Slow Writing: Thom Andersen on Cinema

£20.00

Out of stock

Slow Writing is a collection of articles by Thom Andersen that reflect on the avant-garde, Hollywood feature films, and contemporary cinema. His critiques of artists and filmmakers as diverse as Yasujirō Ozu, Nicholas Ray, Andy Warhol, and Christian Marclay locate their work within the broader spheres of popular culture, politics, history, architecture, and the urban landscape. The city of Los Angeles and its relationship to film is a recurrent theme. These writings, which span a period of five decades, demonstrate Andersen’s social consciousness, humour and his genuine appreciation of cinema in its many forms. Thom Andersen’s films include the celebrated documentary essays Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1975), Los Angeles Plays Itself(2003), and The Thoughts That Once We Had(2015). Together with Noël Burch, he produced primary studies of the Hollywood Blacklist in the form of the book Les communistes de Hollywood: Autre chose que des martyrs (1994) and film Red Hollywood (1996). “There are few writers and few filmmakers who make me rethink what cinema is more than Thom Andersen. Sometimes this is a matter of introducing fresh perspectives, such as making cinema and architecture more mutually interactive. It’s always a political matter of figuring out just who and where we are, and why.” —– Jonathan Rosenbaum “In his disarmingly plainspoken introduction, Thom Andersen more or less apologizes for not becoming a film critic, and for not delivering a manifesto. Personally I’m relieved, and I think you should be as well, because we instead have his superb films, and that is something much more valuable. And now we have Slow Writing, where he shows us just how terrific a critic he hasn’t (mostly) bothered to be, and where he is also free to write brilliantly about his own films. The result of the resonance between this conjunction — writing about his own work alongside that of others — forms, in truth, a kind of quiet manifesto. This book belongs on a very small and special shelf of the most incisive and ungrandiose books by artists, alongside The Collected Writings of Robert Smithson.” —– Jonathan Lethem

More shop items

£30.00

In stock

£14.00

Out of stock

Skip to content