Making Images Move reveals a new history of cinema by uncovering its connections to other media and art forms. In this richly illustrated volume, Gregory Zinman explores how moving-image artists who worked in experimental film pushed the medium toward abstraction through a number of unconventional filmmaking practices, including painting and scratching directly on the film strip; deteriorating film with water, dirt, and bleach; and applying materials such as paper and glue. This book provides a comprehensive history of this tradition of “handmade cinema” from the early twentieth century to the present, opening up new conversations about the production, meaning, and significance of the moving image. From painted film to kinetic art, and from psychedelic light shows to video synthesis, Gregory Zinman recovers the range of forms, tools, and intentions that make up cinema’s shadow history, deepening awareness of the intersection of art and media in the twentieth century, and anticipating what is to come.

About the Author

Gregory Zinman is Assistant Professor of Film and Media in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology and is a coeditor, with John Hanhardt and Edith Decker-Phillips, of We Are in Open Circuits: Writings by Nam June Paik.

List of Illustrations
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

"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."
— Los Angeles Review of Books

"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."
— Cinema Scope Magazine

"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."
— Film Comment

"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."
— Critical Inquiry

"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."
— Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

"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."
— Millennium Film Journal

“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

About the Book

About the Author

Table of Contents

Reviews