BOOK LAUNCH:
A.L. Rees’s Fields of View: Film, Art and Spectatorship

Join us for an online discussion and screening to celebrate the launch of a new publication A.L. Rees’s Fields of View: Film, Art and Spectatorship 

A.L. Rees was an influential teacher, historian, critic and champion of experimental cinema right up until the end of his life in 2014. His book A History of Experimental Film and Video (1999/2011) remains a key text, supplemented by the wide range of essays he wrote for journals and several books on film and art. Rees left behind an incomplete manuscript for a book entitled Fields of View, which Simon Payne has carefully prepared for publication. Drawing on film theory, literary modernism, psychology and art history, Fields of View elucidates an expanded network of connections between avant-garde cinema and wider culture. Key terms including ‘fields’, ‘frames’ and ‘intervals’ recur throughout the book in different contexts uncovering ideas that connect a range of artists, critics and filmmakers. Auteur cinema and the canonical avant-garde are central to Fields of View, but so too are the works of younger and lesser-known artists, echoing Al’s engaged commitment and enthusiastic vision for the field.
Join us for a discussion of Fields of View and A.L. Rees’s wider contributions to experimental film and video. Participants include Nicky Hamlyn, Deniz Johns, Simon Payne and Jonathan Walley. We will also be screening two films that Rees writes about in the book: Maya Deren’s A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945) and Toby Cornish’s Sarajevo Vertical (2004).
The book is available from Bloomsbury