Week 1

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (1968; New York: Schocken, 1969) 217-51.

Dziga Vertov, “We: Variant of a Manifesto,” Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson, tr. Kevin O’Brien (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) 5-9.

Week 2

Grace L. McCann Morley, “Foreword”; Richard Foster and Frank Stauffacher, “Introductory Notes”; Hans Richter, “A History of the Avantgarde”; Elie Faure, “The Art of Cineplastics”; Man Ray, [untitled]; Art in Cinema, ed. Frank Stauffacher (San Francisco: Art in Cinema Society/San Francisco Museum of Art,

1947).

Peter Bürger, “On the Problem of the Autonomy of Art in Bourgeois Society,” Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) 35-54.

Germaine Dulac, “The Essence of the Cinema: The Visual Idea” (1925), The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney (New York: New York University Press, 1978) 36-43.

André Breton, “First Surrealist Manifesto,” Theater of the Avant-Garde 1890-1950, ed. Bert Cardullo and Robert Knopf (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) 366-72.

Week 3

Maya Deren, An Anagram of Ideas on Art, Form, and Film [selections] (Yonkers: Alicat, 1946); reprinted in The Legend of Maya Deren, vol. I, part 2, ed. VèVè A. Clark, Millicent Hodson, Catrina Neiman (New York: Anthology/Film Culture, 1988) 555-60, 571-75, 594-602.

Jonas Mekas, “The Experimental Film in America,” Film Culture 1.3 (May/June 1955): 15-20.

David James, “The Forties: Maya Deren and Her Acolytes, Wizards of the Id,” The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005) 165-202.

Juan A. Suárez, “The 1960s Underground as Political Postmodernism: From the New Sensibility to Gay Cultural Activism,” Bike Boys, Drag Queens, Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture, and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press) 87-140.

Week 4

Thomas Y. Levin, “Dismantling the Spectacle: The Cinema of Guy Debord,” on the passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time: The Situationist International 1957-1972, ed. Elizabeth Sussman (Boston/Cambridge: ICA/MIT Press, 1991) 73-123.

Selections from the Situationist International Anthology, ed. & trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1981).

John Burris, “Did the Portapak Cause Video Art? Notes on the Formation of a New Medium,” Millennium Film Journal 29 (Fall 1996): 3-28.

David Ross, “A Provisional Overview of Artists’ Television in the U.S.,” New Artists Video: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1978).

Nam June Paik with Charlotte Moorman, “Videa, Vidiot, Videology,” New Artists Video: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1978) [recommended].

Robert Stefanotty, “Kissing the Unique Object Good-Bye”; New Artists Video: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1978) [recommended].

Week 5

Alain Fleischer, “Michael Snow’s Cinemachine,” tr. Gila Walker, Michael Snow Panoramique: Photgraphic Works and Films, 1962-1999 (Bruxelles: Société des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, 1999) 50-63.

“The Life and Times of Michael Snow” (interview with Joe Mejuck), The Collected Writings of Michael Snow, The Michael Snow Project (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press) 68-80.

Margaret Morse, “Video Installation Art: The Body, the Image, and the Space-in-Between,” Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, ed. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (New York: Aperture [w/ the Bay Area Video Coalition], 1990) 153-67.

Melinda Barlow, “No Place Like Home,” Art in America Jan. 2000: 103-06.

Bill Viola, selections from Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973-1994, ed. Robert Violette (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995) 146-52 [recommended].

Week 6

Kate Haug, “An Interview with Carolee Schneemann”; Caroline Koebel, “From Danger to Ascendancy: Notes toward Carolee Schneemann,” Wide Angle 20.1 (1998): 20-62.

Roy Grundmann, “Gay Masculinity between (De)construction and Demontage,” Andy Warhol’s Blow Job (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003) 100-31.

Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,” October 1.1 (1976): 51-64.

Week 7

Christine Tamblyn, “Qualifying the Quotidian: Artist’s Video and the Production of Social Space,” Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, ed. Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996) 13-28.

Martha Rosler, “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment,” Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Art, ed. Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (New York: Aperture [w/ the Bay Area Video Coalition], 1990) 31-50.

Dierdre Boyle, “From Portapak to Camcorder: A Brief History of Guerrilla Television,” Journal of Film and Video 44.1-2 (Spring-Summer 1992): 67-79.

Patricia Mellencamp, “Video and the Counterculture,” Global Television, ed. Cynthia Schneider and Brian Wallis (New York: Wedge/Cambridge MA: MIT University Press, 1988) 199-223.

Week 8

Jeffrey Skoller, “Introduction,” Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) xiii-xlvi.

Jeffrey Skoller, “Obsessive Returns: Filmmaking as Mourning Work” Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005) 149-66.

Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey, vol. 14 (London: Hogarth, 1957) 239-58.

Week 9

Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Difference: ‘A Special Third World Women Issue,’” Discourse 8 (Fall-Winter 1986-87): 10-37.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée (1982; Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1995) 1-33.

Mia Carter, “The Politics of Pleasure: Cross-Cultural Autobiographic Performance in the Video Works of Sadie Benning,” Signs 23.3 (1998) 745-69.

Week 10

Akira Mizuta Lippit, “Cinemnesis: Martin Arnold’s Memory Machine,” Afterimage May/June 1997: 8-10.

Julia Bryan-Wilson, “Some Kind of Grace: An Interview with Miranda July,” Camera Obscura 55 (2004): 181-97.