Kahlo/Modotti – Forty Years Later / 40 Jahre später

DWOSKINO. The Gaze of Stephen Dwoskin is the culmination of a three year research project, The Legacies of Stephen Dwoskin, at the University of Reading where his archive is housed. The book is a unique visual distillation of Dwoskin’s life and times, with hundreds of never-seen-before images taken from his archive, and texts by among others Laura Mulvey, Raymond Bellour, Raymond Durgnat, and Dwoskin himself.

Stephen Dwoskin (1939–2012) began his filmmaking career in the New York underground scene of the early 1960s, then moved to London in 1964, where he became a leading figure in avant-garde film, and was one of the founders of the London Filmmakers Co-operative (now LUX). His early works, such as Dyn Amo (1972), are synonymous with the male gaze. Laura Mulvey wrote that he ‘opened a completely new perspective for me on cinematic voyeurism’ and his work was a major influence on her influential work on the male gaze in cinema. From the mid-1970s, he focused his camera upon his own body, afflicted by polio during childhood, in such films as Behindert (1974) and Outside In (1981).

This collection of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's film scripts vividly evokes the close connection between their influential work as theorists and their work as filmmakers. It includes scripts for all six of Mulvey and Wollen's collaborative films, Wollen's solo feature film, Friendship's Death (1987), and Mulvey's later collaborations.

Each text is followed by a new essay by a leading writer, offering a critical interpretation of the corresponding film. The collection also includes Wollen's short story Friendship's Death (1976), the outlines for two unrealised Mulvey and Wollen collaborations, and a selection of scanned working documents. The scripts and essays collected in this volume trace the historical significance of a complex cinematic project that brought feminist, semiotic and psychoanalytic concerns together with formal devices and strategies.

The book includes original contributions from Nora M. Alter, Kodwo Eshun, Nicolas Helm-Grovas, Esther Leslie, Laura Mulvey, Volker Pantenburg, Griselda Pollock, B. Ruby Rich and Sukhdev Sandhu.

The Liberated Film Club—running from its birth to its death, 2016 to 2020—would guarantee a wide wing-span for critical conversation. Screening “Liberated film” (a loose category designed to scaffold the show), a guest would be invited to introduce a film; an audience seated to watch it through; but there’d be an interruption to that typical format. Neither the audience nor the guest would have any idea what film would be shown, and this anonymised format would invite broad and antagonistic perambulation on the what, the why and the how of film.

An interrogation of what we do when we sit in a cinema; a reckoning with the kind of posture we should assume when we frame a film for further talk. Playing with the various ways we should consider and reproach the institutions built around all of our cultures of making and the manners and methods of all of our cultures of consumption, the Liberated Film Club was a rare reflection on the act of reflection itself.

An anthology publication,
featuring contributions from
John Akomfrah;
Chloe Aridjis;
Dennis Cooper;
Laura Mulvey;
Chris Petit;
Mania Akbari;
Elena Gorfinkel;
Juliet Jacques;
Ben Rivers;
Dan Fox;
Sean Price Williams;
Adam Christensen;
Stewart Home;
Stephen Watts;
Tony Grisoni;
Gideon Koppel;
Astra Taylor;
Miranda Pennell;
Gareth Evans;
Adam Roberts;
Tai Shani;
Anna Thew;
Xiaolu Guo;
Andrea Luka Zimmerman;
William Fowler;
Athina Tsangari;
John Rogers;
Shama Khanna;
Shezad Dawood;
Damien Sanville;
& Stanley (& Winstanley) Schtinter.

(Eds.) Stanley Schtinter,
with Dominic J. Jaeckle
& Jon Auman

The collected manifestos of Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau: for a postcolonial response to planetary crisis.

Manifestos brings together for the first time in English the manifestos written by Édouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau between 2000 and 2009. Composed in part in the aftermath of Barack Obama's election in 2008, the texts resonate with the current context of divided identities and criticisms of multiculturalism. The individual texts grapple with concrete historical and political moments in France, the Caribbean, and North America. Across the manifestos, as well as two collectively signed op-eds, the authors engage with socio-political aspects of climate catastrophe, resource extraction, toxicity, and neocolonialism.  

Throughout the collection, Glissant and Chamoiseau engage with key themes articulated through their poetic vocabulary, including Relation, globalization, globality (mondialité), anti-universalism, métissage, the tout-monde (“whole-world”) and the tout-vivant (“all-living,” including the relationship of humans to each other and “nature”), créolité and the creolization of the world, and the liberation from community assignations in response to individualism and neoliberal societies.  

Translated as the first volume in the Planetarities series with Goldsmiths Press, the themes of Manifestos resonate with the planetary as they work in response to contemporary forms of (economic) globalization, western capitalism, identity politics, and urban, digital and cosmic ecosystems, as well as the role of the poet-writer. A distinguishing feature of this publication is its interventional aspect, which prioritizes engaged scholarship and practice while demonstrating the relevance of the poetic in response to the urgencies of planetary crisis. 

Translated by Betsy Wing and Matt Reeck

Afterword by Edwy Plenel

In a reality in which the boundaries between cinema, art, installation and multimedia experimentation seem to be increasingly blurred, History of a Tree by Flatform is a project that sets out to radically alter the idea of the portrait in western art. 

A non-human living organism – the Oak of the Hundred Knights of Tricase, the oldest Vallonea oak in Europe at the age of 900 years – and the territory in which it has stood for centuries become the subject: through a film and a robotized video installation, statements become a portrait, and are transformed into a work of art. 

The book retraces the genesis, development and implementation of this original idea, providing a visual score, the film in 80 images, dialogues in ten languages, the contributions of a tree searcher, an art historian and two philosophers, as well as a series of in-depth essays drawing on the fields of science, history, anthropology, music and linguistics. 

‘Inland Empire’ is a film by David Lynch about a once-feted Hollywood actress who is cast in a movie that is rumoured to be cursed. From a queer, feminist perspective, film critic Melissa Anderson examines how Lynch’s late masterpiece is not only a brilliant evocation of how images work on the mind, but how powerful “acteurs” are in the creation of dreamlike cinema. Laura Dern’s astonishing performance, as the film’s realities splinter and identities multiply, is elucidated by Anderson through her deep affection and respect for Lynch. The book is part of the Decadent Editions series, which examines one film for every year of the 2000s, each a milestone of contemporary cinema.

Peter Downsbrough (New Jersey, US, 1940) lives and works in Brussels (Belgium). Associated with major international art movements such as minimal art, conceptual art, and visual poetry, his work spans across various mediums including sculpture, wall pieces and room pieces, books, work on paper, photography, film, and video. The work, which has affinities with architecture and typography, explores the traditional use of space and language, while criticizing power structures, e.g. urbanism, that influence social interactions and shape the landscape.

A special edition issue curated, designed and published by AVARIE, Paris and Labor Neunzehn, Berlin. It accompanies KAMERA SERIES, while it is an independent and valuable object to collect.

The central idea that informs and directs the booklets’ montage is the interplay between the concepts of addition and subtraction. This is achieved by unveiling a missing image in the screening or an unreleased second from an artist's film, expanded to 24 pages. Additionally, each booklet contains a piece directly removed from the show.

The editing establishes a dialogue between film frames and performed writings derived from texts, scripts, storyboards, and notes. The KAMERA exhibition is consequently extended into a physical space—the book—allowing for its widespread dissemination, complementing and contrasting with its potential online occurrence.

KAMERA SERIES is a screening program of experimental films, video art works and printed matter taking place in a former GDR building in Berlin. Each event showcases a retrospective of selected films by an artist and a small exhibition of his/her publications or works on paper over a span of 4 days.

Produced on the occasion of Leslie Thornton's major solo exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center as well as a recent solo exhibition at Kunstverein Nurnberg, this richly illustrated volume is the first monograph on this important artist and filmmaker, offering essential, foundational scholarship on Thornton's influential work in film and video.

Since the mid-1970s, American avant-garde filmmaker and artist Leslie Thornton (born 1951) has produced an influential body of work in film and video. Thornton's early encounters with experimental, structuralist, and cinéma vérité traditions fueled her iconoclastic take on the moving image and gave shape to her practice of weaving together her own footage and voice with archival film and audio. In part through her forceful and dynamic use of sound, Thornton exposes the limits of language and vision in her works, while acknowledging the ways that language and vision nevertheless remain central to scientific discourse and narrative in general. Her work consistently interrogates modes of representation and the violence of looking, pushing beyond critiques of the gaze to consider biases in perception, or the way voice and sound can undermine an otherwise dominant visual narrative.