Title: Lovers of cinema : the first American film avant-garde, 1919- 1945 /
Authors: Horak, Jan-Christopher.
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press,
Year: 1995
Subjects: Experimental films United States History and criticism.
Abstract: Historians and students of American avant-garde cinema often overlook the films of the 1920s through the early 1940s, considering them mere derivatives of their European counterparts. In fact, the American films possess an eclecticism, innovation, and naivete all their own. Marshaling his broad cinematic and cultural knowledge, editor Jan-Christopher Horak has compiled in Lovers of Cinema a ground-breaking group of articles on this neglected film period. With one exception, all are original to this volume, and many are the first to treat comprehensively such early filmmakers as Mary Ellen Bute, Theodore Huff, and Douglass Crockwell.
Contents: Introduction : history in the gaps / Jan-Christopher Horak -- The first American film avant-garde, 1919-1945 / Jan-Christopher Horak -- The limits of experimentation in Hollywood / Kristin Thompson -- Robert Florey and the Hollywood avant-garde / Brian Taves -- Americans in Paris : Man Ray and Dudley Murphy / William Moritz -- Startling angles : amateur film and the early avant-garde / Patricia R. Zimmerman -- U.S. Modernism and the emergence of "the right wing of film art": the films of James Sibley Watson, Jr. and Melville Webber / Lisa Cartwright -- Theodore Huff: historian and filmmaker / Chuck Kleinhans --