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Recent years have seen a panic over the future of mainstream film. Yet film culture is at its most vital on the margins, where the moving image meets visual art, documentary brushes up against experimentalism, and curators are reshaping established histories. Bringing together a decade of criticism, The Edges of Cinema roams across an array of styles to take account of how some of the most important contemporary filmmakers are engaging the world.
Erika Balsom—a leading scholar and critic—explores subjects ranging from computer-generated animation to the effects of digitization, and from the status of observational cinema to the longest of long takes. She takes a bold stand in debates on the “female gaze” and examines how filmmakers address issues concerning climate change, race, gender, violence, and technology. Balsom considers works at the intersection of documentary, experimental film, and auteur cinema by directors such as Peggy Ahwesh, James Benning, Aria Dean, Mati Diop, Harun Farocki, Albert Serra, Brett Story, Tsai Ming-liang, and Wang Bing. Challenging the caricature of experimental film as “difficult,” this wide-ranging and engaging book makes a case for the politics, provocations, and pleasures of a less ordinary cinema.
To read an essay—of any length, on any topic—by Erika Balsom is to be transformed, enlightened, delighted. In this extraordinary collection, there is another kind of edge to consider: that of Balsom’s writing, which is unfailingly incisive, vigorous, sharp as a blade.
— Melissa Anderson
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Edges of Cinema
Part I. Experiments in Nonfiction
1. The Reality-Based Community
2. Observing Otherwise
3. Collective Monologue
4. Do We Share a World?
5. Historical Present: On Brett Story’s The Hottest August
6. A Night of Knowing Nothing
7. The Game Is Up!
8. The Chronicles of John Smith
9. Retrospection and Recycling in the Installations of Chantal Akerman and Agnès Varda
10. Faces Places
11. Hear Her Whisper
12. Dahomey
13. No More
Part II. The New Constructivism
14. The Crowd Is Dead, Long Live the Crowd!
15. A World Beyond Control
16. Girlish Pursuits
17. A Bouquet of Blue Flowers for Ed Atkins
18. Bad Animation
19. The Cow Question
Part III. Duration, Body, Landscape
20. Watching Paint Dry
21. Wang Bing’s 15 Hours and the Chimera of Endlessness
22. Landscapes of Contestation
23. The Lives of Others: On James Benning’s PLACE
24. Urban Studies: On Shengze Zhu’s A River Runs, Turns, Erases, Replaces
25. Terra Cognita: Babette Mangolte’s The Sky on Location
26. Time Is the Best Author: On Tsai Ming-liang’s Days
27. The Death of Louis XIV
28. The Human Surge
Part IV. Feminist Revisions
29. The Critic Lady
30. In Search of the Female Gaze
31. EXT. CINEMA—NIGHT: On Variety and Simone Barbès or Virtue
32. Remembering Women
33. Rustling Leaves
34. Reflections on an Exhibition: The Multiple Worlds of “No Master Territories”
Coda: Rectangular Spaces
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index