Bringing alive a remarkable moment in American cultural history, Scott MacDonald tells the colorful story of how a small, backyard organization in the San Francisco Bay Area emerged in the 1960s and evolved to become a major force in the development of independent cinema. Drawing from extensive conversations with men and women crucial to Canyon Cinema, from its newsletter Canyon Cinemanews, and from other key sources, MacDonald offers a lively chronicle of the life and times of this influential, idiosyncratic film exhibition and distribution collective. His book features many primary documents that are as engaging and relevant now as they were when originally published, including essays, poetry, experimental writing, and drawings.

Expanded cinema: avant-garde moving image works that claim new territory for the cinematic, beyond the bounds of familiar filmmaking practices and the traditional theatrical exhibition space. First emerging in the 1960s amidst seismic shifts in the arts, multi-screen films, live cinematic performance, light art, kinetic art, video, and computer-generated imagery - all placed under expanded cinema's umbrella - re-emerged at the dawn of the 2000s, opening a vast new horizon of possibility for the moving image, and perhaps even heralding the end of cinema as we know it. Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia offers a bold new account of its subject, breaking from previous studies and from larger trends in film and art scholarship. Author Jonathan Walley argues that expanded cinema's apparent departure from the traditions and forms of cinema as we know it actually radically asserts cinema's nature and artistic autonomy. Walley also resituates expanded cinema within the context of avant-garde film history, linking it to a mode of filmmaking that has historically investigated and challenged the nature and limits of cinematic form. As an outgrowth of this tradition, expanded cinema offered a means for filmmakers within the avant-garde, regardless of their differing styles, formal concerns, and politics, to stake out cinema's unique aesthetic terrain - its ontology, its independence, its identity. In addition to reconsidering the better-known expanded cinema works of the 1960s and 70s by artists like Andy Warhol, Robert Whitman, and Nam June Paik, Cinema Expanded also provides the first scholarly accounts of scores of lesser-known works across more than 50 years. Making new arguments about avant-garde cinema in general and its complex meditations on the nature of cinema, it urgently addresses current and crucial debates about the fate of the moving image amidst a digital age of near-constant technological change.

"MacDonald's selections tread a pitch-perfect path between being comprehensive and making an engrossing and illuminating narrative. He has perfected his voice, and controls the entire history of U.S. avant-garde film with an easy and graceful confidence."—David E. James, author of The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles

Sporting Blackness examines issues of race and representation in sports films, exploring what it means to embody, perform, play out, and contest blackness by representations of Black athletes on screen. By presenting new critical terms, Sheppard analyzes not only “skin in the game,” or how racial representation shapes the genre’s imagery, but also “skin in the genre,” or the formal consequences of blackness on the sport film genre’s modes, codes, and conventions. Through a rich interdisciplinary approach, Sheppard argues that representations of Black sporting bodies contain “critical muscle memories”: embodied, kinesthetic, and cinematic histories that go beyond a film’s plot to index, circulate, and reproduce broader narratives about Black sporting and non-sporting experiences in American society.

This volume offers introductions to the work of fifteen avant-garde American women filmmakers.

"A superb collection, as exciting, in many ways, as the works it chronicles."--Akira Mizuta Lippit, author of Atomic Light (Shadow Optics)