More on artists' film and video: an e-book, and 'vodcast' links

From Ecology, directed by Sarah Turner, 2007. Photo: Matthew Walter/Sarah Turner

A few more links have been added to Film Studies For Free's list of film-scholarly podcasts and videocasts, most notably one to a page on the LUXONLINE site, a brilliant web resource for exploring British based artists’ film and video in-depth (offering critical writing, stills, streaming video clips, and other contextual resources).

The link I've just added is to LUXONLINE's offering of 'vodcasts' of interviews with leading British film artists and curators (link HERE, please note, though, that you need to be registered first with iTunes in order to access almost all of the vodcasts). There are video interviews with Andrew Kötting, Angela Kingston (independent curator), Tina Keane, Ruth Novaczek, Chris Welsby, Alia Syed, Stephen Dwoskin, and Harold Offeh. The latest vodcast is with Sarah Pucill (there's currently no need for an iTunes account for this one: there's a direct link HERE)

The LUXONLINE site also has a lot of original artists' films, or clips from artists' films, available for viewing in streaming video, so it is well worth taking the time to explore the site properly. You can start your searches for resources by particular artists HERE and for particular streamed films/clips HERE.

There's another organisation which has even more user-friendly listings to assist with tracking down British-based artists' film available for viewing more generally on the web (links HERE and HERE). The British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection is a research project led by David Curtis and Steven Ball and based at Central St Martins College of Art and Design, London. It focuses in particular on the history of artists' film and video in Britain.

Like LUXONLINE, the British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection also provides a good collection of freely accessible research papers on artists' film or by film artists (link HERE), including ones by Malcolm Le Grice and Michael Mazière. There's also a paper by my friend and former colleague in Film Studies at the University of Kent, Sarah Turner, which sets out some of the conceptual background to her 2007 film Ecology (read a BBC interview HERE), which premiered at last year's Cambridge Film Festival.

Finally, there's also a link now in Film Studies For Free's 'Film Open Access e-books' listing to Gene Youngblood's hugely influential and prescient Expanded Cinema, a 444 page book, originally published in 1970 (downloadable in a single .pdf via Ubu.com; and also accessible HERE in separate sections via http://www.vasulka.org/). Expanded Cinema, as the very useful Wikipedia article on it argues, was

the first book to consider video as an art form, [and] was influential in establishing the field of media arts. In the book [Youngblood] argues that a new, expanded cinema is required for a new consciousness. He describes various types of filmmaking utilising new technology, including film special effects, computer art, video art, multi-media environments and holography.