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SMFA Print Periodicals
- Film quarterlyPrint issues available at the SMFA Library
- Independent film & video monthlyPrint issues available at the SMFA Library
- Film commentPrint issues available at the SMFA Library and online issues
- Wide anglePrint issues available at the SMFA Library & Tisch and online issues
SMFA Online Periodicals
- Film quarterlyOnline issues
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- The velvet light trapOnline issues
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Featured Film Titles
Arthur Jafa: MAGNUMB by
"Though he has worked in film and music for decades, American video artist Arthur Jafa only garnered acclaim in the art world in 2016 for his video work Love is the Message, the Message is Death. Composed of found images and videos, his oeuvre revolves around Black American culture, the history of slavery, and ongoing structural and physical violence against Black Americans. As Jafa put it in his 2003 text 'My Black Death': 'The central conundrum of black being (the double bind of our ontological existence) lies in the fact that common misery both defines and limits who we are. Such that our efforts to eliminate those forces which constrain also function to dissipate much which gives us our specificity, our uniqueness, our flavor by destroying the binds that define we will cease to be, but this is the good death (boa morte) to be embraced.' This essential overview presents Jafa's best-known works, such as Love is the Message, the Message is Death and its 2018 follow-up piece The White Album, alongside never-before-seen projects and essays by notable scholars"--Publisher's website.
Call Number: SMFA: N6498.V53 J34 2021
The Art of Film Projection: a Beginner's Guide by
The Art of Film Projection: A Beginner's Guide' is a beautifully produced, comprehensive outline of the materials, equipment and knowledge needed to present the magic of cinema to an enthralled audience. Part manual and part manifesto, The Art of Film Projection compiles more than 50 years of expertise from the staff of the world-renowned George Eastman Museum and the students of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation into the most complete and accessible guide to film projection ever produced. The product of more than ten years of painstaking work by renowned film preservation specialists, and featuring a foreword by Tacita Dean and Christopher Nolan, this volume addresses a changing film landscape. No film comes to life until it is shown on the big screen, but with the proliferation of digital movie theaters, the expertise of film projection has become increasingly rare. Written for both the casual enthusiast and the professional projectionist in training, this book demystifies the process of film projection and offers an in-depth understanding of the aesthetic, technical and historical features of motion pictures. Fully accessible to the layperson, student, technician or scholar, the book is designed to be used: richly illustrated with photographs and easy-to-read diagrams, it is printed at a size that is easy to carry, with a ribbon bookmark and pages for notes. The Art of Film Projection invites readers to help save the authentic experience of seeing motion pictures on film.
Call Number: SMFA: TR890 .A78 2019
Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image by
Intersectional, intergenerational, and international perspectives on nonfiction filmmaking by women, generously illustrated, with film stills and other images. This book offers intersectional, intergenerational, and international perspectives on nonfiction film- and videomaking by and about women, examining practices that range from activist documentaries to avant-garde experiments. Concentrating primarily on the period between the 1970s and 1990s, the contributions revisit major figures, contexts, and debates across a polycentric, global geography. They explore how the moving image has been a crucial terrain of feminist struggle-a way of not only picturing the world but remaking it. The contributors consider key decolonial filmmakers, including Trinh T. Minh-ha and Sarah Maldoror; explore collectively produced films with ties to women's liberation movements in different countries; and investigate the cinematic expressions of tensions and alliances between feminism and anti-imperialist struggles. They grapple with the need for a broader more inclusive definition of the term "feminism"; meditate on the figure of the grandmother; reflect on realist aesthetics; and ask what a feminist film historiography might look like. The book, generously illustrated with film stills and other images, many in color, offers ten original texts, two conversations, and eight short essays composed in response to historical texts written by filmmakers. The historical texts, half of which are published in English for the first time, appear alongside the essays. Contributors Helena Amiradżibi, Madeleine Bernstorff, Teresa Castro, Counter Encounters (Laura Huertas Millan, Onyeka Igwe, Rachael Rakes), Ayanna Dozier, Forough Farrokhzad, Safi Faye, Devika Girish, Elena Gorfinkel, Haneda Sumiko, Shai Heredia, Juliet Jacques, Sarah Keller, Nzingha Kendall, Julia Lesage, Beatrice Loayza, Janaina Oliveira, Lakshmi Padmanabhan, Yasmina Price, Elizabeth Ramirez-Soto, Pooja Rangan, Lis Rhodes, Sara Saljoughi, Rasha Salti, Isabel Segui, Chick Strand, Monika Talarczyk, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Fran oise Verg s, Claudia von Alemann, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Shilyh Warren, Giovanna Zapperi
Call Number: SMFA: PN1995.9.W6 F466 2022
Film Noir Portraits by
With its singular focus on the very best portrait photography of the Film Noir era, every page of this coffee table volume is rich in brooding atmosphere. The portraits were taken by premiere studio photographers like Robert Coburn, Ernest Bachrach and A.L. Whitey. Their remarkable ability to exaggerate the play of shadow and light to dramatic effect is the reason that their work still has the same ability to arrest the viewer as it did in the 1940s. The photographs remain some of the most innovative and striking portraits in the history of cinema.
Call Number: SMFA and Tisch: TR681.A28 F55 2022
Flowers of Perversion, Volume 2 by
The disturbing, exciting, and defiantly avant-garde films of Jesos "Jess" Franco, director of such films as Vampyros Lesbos and Lilian the Perverted Virgin.Jesos "Jess" Franco is an iconic figure in world cinema. His sexually charged, fearlessly personal style of filmmaking has never been in vogue with mainstream critics, but for lovers of the strange and sado-erotic he is a magician, spinning his unique and disturbing dream worlds from the cheapest of budgets. In the world of Jess Franco freedom was the key, and he pushed at the boundaries of taste and censorship repeatedly, throughout an astonishingly varied career spanning sixty years. The director of more than 180 films, at his most prolific he worked in a supercharged frenzy that yielded as many as twelve titles per year, making him one of the most generative auteurs of all time. Franco's taste for the sexy and horrific, his lifelong obsession with the Marquis De Sade, and his roving hand-held camera style launched a whole new strain of erotic cinema. Disturbing, exciting, and defiantly avant-garde, films such as Necronomicon, Vampyros Lesbos, Virgin Among the Living Dead, and Venus in Furs are among the jewels of European horror, while a plethora of multiple versions, re-edits and echoes of earlier works turn the Franco experience into a dizzying hall of mirrors, further entrancing the viewer who dares enter Franco's domain. Stephen Thrower has devoted five years to examining each and every Franco film. This book-the second in a two-volume set-delves into the latter half of Franco's career, covering titles including Shining Sex, Barbed Wire Dolls, Swedish Nympho Slaves, and Lilian the Perverted Virgin. Assisted by the esteemed critic and researcher Julian Grainger, Thrower shines a light into the darkest corners of the Franco filmography and uncovers previously unknown and unsuspected facts about their casts, crews, and production histories. Unparalleled in scope and ambition, Flowers of Perversion brings Franco's career into focus with a landmark study that aims to provide the definitive assessment of Jess Franco's labyrinthine film universe.
Call Number: SMFA: PN1998.3.F73 T482 2019
Horror Caviar by
Recipes inspired by Alien; Audition; The Blob; Blood and Black Lace; Blood Dinner; The Boxer's Omen; Candyman; The Company of Wolves; Daughters of Darkness; Def by Temptation; Eve's Bayou; Eyes Without a Face; Ganja & Hess; Haxan; House; Matango; Midsommar; Pet Sematary; Possession; Raw; Rosemary's Baby; The Seventh Victim; The Shining; The Slumber Party Massacre; Suspiria; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2; Trouble Every Day; Valerie and Her Week of Wonders; The Witch.
Call Number: SMFA: TX739.2.H34 H67 2021
House of Psychotic Women by
In 2012, a book debuted that would go on to canonical status and usher in a new way of writing about film. Kier-La Janisse's HOUSE OF PSYCHOTIC WOMEN is an autobiographical exploration of female neurosis in horror and exploitation films that examines hundreds of films through a daringly personal lens. In this pioneering work, anecdotes and memories interweave with film history, criticism, trivia and confrontational imagery to create a reflective personal history and a consideration of female madness, both onscreen and off. To mark its 10th anniversary, Kier-La Janisse and FAB Press have reteamed to produce an expanded edition the book, featuring new writing on 100 more films - many of which were inspired in part by the book itself - and hundreds of new images. This first pressing of the Expanded Edition has been issued as a large format hardcover. Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen. Horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for these histrionics: crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria. Unlike her male counterpart - 'the eccentric' - the female neurotic lives a shamed existence, making these films those rare places where her destructive emotions get to play. This sharply-designed book, including a 48-page full-colour section, is packed with 680 rare stills, posters, pressbooks and artwork throughout, that combine with family photos and artifacts to form a titillating sensory overload, with a filmography that traverses the acclaimed and the obscure in equal measure. Films covered include The Entity, The Corruption of Chris Miller, Singapore Sling, 3 Women, Toys Are Not for Children, Repulsion, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, The Haunting of Julia, Secret Ceremony, Cutting Moments, Out of the Blue, Mademoiselle, The Piano Teacher, Possession, Antichrist and hundreds more!
Call Number: SMFA: PN1995.9.H6 J375 2022
I AM HERE: Home Movies and Everyday Masterpieces by
Multimedia expressions of a universal human impulse: the desire to record our daily lives, from cave paintings to TikTok Home movies capture everything from mundane events to rites of passage: a child's first steps, a family vacation or a birthday party. These everyday subjects that fascinate amateur filmmakers have also long inspired visual artists. I AM HEREpresents home movies alongside art by Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Nicole Eisenman, Keith Haring, David Hockney, Arthur Jafa, Ed Ruscha and others, as well as personal artifacts including family photo albums, mixtapes, time capsules, postcards and home movies. This book embraces a more-is-more visual approach with reproductions of art and film stills, plus an eye-popping cover by Toronto-based artist Fiona Smyth.
Call Number: SMFA: N6490 I23 2022
Labour in a Single Shot by
This collection of essays offers a critical assessment of Labour in a Single Shot, a groundbreaking documentary video workshop. From 2011 to 2014, curator Antje Ehmann and film- and video-maker Harun Farocki produced an art project of truly global proportions. They travelled to fifteen cities around the world to conduct workshops inspired by cinema history's first film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, shot in 1895 by the Lumière brothers in France. While the workshop videos are in colour and the camera was not required to remain static, Ehmann and Farocki's students were tasked with honouring the original Lumière film's basic parameters of theme and style. The fascinating result is a collection of more than 550 short videos that have appeared in international exhibitions and on an open-access website, offering the widest possible audience the opportunity to ponder contemporary labour in multiple contexts around the world.
Call Number: SMFA and ebook: PN1995.9.L28 L33 2022
Lawrence Abu Hamdan: Live Audio Essays by
An anthology of Abu Hamdan's disquieting audio-essay monologues on the soundscape of political life This volume compiles transcripts from performances and films by Beirut-based Lawrence Abu Hamdan (born 1985), an artist known for his political and cultural reflections on sound and listening. Taken from seven works dating from 2014 to 2022, Abu Hamdan's intricately crafted monologues are at times intimate, humorous and entertaining, yet politically disquieting in their revelations. Utilizing personal narratives, anecdotes, popular media and transcripts rooted in historic and contemporary moments, the artist leads the reader through his investigations into crimes that are heard but not seen. His live audio essays are an exercise in listening to acoustic memories, echoes of reincarnated lives, voices that leak through walls and borders, the drone of warfare, cinematic sound effects, atmospheric noise, the resonant frequencies of buildings and the sound of hunger. Collected here for the first time, all the texts were transcribed from performance documentation and edited with the artist.
Call Number: SMFA: NX573.6.L44 A28 2023
Maya Deren, Choreographed for Camera by
Illustrated biography of the groundbreaking 20th century experimental filmmaker.
Call Number: SMFA: PN1995.9.E96 D873 2022
Mommartzfilm 1964-2020 by
The work of the experimental filmmaker Lutz Mommartz (*1934) has been shaking up the art and film community for more than 50 years. Ever since he embarked on his career as an artist in the 1960s, Mommartz has been thinking out of the box. Rejecting the clichés of the movie industry, he aimed to bring about a radical new beginning of film – with a focus on aesthetic and social goals. In 1967, he soared to the top of the German avantgarde as a self-taught filmmaker after his surprising success at the renowned experimental film festival in Knokke, Belgium. Not only was he one of the founding members of the legendary Creamcheese bar populated by artists, but he also participated in influential festivals and exhibitions such as the documenta 4 (1968). From this time onward, he belonged to the circle of filmmakers who pressed ahead with “the other cinema” against the mainstream film industry and promoted alternative distribution systems. In 1975, Mommartz became the first professor of film at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and headed the film class until 1999. During a career spanning more than 50 years, Mommartz produced an impressive body of short and experimental films, feature films, and documentary recordings of Düsseldorf’s art scene. The two-volume publication provides an introduction into his diverse oeuvre and highlights thematic and associative connections between his films. Text in English and German. Published to accompany an exhibition at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, between 21 November 2020 and 7 February 2021.
Call Number: SMFA Library: N6888.M66 A4 2020
Murderous Passions by
Spanish filmmaker Jesus Franco (aka Jess Franco) directed more than 180 films in a career spanning six decades, making him one of the most prolific directors of all time and winner of a Lifetime Achievement prize at the 2009 Spanish Goya Film Awards. Yet his work frequently met with censorship resistance & was often despised by critics. Franco's taste for the sexy and horrific, his lifelong obsession with the Marquis De Sade and his roving hand-held camera style birthed a whole new strain of outlandish sado-erotica. This looks at the first half of his career.
Call Number: SMFA: PN1998.3.F73714 T57 2015
Reel Resistance - the Cinema of Jean-Marie Teno by
Both a monograph and a critical dialogue between academic Melissa Thackway, author of 'Africa Shoots Back', and the Cameroonian filmmaker Jean-Marie Teno, this collaborative work takes the reader on a journey through Teno's multifaceted on-going filmic reflection on Cameroon and the wider African continent, its socio-political systems, history, memory and cultures. Presenting and contextualizing Teno's cinema, it addresses the notion of political commitment in art and of cinema as a form of resistance. It also considers Teno's filmmaking both in relation to the theoretical and aesthetic debates to have animated West and Central African filmmakers since the 1960s and 1970s, and in relation to documentary filmmaking practices on the continent and beyond. In so doing, the book offers an analysis of the predominant stylistic and thematic traits of Teno's work, examines the individual films and the collective oeuvre, and highlights the evolutions of his film language and concerns. It identifies and explores the committed socio-political and historical themes at play, such as violence, power, history, memory, gender, trauma and exile. It also considers Teno's unwavering focus, both thematically and in his filmmaking choices, on forms and instances of resistance, framing his cinema as a form of decolonial aesthetics.
Call Number: SMFA and Ebook: PN1993.5.A35 T483 2020
Time Machine by
Both a book and an exhibition, Time Machine: Cinematic Temporalities takes as a starting point two events that occurred in the same year, 1895: the publication of H.G. Wells's 'scientific romance' The Time Machine: An Invention, the first literary work in which movement through time is made possible by a technical device, and the first public presentation, on the evening of December 28, 1895, of the Lumière Brothers's Cinématographe: a film camera functioning also as a film projector which, together with Edison's Kinetoscope and Kinetograph, introduced new possibilities of recording, storing, reproducing, and manipulating the visual flow of events unfolding in time. Based on this double starting point, Time Machine: Cinematic Temporalities tackles the way in which cinema and other moving-image media such as video and video installations have transformed, throughout their history, our perception of time through the different techniques of slow motion and acceleration, loops and reversals, time lapse and freeze-frame, multiple exposures, stop-motion animation, in addition to the endless variations of the operation of montage: that crucial act of separating and joining images and sounds which has often been considered as one of cinema's defining traits. Exhibition: Palazzo del Governatore, Parma, Italy (12.01-03.05.2020).
Call Number: TR848 .S66 2020
Vampire Cinema: the First One Hundred Years by
This coffee table visual feast celebrates a century of classic vampire cinema - mainstream and niche - through the many colourful ways in which the key films have been marketed and consumed, to enter the bloodstream of contemporary world culture. This book is dripping with stills, posters, artworks, pressbooks - many of which haven't seen the light of day for a very long time - and is introduced by cultural historian and connoisseur of the Gothic Christopher Frayling, who has been called 'the Van Helsing de nos jours'.
Call Number: SMFA: PN1990-1997
