Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood (Hardcover First Edition)
Published by E. P. Dutton & Co., 1970
Sewn bound hardcover
First edition
432 pages
8.5x6 inches
First edition. Near Fine book in Very Good dust jacket. Comes in removable protective Brodart mylar cover.
“What if film criticism could read as science fiction? That question crossed my mind as I was reading Gene Youngblood’s influential 1970 survey that functions as history and augury at once. Youngblood offers... an integrative approach to some of the most radical modes of moviemaking in the 1960s, bringing together bodies of work that might otherwise be understood in contradiction― Stan Brakhage meets Bell Labs... Expanded Cinema is a future forecast by way of a vibe report.”—Thomas Beard, Artforum
Gene Youngblood’s hugely influential Expanded Cinema was the first serious treatment of video, computers, and holography as cinematic technologies. Long considered the bible for media artists, Youngblood’s insider account of 1960s counterculture and the birth of cybernetics remains a mainstay reference in today’s hypermediated digital world.
The book is unique eyewitness account of burgeoning experimental film and the birth of video art in the late 1960s, tracing the evolution of cinematic language to the end of fiction, drama, and realism. Vast in scope, its prescient formulations include “the paleocybernetic age,” “intermedia,” the “artist as design scientist,” the “artist as ecologist,” “synaesthetics and kinesthetics,” and “the technosphere: man/machine symbiosis.” Outstanding works are analyzed in detail. Methods of production are meticulously described, including interviews with artists and technologists of the period, such as Nam June Paik, Jordan Belson, Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, Stan VanDerBeek, Les Levine, and Frank Gillette. An inspiring Introduction by the celebrated polymath and designer R. Buckminster Fuller―a perfectly cut gem of countercultural thinking in itself―places Youngblood’s radical observations in comprehensive perspective.
