"for over 40 years, Pablo has been putting his stamp on the moving image through works such as the opening of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and the revolutionary split-screen montage of 1963's The Thomas Crown Affair. He has also created the opening titles for Hal Ashby's Being There (1979) and Gus Van Sant's To Die For (1995)."
(Art of the Title)
"In 1924 Claude Friese-Greene (cinematographer and son of moving-image pioneer William) embarked on an intrepid road trip from Land's End to John O'Groats. He recorded his journey on film, using an experimental colour process. Entitled The Open Road, this remarkable travelogue was conceived as a series of 26 short episodes, to be shown weekly at the cinema."
(Independent Cinema Office, UK)
"Named after the pioneering critic of the commercialization of mass media, the late Professor Rose Goldsen of Cornell University, the Archive was founded in 2002 by Timothy Murray to house international art work produced on CD-Rom, DVD-Rom, video, digital interfaces, and the internet. Its collection of supporting materials includes unpublished manuscripts and designs, catalogues, monographs, and resource guides to new media art.
Emphasizing multimedia artworks that reflect digital extensions of twentieth-century developments in cinema, video, installation, photography, and sound, holdings include extensive special collections in American and Chinese new media arts, significant online and offline holdings in internet art, and the majority of works in the international exhibition, Contact Zones: The Art of CD-Rom. A novel research archive of international significance, the collection complements the holdings in the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections of illuminated manuscripts and the early modern printed book, and adds to the breadth of its important collections in human sexuality, Asian Studies, and Media, Film, and Music."
(Cornell University Library)
"Melvyn Bragg considers how technology and increasing access to education made possible the rise of a true mass culture in the twentieth century. He examines how the rise of cinema and photography opened the cultural realms to millions, and how our understanding of what culture is, and what it's for, was transformed by the work of scholars such as Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams."
(Melvyn Bragg, 2013)
"The Value of Culture: Two Cultures", Radio broadcast, Episode 4 of 5, Duration: 42 minutes, First broadcast: Thursday 03 January 2013, Presenter/Melvyn Bragg, Producer/Thomas Morris for the BBC Radio 4, UK.
"Meshes of the Afternoon is one of the most influential works in American experimental cinema. A non-narrative work, it has been identified as a key example of the 'trance film,' in which a protagonist appears in a dreamlike state, and where the camera conveys his or her subjective focus. The central figure in Meshes of the Afternoon, played by Deren, is attuned to her unconscious mind and caught in a web of dream events that spill over into reality. Symbolic objects, such as a key and a knife, recur throughout the film; events are open-ended and interrupted. Deren explained that she wanted 'to put on film the feeling which a human being experiences about an incident, rather than to record the incident accurately.'
Made by Deren with her husband, cinematographer Alexander Hammid, Meshes of the Afternoon established the independent avant-garde movement in film in the United States, which is known as the New American Cinema. It directly inspired early works by Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage, and other major experimental filmmakers. Beautifully shot by Hammid, a leading documentary filmmaker and cameraman in Europe (where he used the surname Hackenschmied) before he moved to New York, the film makes new and startling use of such standard cinematic devices as montage editing and matte shots. Through her extensive writings, lectures, and films, Deren became the preeminent voice of avant-garde cinema in the 1940s and the early 1950s."
(MoMA, 2004)
The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999.
Maya Deren (1943). "Meshes of the Afternoon", 16mm film, black and white, silent, 14 min. Acquired from the Artist.