Indiscretions: Avant-Garde Film, Video, and Feminism (Theories of Contemporary Culture) - Softcover

Mellencamp, Patricia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0253205875 ISBN 13: 9780253205872

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 1990

Synopsis

Indiscretions follows the path of U.S. avant-garde film and video from the underground of the 1960s to the academy of the 1980s. Patricia Mellencamp traces and charts the intersections of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the desiring male subject, Roland Barthes and texts of pleasure, Michel Foucault and the disciplinary society, the grotesque body and Mikhail Bakhtin, the rhizomatic alogic of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and the female subject of feminist film theory. She creates a dialogue among theory and popular culture and politics through inventive readings of the films of Owen Land, Hollis Frampton, Ken Jacobs, Bruce Conner, Robert Nelson, Michael Snow, Yvonne Rainer, and Sally Potter, and videotapes by Ant Farm, TVTV, Michael Smith, William Wegman, and Cecelia Condit.

About this title

Review:

"... delightfully personal even though it is solidly academic and documented... a welcome and rare bridging of the theoretical and the practical explication of particular texts." Choice "... influenced by Foucault, by Deleuze and Guattari ... in a style that is passionate and inventive. The essays reflect the author's enthusiasm for a kind of filmmaking and criticism which sidesteps the cautious scholarly mode. Mellencamp is a theorist ... who enjoys taking liberties with theory ... one moment an academic spokeswoman on behalf of the avant garde; the next a feminist critic; then a raconteur bringing us tales from the underground; then a cultural archivist putting down in print otherwise undocumented past moments; and finally, a postmodern writer pursuing a 'rhizomatic' path ... Mellencamp is remembering a history which made an enormous contribution to present-day film culture." Angela McRobbie, Screen "Mellencamp takes a fresh look at the American avant-garde cinema ... a lively intellectual romp, moving rapidly from one concept to another ..." Cantrills Filmnotes " ... Mellencamp writes well, with flair and style, with a kind of feisty eclecticism." East-West Film Journal " ... an invigorating read; its devotion to the avant-garde is infectious; and its optimism fires hope for a bold and transgressive future for feminist cultural politics ..." Journal of Gender Studies

About this edition

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0253205875
• ISBN 13: 9780253205872
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256