The Palgrave Handbook of Experimental Cinema, 2024

This book is a collection of newly commissioned essays by established and emerging scholars that maps out the current landscape of experimental cinema studies and sets agendas for future work in the field. Introducing new critical methodologies and calling overdue attention to neglected artists, regions, and topics, the contributions to this volume reassess and reassert experimental cinema as a site of formal exploration and interrogation as well as resistance to institutional, political, and social norms. This collection articulates what it means for experimental cinema to be these things in the contemporary moment, staking out new directions in thinking about the subject not only as a growing sub-field of cinema studies, but as an artistic and scholarly tradition in dialogue with art history, visual culture, philosophy, and the sciences. The contributions reflect a diversity of voices and perspectives, weaving together theoretical, poetic, and personal modes of writing and traversing questions of form, emotion, materiality, national, postcoloniality, the body, and ecology. 

1. Introduction.-2. Letters from the (Sub)Field: Canons, Institutions, Legacies and Horizons.-3. The Practice of “Non-Knowing”: Experimental Cinema’s Blurred Aesthetics.-4. Cut-ups: First Blood.-5. Midnight in Andalusia: Mainstream Cinema and the Avant-Garde.-6. Unframing.- 7. Poetic Procedures in David Gatten’s The Great Art of Knowing and The Extravagant Shadows.- 8. Matters of Photochemical Alchemy/Chymistry.-9. A History of Dreams, or The Experimental Cinema of Georges Perec.-10. Experimental Film, DW Winnicott, and Object Relations: A Thought Experiment.-11. Cognitivism and the Avant-Garde.- 12. Strange Feelings: Experimental Film, Cognition, and Emotion.-13. Splinter in my Eye: Structural/Materialist Film.-14. Disrupting Colonial Histories through Process Cinema.- 15. ANTI-COLONIAL CINEMA PRACTICES:  dialogical ethnographic, experimental and photochemical film praxis in Puerto Rico.-16. An Experimental Ethnographic Cinema in Mexico: The Case of Nicolás Echevarría’s Judea.- 17. No Sex Please: Film, Feminism and Sex in the 1970s and 1980s.- 18. Disarticulating Authorship: Vicky Smith’s Direct Animations.- 19. Processing Problems: Experimental Film, Pornography, Historiography.- 20. Visioning Reproductive Labour in Experimental and Artist Film Representations of Gestation and Birth.- 21. Experimental Film Practice and the Biosphere.- 22. Negotiating Human and Non-Human Entanglements in Experimental Cinema.- 23. Color Field Film: Post-Painterly Landscapes in Experimental Cinema.- 24. An Ethics of Place and Ways of Telling: Finding a Feminist Eco-cinema in Moving Image’s Ecological Turn.- 25. Larry Gottheim’s Entanglement: “Going against the Clock” (an essay entangled with a conversation).- 26. Towards a Practice of Experimental Cinema-Making.- 27. A Space that Breathes: Discotheques, Display and Environment in 1960s Japanese Expanded Cinema.- 28. Guilty as Charged: A Defense of Norman McLaren for Experimental Film History in Canada.- 29. Ghost Writing: Where is Australian Experimental Film?.- 30. Dedications in Recent Avant-Garde Film.