An Excerpt from a current writing project-in-progress:
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (1895 1946) spent an extended portion of his book Painting, Photography, Film concerned with issues of the absolute film following his initial observations about the importance of Viking Eggelings work. His focus was on the ability to create an abstract work where light and movement appear on screen separated from the confines of theatrical, literary cinema: he called these works light-space articulation; an idea he developed initially in the form of the Light-Space Modulator, a kinetic sculpture produced in collaboration with Stefan Seboek at the Bauhaus in Berlin. This work was in development for most of the 1920s, an on-going project of Moholy-Nagys from 1922 when he created the first version until his final version done in 1930. It is this last version that appears in Ein Lichtspiel schwarz weiss grau (1930).
"The most striking thing about ''Moving Pictures" as a viewing experience has less to do with scholarship than perception. It turns time upside down. With their colors and verve, the paintings and posters and prints look so much more contemporary than the more recent art form does. Many of the films have deteriorated with time, lending them an appearance of patination. More than that, they have this alien aspect -- the jerky motions, the black and white, the teeming silence -- as from a distant, subaqueous world. It's as if the black edges of all those nifty screens are so many high-tech frames around images that could be from Lascaux."
Paul Arthur's new book collects his essays on avant-garde film from the past thirty years into a single volume. This book is a much needed survey of American work since 1965 that was written at the time of the events being discussed, rather than a historicizing volume written from a singular contemporary viewpoint.
