A collection of texts by researchers, artists and critics, exploring Morgan Fisher's filmography in relation to his other artistic practices. Positioned at the intersection of cinema, painting, installation, architecture, video, drawing and photography, the work of filmmaker Morgan Fisher remains to be explored, as is its influence on new generations of artists. This collection considers Morgan Fisher's filmography in relation to his other artistic practices, and investigates the very special temporality created by Fisher's structural interventions. The publication gathers researchers, artists and critics, to draw up the unprecedented profile of a work guided by the love of cinema, while going beyond it. Morgan Fisher, an artist and filmmaker, was born in Washington, D.C., in 1942. He received an A.B. in art history from Harvard College, then studied film production in Los Angeles. His early work was predominantly in film. His films have been shown at international film festivals (Berlin, Rotterdam, London, among others) and in one-person screenings or exhibitions at, among other places, Tate Modern, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In the early 1990s he started making works on paper, then paintings and sculptures. One-person exhibitions that included examples of such work were at Portikus, Raven Row, Museum Abteiberg, Generali Foundation, and Aspen Art Museum. More recently, he has exhibited photographs. He was in the 1985, 2004, and 2014 Whitney Biennials. A collection of his writings was published in 2012 by Walther König. He has been a visiting teacher at Brown University, California Institute of the Arts, and the University of California, Los Angeles. He lives and works in Los Angeles.

This book takes an extensive look at the many different types of users and cultures that comprise the popular social media platform Tumblr. Though it does not receive nearly as much attention as other social media such as Twitter or Facebook, Tumblr and its users have been hugely influential in creating and shifting popular culture, especially progressive youth culture, with the New York Times referring to 2014 as the dawning of the “age of Tumblr activism.” Perfect for those unfamiliar with the platform as well as those who grew up on it, this volume contains essays and artwork that span many different topics: fandom; platform structure and design; race, gender and sexuality, including queer and trans identities; aesthetics; disability and mental health; and social media privacy and ethics. An entire generation of young people that is now beginning to influence mass culture and politics came of age on Tumblr, and this volume is an indispensable guide to the many ways this platform works.

American artist Morgan Fisher became prominent in the early 1970s as an experimental filmmaker in the structuralist milieu, whose main interest was not the content of that depicted but rather the analysis of the medium itself. This title explores Fisher's work.

“An engaging mix of humor and detailed critical analysis…great fun.” —Mojo From the award-winning author of Bring It On Home: Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin, and Beyond and Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd comes this deeply researched alphabetical biography of Queen and each of its dynamic members. Addressing the phenomenal success of the movie Bohemian Rhapsody, acclaimed music journalist Mark Blake builds on the legend of Queen and their enduring audience appeal. Providing a fresh, unparalleled take on Queen’s music, story, and legacy, Blake’s complete portrait covers not only the major hits and bestselling albums, but also the inside stories behind the music. Via a series of essays, interviews, and biographies, the author shares a wealth of lesser-known details—gained from over thirty years of original material—and explores what the songs of Queen say about their creators. “You want it all? There’s not much missing here.” —Classic Rock

Marking a return for Laura Mulvey to questions of film theory and feminism, as well as a reconsideration of new and old film technologies, this urgent and compelling collection of essays is essential reading for anyone interested in the power and pleasures of moving images. Its title, Afterimages, alludes to the dislocation of time that runs through many of the films and works it discusses as well as to the way we view them. Beginning with a section on the theme of woman as spectacle, a shift in focus leads to films from across the globe, directed by women and about women, all adopting radical cinematic strategies. Mulvey goes on to consider moving image works made for art galleries, arguing that the aesthetics of cinema have persisted into this environment. Structured in three main parts, Afterimages also features an appendix of ten frequently asked questions on her classic feminist essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in which Mulvey addresses questions of spectatorship, autonomy, and identity that are crucial to our era today.

In Archiveology Catherine Russell uses the work of Walter Benjamin to explore how the practice of archiveology—the reuse, recycling, appropriation, and borrowing of archival sounds and images by filmmakers—provides ways to imagine the past and the future. Noting how the film archive does not function simply as a place where moving images are preserved, Russell examines a range of films alongside Benjamin's conceptions of memory, document, excavation, and historiography. She shows how city films such as Nicole Védrès's Paris 1900 (1947) and Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) reconstruct notions of urban life and uses Christian Marclay's The Clock (2010) to draw parallels between critical cinephilia and Benjamin's theory of the phantasmagoria. Russell also discusses practices of collecting in archiveological film and rereads films by Joseph Cornell and Rania Stephan to explore an archival practice that dislocates and relocates the female image in film. In so doing, she not only shows how Benjamin's work is as relevant to film theory as ever; she shows how archiveology can awaken artists and audiences to critical forms of history and memory.

In 1891 a young W. E. B. DuBois addressed the annual American Historical Association on the enforcement of slave trade laws: “Northern greed joined to Southern credulity was a combination calculated to circumvent any law, human or divine.” One law in particular he was referring to was the Abolition Act of 1808. It was specifically passed to end the foreign slave trade. However, as Ernest Obadele-Starks shows, thanks to profiteering smugglers like the Lafitte brothers and the Bowie brothers, the slave trade persisted throughout the south for a number of years after the law was passed. Freebooters and Smugglers examines the tactics and strategies that the adherents of the foreign slave trade used to challenge the law. It reassesses the role that Americans played in the continuation of foreign slave transshipments into the country right up to the Civil War, shedding light on an important topic that has been largely overlooked in the historiography of the slave trade.