"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.
The Screening Series Program has detailed notes and information about each artist and their films. What is striking about these works is how critical they are of conceptual art, and, at the same time they employ the same modes as conceptual art from New York (for example).
