AFTERIMAGE

LUX Shop is very happy to be able to offer new copies of various issues of the seminal UK film magazine AFTERIMAGE which was published between 1970-1987.

AFTERIMAGE was founded in 1970. It was kick-started with funds and encouragement from the film-maker Peter Whitehead. It was a time of numerous small – and radical – film magazines, often emerging, like AFTERIMAGE, from universities. Others included CINEMA, CINEMANTICS, CINIM and CINEMA RISING. Nearly all reacted against what was seen as the conservative positions of SIGHT AND SOUND and MOVIE with positions on radical politics and radical aesthetics and the new independent and underground cinema; positions that were explored in the founding issues of AFTERIMAGE. Thus No 1, published in April 1970, carried an emblematic image from the Cinetracts on its cover and featured material on or by Glauber Rocha, Peter Whitehead, English producer Tony Garnett, the ‘re-discovery’ of DzigaVertov and on the contemporary radical newsreels in the US, Italy and France. At its heart it contained a dossier of texts on the ‘Dziga Vertov Group’ films of the then, for us, exemplary figure of Jean-Luc Godard and his associate, Jean-Pierre Gorin. It included Godard’s militant manifesto WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
No 2 was devoted to Avant-Garde Film and included essays by P Adams Sitney on the exemplary figures from the other ‘wing’ of the avant-garde for the magazine like Brakhage and Snow. It had Steve Dwoskin on Mare’s Tail, and essays on the German underground and the French New Cinema. The 3rd issue on Third World Cinema refected the emerging radical Latin American cinema with essays on and by Rocha, Espinosa and Solanas. The 4th issue in 1972 under the rubric of For a New Cinema brought together the ‘two avant-gardes’ that Peter Wollen was later to outline in his influential essay in Studio International in 1975 and that reflected the continuing interests of Afterimage. Wollen along with Noel Burch was an exemplary critic of the avant-garde for the magazine, which also highlighted essays and polemics by film-makers themselves. No 4 included Wollen’s essay on Counter Cinema on Godard’s Vent D’Est plus writing by Paul Sharits, Malcolm LeGrice, Noel Burch and and extended interview with Hollis Frampton.
Sadly these early volumes are effectively out-of-print and only available in a limited number of almost complete sets (email [email protected] to enquire about these sets), along with volume 6 which was entirely devoted to Perspectives on English Independent Cinema with essays on Gidal’s theory, on Jeff Keen, Dwoskin and Cinema Action among others. In those that we are now glad to make available the magazine continued its happily partisan policy of focussing each issue on a theme or on exemplary film-makers and their writings.
Afterimage ceased publication in 1987 with its special issue No 13, Animating the Fantastic, also now sold out, focussing on the work of Jan Svankmajer and other great contemporary animators including Norstein, Brothers Quay and Bokanoswki.
The following issues are available by clicking below on the related LUX Shop items