Avant-Doc

Over the past fifty years, a unique hybrid genre of nonfiction cinema called the "avant-doc" has emerged in the world of independent film. Combining the unconventional techniques of avant-garde auteurs like Stan Brakhage with the verisimilitude of traditional documentaries, the avant-doc expands the way cinema captures and chronicles events. Drawing on firsthand interviews with nineteen of the form's chief practitioners and participants, Avant-Doc constructs an oral history that provides the first insider's perspective on the phenomenon. "A compelling achievement, Avant-Doc diagrams a new fluid geography of cinema, where traditional categories such as "experimental," "documentary," and "fiction" dissolve. The insightful, probing conversations assembled so deftly here vaporize fixed cinematic modes. These filmmakers describe cinema as a living organism, pulsating in networks of politics, arts, philosophies, teachers, literature, communities, technologies, and aesthetics." --Patricia R. Zimmermann, author of States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracy"Scott MacDonald's groundbreaking and seminal new volume, Avant-Doc, illuminates correspondences between avant-garde cinema and documentary through a series of compelling interviews with major independent filmmakers and noted scholar Annette Michelson. This intimate and probing follow-up to MacDonald's Critical Cinema series creates a lively and deeply personal oral history. Avant-Doc broadens our understanding of connections between avant-garde and documentary film, while providing a rich treasure trove of research material that current and future scholars will find invaluable." --J.J. Murphy, author of The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy WarholTable of Contents: ; Introduction ; Annette Michelson ; Robert Gardner ; Ed Pincus (and Jane Pincus, Lucia Small) ; Alfred Guzzetti ; Ross McElwee ; Nina Davenport ; Leonard Retel Helmrich ; Jonathan Caouette ; Pawel Wojtasik ; Michael Glawogger ; Susana de Sousa Dias ; Alexander Olch (on The Windmill Movie) ; Amie Siegel (on DDR/DDR) ; Arthur and Jennifer Smith (on Ice Bears of the Beaufort) ; Betzy Bromberg (on Voluptuous Sleep) ; Jen Proctor (on A Movie by Jen Proctor) ; Jane Gillooly (on Suitcase of Love and Shame) ; Godfrey Reggio (on Visitors) ; Todd Haynes ; Sensory Ethnography ; Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor (on In and Out of Africa and Sweetgrass) ; Lucien Castaing-Taylor (on his installation work and on Harvard's Sensory Ethnography Lab) ; Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel (on Leviathan) ; Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez (on Manakamana) ; Filmographies ; Bibliographies