Making Images Move
About the Author
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
A Shadow History of the Moving Image
PART I. HANDMADE FILM
1. Between Canvas and Celluloid
Visual Music, Motion Paintings, and Cameraless Photography
2. Abstractions in Time
Painting and Scratching on Film
3. By Chemical, by Body, by Mechanism
Other Handmade Methods
4. Beyond the Frame
Cameraless Questions of Politics and Representation
PART II. HANDMADE MOVING IMAGES
5. Light in Motion
The Moving Image between the Plastic Arts and Cinema
6. Making Space, Making Time
Light Art of the 1950s and 1960s
7. Forms of Radiance
The Practice and Significance of the Psychedelic Light Show
8. Video Art
Analog Circuit Palettes, Cathode Ray Canvases
Conclusion
Handmade Moving Images in the Digital Era
Notes
Index
Reviews
— Los Angeles Review of Books"Written with careful precision and breadth. . . chronicling a rich, 100-year history of handmade moviemaking in which artists similarly trespass into other areas of creative practice."
— Cinema Scope Magazine"Gregory Zinman’s excellent new book on movies made (or remade) through the direct, often tactile engagement of artists and their filmstrips, video-feedback loops, and myriad other animated oozes and vibrant viscosities, Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts is everything one wants in this age of over-scribbling at the margins of cinema. Lucid, smart, but entirely readable, and compellingly illuminated with color illustrations of the wonders it describes."
— Film Comment"Devoid of zeitgeisty romanticizations of the analog, Gregory Zinman's Making Images Move presents a defiant yet clear-eyed alternative history of the origins of cinema. . . . Zinman's prose sparkles in recounting artists' use of chemicals, bodily fluids, and elements like wind and water, which often render celluloid fragile or ephemeral."
— Critical Inquiry"Zinman’s is the book perched on our balconies. It is worth way more than two in the bush. That’s the great thing about books that are also birds. Their singleness multiplies in hands that hold them. Running fingers through their feathered figures to thread additional ones in responds to their song."
— Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television"Zinman explores the history of camera-less filmmaking in an exciting intervention that ennobles an underdiscussed mode of film production and challenges our very conception of what constitutes a 'movie.' . . . A groundbreaking immersion into a previously uncelebrated filmmaking practice."
— Millennium Film Journal"Rather than manifesting a site of contestation between painting, film, sculpture, or photography, Making Images Move espouses the handmade's medium-collaborative impulse through material investigations of light in time. . . . Though Zinman situates the return to craft as a response to mass digitization, the current pandemic transfigures Zinman's politics of handmade joy into something almost elegiac, as even the possibility of direct artistic experience remains untenable."
“Gregory Zinman traces a bold new path through the history of media art. Putting aside the emphasis on photographic representation that has been a near-constant in debates concerning filmic ontology, Zinman turns to the handmade and the abstract, finding there a rich set of artistic practices and an opportunity to probe timely theoretical questions. Essential reading for scholars of contemporary art and media.”—Erika Balsom, author of After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation
“Making Images Move offers at once a lively account of cameraless cinemas, an invaluable supplement to the study of experimental and avant-garde film, and a compendium to the study of contemporary digital and interactive cinemas that have redefined the conventions of commercial entertainment.”—Akira Lippit, author of Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift?
“A much-needed celebration of the achievements of these artists, many of whom are almost entirely unaccounted for in the literature of the field. Zinman has unearthed a wealth of original material in this comprehensive and compelling history.”—Roger Rothman, author of Tiny Surrealism: Salvador Dalí and the Aesthetics of the Small
“Gregory Zinman expands and deepens our understanding of the impact of the moving image on art and culture. He deftly constructs a critical method and historiography that embraces diverse modalities of moving-image making, and in the process, he rethinks the boundaries of the moving image itself. There’s a lot to discover in this book! An important and beautifully illustrated volume that should be read by every student of film, video, media, and art history.”—John Hanhardt, curator and author of Bill Viola