The Films of Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen

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).

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

Published in conjunction with the first major U.S. museum show of Joan Jonas’s art in nearly fifteen years, this monograph features new scholarship on her multimedia installations and performance practice from the early 1970s to the present. Inspired by the format of a reader, it breaks new ground by contextualizing and expanding understandings of Jonas’s body of work through three thematic approaches: the critical notions of gender, being and otherness; the politics of landscape and ecology; and new conceptions of medium specificity and un-specificity. Richly illustrated, with never-before-published sketches and drawings, the volume includes an interview with the late Douglas Crimp and Jonas’s personal reflection on their enduring friendship.

Edited by Barbara Clausen and Kristin Poor with Kelly Kivland, with an introduction by Clausen; essays by Clausen, Adrienne Edwards, André Lepecki, Poor, and Jeannine Tang; interview with Douglas Crimp; writings by Joan Jonas; conversation between Heather Davis, Joan Jonas, and Zoe Todd; and coda by Kivland

A workbook by Flatform on displacement, conceived and curated by Giuliana Prucca.

The book is published under four different covers and with four different layouts, randomly distributed.

Founded in 2006 and based in Berlin and Milan, Flatform is a video and media arts collective, at the border between experimental cinema and contemporary art, that creates time-based works, film events, and installations, most of which revolve around landscape and biopolitics. Distributed by Light Cone in Paris and by Video Data Bank in Chicago, works by Flatform have competed in major film festivals including Cannes, Rotterdam, Venice, Toronto, and have been shown worldwide in art venues such as Centre Pompidou, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Hirshhorn Museum, MAXXI Museum, Eye Filmmuseum, Wexner Center for the Arts and Garage Center for the Arts.

Co-published by Light Cone and Avarie.

Seventeen interviews conducted with Med Hondo over a period of almost half a century, most of the interviews originally published in French were translated into English.

To read Med Hondo opens us up to many perspectives: to his work and its time-historical contexts, to his interests and obsessions, to his standpoint with regard to the intertwining of politics, economics, and culture. Med Hondo describes the school of pronunciation until such point as the slightest accent is erased; he observes the insults immigrants in France have had to tolerate, and fuses their stories and histories with the present; he builds bridges to the Caribbean and to the Western Sahara, to Algeria and Burkina Faso, to Niger and Senegal, to South Africa and the USA. This publication aims to draw attention to Med Hondo's cinema and legacy.

The book originated in the long-term project Cours, cours, camarade, le vieux monde est derrière toi—Run, comrade, run, the old world is behind you—The Cinema of Med Hondo.

Franco-Mauritanian director, screenwriter, producer and actor, also known for his work in dubbing, Med Hondo (1936-2019) is one of the great figures of African cinema. His militant work denounces neo-colonialism, racism, the rupture between the peoples of Africa, immigration policies and the resulting social violence.

‘Piles of Bricks / Piles de briques’ by Bie Michels presents the working proces of her project ‘Bricks in Madagascar’. This project consists of two films, ‘La couleur de la brique’ and ‘Ingahy Kama’, the installation ‘Circular construction versus human body—referring to Toshikatsu Endo’, which she showed in Madagascar (October 2017) and Argos Brussels (May 2018), and the performance ‘Piles of bricks (working process)’, on which she will work 8 weeks before the book presentation and which will be performed at that moment.

Besides images and stills, five writers deliver a contribution in their own working field related to the project: Hobisoa Raininoro (Art assistent and former director of CRAAM (Centre de Ressources des Arts Actuels de Madagascar, MG), Rafolo Andrianaivoarivony (Professor History University of Antanarivo, MG), Petra Van Brabandt (Doctor philosophy Sint Lucas Antwerp, B), Gwyn Campbell (Professor History Mc Gill University, CA) and Nanne op ‘t Ende (writer, NL)

‘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.