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University of California Press

About the Book

"Ask audience to cut the part of the image on the screen that they don't like. Supply scissors."—Yoko Ono, Tokyo, June 1964

A dazzling range of unconventional film scripts and texts, many published for the first time, make up Scott MacDonald's newest collection. Illustrated with nearly 100 film stills, this fascinating book is at once a reference work of film history and an unparalleled sampling of experimental "language art." It contributes to the very dissipation of boundaries between cinematic, literary, and artistic expression thematized in the films themselves. Each text and script is introduced and contextualized by MacDonald; a filmography and a bibliography round out the volume.

This is a readable—often quite funny—literature that investigates differences between seeing and reading. Represented are avant-garde classics such as Hollis Frampton's Poetic Justice and Zorns Lemma and Morgan Fisher's Standard Gauge, and William Greaves's recently rediscovered Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One. Michael Snow turns film loose on language in So Is This; Peter Rose turns language loose on theory in Pressures of the Text.

Some of the most influential feminist filmscripts of recent decades—Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen's Riddles of the Sphinx, Su Friedrich's Gently Down the Stream, Trinh T. Minh-ha's Reassemblage, Yvonne Rainer's Privilege—confirm this book's importance for readers in gender and cultural studies as well as for filmmakers and admirers of experimental writing, independent cinema, and the visual arts in general.


"Ask audience to cut the part of the image on the screen that they don't like. Supply scissors."—Yoko Ono, Tokyo, June 1964

A dazzling range of unconventional film scripts and texts, many published for the first time, make up Scott MacDonald's

About the Author

Scott MacDonald is Professor of Film Studies and American Literature at Utica College. He is editor of A Critical Cinema and A Critical Cinema 2 (California, 1988, 1992).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Yoko Ono
Mini Film Scripts

William Greaves
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One: Director's Early Notes
   Prior to and during Production in the Spring of 1968
Transcript of Excerpt from Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One
Program Notes for Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One

Hollis Frampton
Narration from Part 1 of Zorns Lemma
Notes on Zorns Lemma
Narration from Part 3 of Zorns Lemma
Text of Poetic Justice
Text of Gloria!

Laura Mulvey/Peter Wollen
Script of Riddles of the Sphinx

James Benning
"Respect your flag ... " -from Grand Opera
Script for "New York 1980"

Michael Snow
Text of So Is This

Peter Rose
Introduction to Pleasures of the Text
Text of Secondary Currents

Morgan Fisher
Script of Standard Gauge

Trinh T. Minh-ha
Script of Reassemblage
Script of Naked Spaces-Living Is Round

Su Friedrich
(Script) for a Film without Images
Text of Gently Down the Stream
Script of Sink or Swim

Ann Marie Fleming
Transcript of New Shoes: An Interview in
   Exactly 5 Minutes
Transcript and Text from You Take Care Now

Yvonne Rainer
Script of Privilege

Distribution Sources
Selected Bibliography