kobena Mercer, Catherine Quéloz, Gloria Sutton and Elvan Zabunyan--who engage issues central to Green's oeuvre, such as genealogy, archives and their reworkings, movements and displacements, site specificity and location.

Ongoing Becomings : Retrospective 1989-2009

Kodwo Eshun

Harun Farocki

This Farocki season was preceded with the exhibition at Cubitt Gallery, "Harun Farocki. Three Early Films", presented Jan. 17-Feb. 22, 2009

Harun Farocki, Against What? Against Whom?

Nora M. Alter

Books

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