On the Eve of the Future

Selected Writings on Film

by Annette Michelson

$40.00 Hardcover

352 pp., 7 x 9 in, 24 color photos, 54 b&w photos

Hardcover
9780262035507
Published: February 10, 2017
Publisher: The MIT Press

$40.00

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The first collection of Annette Michelson's influential writings on film, with essays on work by Marcel Duchamp, Maya Deren, Hollis Frampton, Martha Rosler, and others.

The celebrated critic and film scholar Annette Michelson saw the avant-garde filmmakers of the 1950s and 1960s as radically redefining and extending the Modernist tradition of painting and sculpture, and in essays that were as engaging as they were influential and as lucid as they were learned, she set out to demonstrate the importance of the underappreciated medium of film. On the Eve of the Future collects more than thirty years' worth of those essays, focusing on her most relevant engagements with avant-garde production in experimental cinema, particularly with the movement known as American Independent Cinema.

This volume includes the first critical essay on Marcel Duchamp's film Anemic Cinema, the first investigation into Joseph Cornell's filmic practices, and the first major explorations of Michael Snow. It offers an important essay on Maya Deren, whose work was central to that era of renewal and reinvention, seminal critiques of Stan Brakhage, Hollis Frampton, and Harry Smith, and overviews of Independent Cinema. Gathered here for the first time, these texts demonstrate Michelson's pervasive influence as a writer and thinker and her role in the establishment of cinema studies as an academic field.

The postwar generation of Independents worked to develop radically new terms, techniques, and strategies of production and distribution. Michelson shows that the fresh new forms they created from the legacy of Modernism became the basis of new forms of spectatorship and cinematic pleasure.

Annette Michelson (1922–2018) was widely considered one of the twentieth century's most influential writers on film. During her more than five-decade career, she was an art editor and critic for the New York Herald Tribune, a writer for Artforum, a founding editor of the journal October, and Professor in the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. Some of Michelson's essays on film were collected in On the Eve of the Future: Selected Writings on Film (MIT Press).

Annette Michelson is one of the most brilliant minds that has ever turned its focus on the art of cinema. It's a blessing to have her illuminating, inspiring, and informative pieces available in this volume.
Jonas Mekas, filmmaker and writer

When many of these texts first appeared, they were undergroundbreaking. Now, as history, they continue to be impressive for their subtle insights and nuanced style. Annette Michelson's writing is as avant-garde and of-the-moment as that of a critic/historian can be.
Michael Snow, filmmaker, musician, visual artist

Written with enviable precision and grace, these essays remain the most compelling chronicle of the radical impact that film would have on the other arts in the twentieth century. Through her writings, Annette Michelson defined a field of critical inquiry where others saw only boundaries.
Bruce Jenkins, Chair, Department of Film, Video, New Media and Animation, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

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October Books

On the Eve of the Future

Selected Writings on Film

October Books

On the Eve of the Future

Selected Writings on Film

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