Series Site
March 4–17
“This series of screenings celebrates the publication by The Visible Press of “The Afterimage Reader”, a selection of editorials, essays, interviews, and filmmakers’ statements from the British film journal Afterimage, which was published irregularly between 1970 and 1987. Afterimage was founded on the principle of an on-going commitment to avant-garde cinema, to radical cinema, to ‘new’ cinema understood both aesthetically and politically.
Afterimage emphasized the importance of the writings of filmmakers themselves. Over 13 issues, alongside critical essays by important critics such as Noël Burch, B. Ruby Rich, and Regina Cornwell, it published manifestoes, scripts, theoretical texts, polemical essays from filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard, Glauber Rocha, Julio García Espinosa, Hollis Frampton, Paul Sharits, Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey, Malcolm Le Grice, Yvonne Rainer, Raúl Ruiz, Stephen Dwoskin, Jan Švankmajer, and many others, as well as by important precursors for a radical cinema like Dziga Vertov and Jean Epstein. Special issues were devoted to Michael Snow and to Derek Jarman. Each publication was effectively a special issue around a theme or filmmaker.
Presenting this series at Anthology Film Archives offers the opportunity to acknowledge how indebted Afterimage was to Film Culture magazine. It was a model for us of a partisan publication that came to be deeply committed to the promotion and representation of the New American Cinema and its rich avant-garde manifestations of the 1960s and 1970s.
Afterimage similarly prided itself on its design. So just as important was our admiration of the handsome issues of Film Culture designed by Fluxus founder George Maciunas. As a consequence of this influence every issue of Afterimage had a distinctive and different design with title pages and full-bleed images.
If the first six issues circled around the ‘two avant-gardes’ and debates in cinema theory, later issues continued the commitment to new, radical cinema but also considered ‘neglected’ works and figures, like BORDERLINE in the past and – at the time of publication – Raúl Ruiz.
Toward the end of Afterimage’s run, new editorial energies steered us in the direction of ‘troublesome cases’: first a festschrift on Derek Jarman, then our final issue featuring the Quay Brothers, Švankmajer, Bokanowski, and other visionary animators.” —Simon Field
Simon Field and Mark Webber will be here in person to introduce selected screenings!