Portland Public Library

Eyes upside down, visionary filmmakers and the heritage of Emerson, P. Adams Sitney

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index"Chronology of films": pages 401-408

illustrations

index present

non fiction

Eyes upside down

bibliographyfilmographies

163603750

P. Adams Sitney

visionary filmmakers and the heritage of Emerson

"P. Adams Sitney analyzes in detail the work of eleven American avant-garde filmmakers as heirs to the aesthetics of exhilaration and innovative vision articulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson and explored by John Cage, Charles Olson, and Gertrude Stein. The films discussed span the sixty years since the Second World War. With three chapters each devoted to Stan Brakhage and Robert Beavers, two each to Hollis Frampton and Jonas Mekas, and single chapters on Marie Menken, Ian Hugo, Andrew Noren, Warren Sonbert, Su Friedrich, Ernie Gehr, and Abigail Child, Eyes Upside Down is the fruit of Sitney's lifelong study of visionary aspirations in the American avant-garde cinema."--Publisher's description

Introduction: Emersonian poetics -- Marie Menken and the somatic camera -- Ian Hugo and superimposition -- Stan Brakhage's autobiography as a cinematic sequence -- Jonas Mekas and the diary film -- Hollis Frampton and the specter of narrative -- Robert Beavers's Winged distance/sightless measure: the cycle of the ephebe -- Beavers's second cycle: the past in the present -- the present in the past -- Andrew Noren and the open-ended cinematic sequence -- Ernie Gehr and the axis of primary thought -- Warren Sonbert's movements in a concerto -- Brakhage and the tales of the tribes -- Frampton's Magellan -- Abigail Child: textual self-reliance -- Su Friedrich: "Giving birth to myself" -- Brakhage: meditative cinema -- Beavers's third cycle: the theater of gesture -- Mekas's retrospection -- Conclusion: Perfect exhilaration -- Appendix: Chronology of films