The first monograph on the groundbreaking video artist and member of the seminal Video Venice News and Studio Z groups.

This is the first major retrospective on the groundbreaking Los Angeles-based video artist Ulysses Jenkins (born 1946). Since the 1970s, Jenkins has interrogated questions of race and gender as they relate to ritual, history and state power. From his work with Video Venice News, a Los Angeles media collective he founded in the early 1970s, to his involvement with the artists' group Studio Z (alongside figures such as David Hammons, Senga Nengudi and Maren Hassinger), to his video and performance works, Jenkins explores how white supremacy is embedded in popular culture. Beginning as a painter and muralist, Jenkins was introduced to video just as the first consumer cameras were made available, and he quickly seized upon the technology as a means to broadcast critical depictions of multiculturalism. This catalog features an extensive portion of Jenkins' archive, early documentary films, photographs and ephemera, as well as his video art.

This book offers intersectional, intergenerational, and international perspectives on nonfiction film- and videomaking by and about women, examining practices that range from activist documentaries to avant-garde experiments. Concentrating primarily on the period between the 1970s and 1990s, the contributions revisit major figures, contexts, and debates across a polycentric, global geography. They explore how the moving image has been a crucial terrain of feminist struggle--a way of not only picturing the world but remaking it.  

The contributors consider key decolonial filmmakers, including Trinh T. Minh-ha and Sarah Maldoror; explore collectively produced films with ties to women's liberation movements in different countries; and investigate the cinematic expressions of tensions and alliances between feminism and anti-imperialist struggles. They grapple with the need for a broader more inclusive definition of the term "feminism"; meditate on the figure of the grandmother; reflect on realist aesthetics; and ask what a feminist film historiography might look like.  

The book, generously illustrated with film stills and other images, many in color, offers ten original texts, two conversations, and eight short essays composed in response to historical texts written by filmmakers. The historical texts, half of which are published in English for the first time, appear alongside the essays.  

Contributors 
Helena Amiradżibi, Madeleine Bernstorff, Teresa Castro, Counter Encounters (Laura Huertas Millán, Onyeka Igwe, Rachael Rakes), Ayanna Dozier, Forough Farrokhzad, Safi Faye, Devika Girish, Elena Gorfinkel, Haneda Sumiko, Shai Heredia, Juliet Jacques, Sarah Keller, Nzingha Kendall, Julia Lesage, Beatrice Loayza, Janaína Oliveira, Lakshmi Padmanabhan, Yasmina Price, Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto, Pooja Rangan, Lis Rhodes, Sara Saljoughi, Rasha Salti, Isabel Seguí, Chick Strand, Monika Talarczyk, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Françoise Vergès, Claudia von Alemann, Mitsuyo Wada-Marciano, Shilyh Warren, Giovanna Zapperi

Jack Smith presented his performance Irrational Landlordism of Bagdad as part of the Cologne Art Fair fringe in the summer of 1977. Many other events were documented photographically and can now be found in the Cologne Art Fair archives - not so Smith's performance.

This book shows him in his fair stall and during his performance for the first time. The pictures are perfect documents of a completely eccentric transaction by this pioneering director and performance artist.

An anthology of the theoretical and critical texts on experimental cinema and moving images written by Yann Beauvais in parallel with his films and his activities as programmer and curator.

Yann Beauvais (born 1953 in France), as a teacher in United States, became conscious of the need to lead a "cultural battle". Filmmaker and film critic, he organizes experimental cinema events in France and other countries. After his film and philosophy studies, he became very influenced by contemporary art (Russian formalism and minimal structuralism) and learned music, as well as by his friendship with Paul Sharits. He strives to find a balance between formalism and lyricism. He himself explains that the common denominator between all his films is that they are all constructed according to the principle : "fragility" – "disappearance" – "disintegration". In 1982 he co-founds Light Cone with Miles McKane. Amongst others he has published : Musique film with Deke Dusinberre (1986), Mots : dites, image with Miles McKane (1988), Poussières d'images (1998), and Monter/Sampler with Jean-Michel Bouhours (2000).

Based on questions raised by the work of filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha, the second volume of the Wattis Institute's annual reader includes new writing and art by Ranu Mukherjee, Kathy Zarur, Shylah Hamilton, Astria Suparak, and Tamara Suarez Porras, as well as written and visual contributions by Trinh T. Minh-ha, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Sky Hopinka,Christina Sharpe, Christine Wang, Camille Rankine, Dionne Brand, Renee Gladman, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Steffani Jemison, among others.

What does the promise of "speaking nearby" rather than "speaking about" look like today? What are the politics of hospitality? What are the problematics of "postfeminism," and how do we challenge the West as the authoritative subject of feminist knowledge? What are the ways that language can be a site of rupture? How do we generate mistrust in the "well-written," and how can poetry be a radical act of refusal? How can we be subjects that believe in land and not borders? What influence has technology and digital space had on the "making and unmaking of identity"? How do we navigate a cyclical eruption of decolonizations?

The Wattis Institute's annual reader, A Series of Open Questions, provides an edited selection of perspectives, images, and references related to the Wattis's year-long "On our mind" research seasons. Each volume includes newly commissioned writing by members of the research season's core reading group, as well as text and visual contributions by a diverse range of other artists and writers. The title of each reader takes the form of a question and becomes, as new books are published, a gradually evolving series of open questions.

If it can be said that experimental filmmakers are "expanding" the artistic field through an exploration of the potencies, modes of dissemination, or even performance of the moving image, in the Anthropocene age, these practices hope for another kind of expansion: to expand our experience of nature.

Appending flowers to the film strip or burying it in the ground, inventing observation devices, allowing the camera to be affected by natural forces, engaging one's own filming body in a symbiotic relationship with the environment, reconstituting ecosystems at the moment of projection: the ecologies of experimental cinema presented in this book constitute forms of practice and engagement that awaken a heightened sensitivity to the living world through cooperative links, casting other beings as subjects and agents of filmic processes, and, finally, reshaping the economy of filmmaking. Thus, ecologies of perception, medium, production and multinaturalism are deployed, contributing to the restoration of our sensory bond with the natural world.

Addressing technical, aesthetic and anthropological issues of cinema, Expanded Nature – Écologies du cinéma expérimental (Ecologies of Experimental Cinema) considers how filmmakers and collectives from different parts of the globe form communities with other non-human beings and work through their films to deconstruct human privilege. At the crossroads of disciplines, anthropologists, philosophers, filmmakers and artists, and researchers in visual studies come together and investigate a different history of cinema, written from the point of view of nature.

Texts by Elio Della Noce, Scott MacDonald, Jean-Michel Durafour, Kim Knowles, Philip Hoffman & Janine Marchessault, Karel Doing, Chris Dymond, Alice Leroy, Rose Lowder, Chris Welsby, Yaniv Touati, Bidhan Jacobs, Lucas Murari, Teresa Castro, Colectivo Los Ingrávidos, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Gérard Leblanc, Frédéric Brayard, Jacques Perconte, Vincent Deville, Lukas Brasiskis & Charlie Hewison. 

Terwijl film station per station de moderne tijd bracht, verdween schijnbaar natuur steeds meer uit ons blikveld. Tegelijk zorgt film tot op vandaag voor nieuwe manieren om natuur te portretteren. Op het kruispunt van verdwijnen en verschijnen vinden we in film en landschap compagnons de route die elkaar slechts zelden uit het oog verliezen.

“What happened to my book?”

This was the last email we received from Nick, in December 2021. A short, concise demand, which we responded to, telling him that the transcription was coming soon and that Marie was finalising the introduction. Little did we know, what Nick surely already knew: he was dying. The urgency should have given it away, but Nick was always blunt in our email exchanges.

Nick passed away on February 27th, 2022. We regret not getting the transcription to him while he could still edit it, so this book in your hands remains an unabridged testament.

The only thing he did edit were his final words, in an unsolicited email in September 2021:

“I was thinking about when you asked me if I had any final words, that it would be better to have me say: Freedom or death. At the crossroads. With a key.”

So we leave you with this; a homage to the legendary founder of the Cinema Of Transgression - a brilliant artist, a sharp mind, a loving father, a kind revolutionary, a boot stamping on the face of modernity forever, an underground phenomenon.
Nick Zedd, rest in peace.

[Note by the publisher.]

With a foreword by Goswell Road. Includes a conversation with Nick Zedd, and the manifesto 'Cinema of Transgression'.

Softcover (11 cm x 18 cm)
84 Pages
75 copies
Language : English

Compiled on the occasion of a Sandra Lahire retrospective at Courtisane festival 2021. This cahier was developed in collaboration with Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola (San Sebastian). Edited by María Palacios Cruz and Charlotte Procter.

Living on air: the films and words of Sandra Lahire is the first monograph dedicated to the work of Sandra Lahire and brings together new and existing texts on Lahire as well as writing by herself, with contributions by Gill Addison, Jo Comino, Pam Cook, Laura Guy, Maud Jacquin, Julia Knight, Michael Mazière, Sarah Pucill, Irene Revell & Kerstin Schroedinger, Lis Rhodes, Selina Robertson & Ricardo Matos Cabo (with So Mayer), Vicky Smith, Sarah Turner and Ana Vaz.

Compiled by Courtisane and Sabzian on the occasion of the Out of the Shadows programme, originally conceived for Courtisane festival 2020 but rescheduled to Courtisane festival 2021.

This program and publication was developed with the support of The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC), CINEMATEK and KASK / School of Arts, in collaboration with Reem Shilleh and Mohanad Yaqubi (Subversive Film).

Compiled on the occasion of new restorations of Michel Khleifi’s films by CINEMATEK and a retrospective film programme organized by CINEMATEK and Courtisane (26 September - 5 November 2019), this publication aims to provide a modest summary of the trajectory of Michel Khleifi on the basis of a series of texts and interviews that were produced between 1981 and 2019.

This publication aims to trace the trajectories of Ogawa Shinsuke and Tsuchimoto Noriaki, who film critic Hasumi Shigehiko respectively called “the filmmaker of the soil” and “the filmmaker of the sea”.

The publication has taken the form of a scrapbook which assembles a patchwork of writings, quotes and interviews that we were able to track down and translate, with the help of numerous other “amateurs” who admire and cherish the work of these two filmmakers. Developed on the occasion of the programs by Courtisane and CINEMATEK devoted to Tsuchi­moto and Ogawa. In collaboration with Sabzian.

Developed on the occasion of a retrospective program of the work of Anne-Marie Miéville. Courtisane, CINEMATEK and Sabzian have collected a series of writings and interviews in a small-edition bilingual publication (French/English).

Published on the occasion of the program Soft Notes on A Sharp Scale — The Rambling Figures of Mani Kaul, produced as part of the Courtisane festival 2018, as well as the associated Mani Kaul programme organized by the Essay Film Festival 2018, in collaboration with the Otolith Group.

Developed on the occasion of a Hong Sang-soo retrospective at CINEMATEK in 2018. Infinite Worlds Possible is compiled, edited and published by Courtisane, CINEMATEK and Sabzian. It aims to trace the development of Hong’s remarkable body of work through a collection of essays and interviews.

Produced on the occasion of Leslie Thornton's major solo exhibition at the MIT List Visual Arts Center as well as a recent solo exhibition at Kunstverein Nurnberg, this richly illustrated volume is the first monograph on this important artist and filmmaker, offering essential, foundational scholarship on Thornton's influential work in film and video.

Since the mid-1970s, American avant-garde filmmaker and artist Leslie Thornton (born 1951) has produced an influential body of work in film and video. Thornton's early encounters with experimental, structuralist, and cinéma vérité traditions fueled her iconoclastic take on the moving image and gave shape to her practice of weaving together her own footage and voice with archival film and audio. In part through her forceful and dynamic use of sound, Thornton exposes the limits of language and vision in her works, while acknowledging the ways that language and vision nevertheless remain central to scientific discourse and narrative in general. Her work consistently interrogates modes of representation and the violence of looking, pushing beyond critiques of the gaze to consider biases in perception, or the way voice and sound can undermine an otherwise dominant visual narrative.

DWOSKINO. The Gaze of Stephen Dwoskin is the culmination of a three year research project, The Legacies of Stephen Dwoskin, at the University of Reading where his archive is housed. The book is a unique visual distillation of Dwoskin’s life and times, with hundreds of never-seen-before images taken from his archive, and texts by among others Laura Mulvey, Raymond Bellour, Raymond Durgnat, and Dwoskin himself.

Stephen Dwoskin (1939–2012) began his filmmaking career in the New York underground scene of the early 1960s, then moved to London in 1964, where he became a leading figure in avant-garde film, and was one of the founders of the London Filmmakers Co-operative (now LUX). His early works, such as Dyn Amo (1972), are synonymous with the male gaze. Laura Mulvey wrote that he ‘opened a completely new perspective for me on cinematic voyeurism’ and his work was a major influence on her influential work on the male gaze in cinema. From the mid-1970s, he focused his camera upon his own body, afflicted by polio during childhood, in such films as Behindert (1974) and Outside In (1981).

Personae is an unpublished book by Scottish filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait (1918-1999), edited by Sarah Neely with a foreword by Ali Smith

Margaret Tait (1918-1999), filmmaker and poet, is one of Scotland’s most extraordinary talents, and yet she was largely overlooked during her lifetime. Born in Orkney, she trained first as a medical doctor and served in the Royal Army Medical Corps during the Second World War, before studying film at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematographia in Rome in the early 1950s. After returning to Edinburgh, Tait established her film studio, Ancona Films, before eventually returning to Orkney in the 1960s, where she lived and continued to make films until her death in 1999.

While best known as a filmmaker, she was also a prolific writer and during her lifetime she self-published three books of poetry and two collections of short stories. Personae is her unpublished manuscript written over a number of years from 1945 onwards and painstakingly reconstructed by Sarah Neely from drafts found in the Tait archive. It is an undefinable work, part-memoir, part-experimental non-fiction; a meditation on the aftermath of war, the healing potential of the creative process, medicine, culture, relationships and an attempt to think towards a future born out of chaos. The book also offers a unique insight into the voice, mind and creative process of a singular Scottish artist whose work did not receive significant attention until after her death in 1999.

The 1960s and 1970s were a defining period for artists’ film and video, and the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative (LFMC) was one of the major international centres. Shoot Shoot Shoot documents the first decade of an artist-led organisation that pioneered the moving image as an art form in the UK, tracing its development from within London’s counterculture towards establishing its own identity within premises that uniquely incorporated a distribution office, cinema space and film workshop.

Contributions from: Antony Balch, Ian Breakwell, Bob Cobbing, John Collins, David Crosswaite, David Curtis, Fred Drummond, John Du Cane, Mike Dunford, Ray Durgnat, Deke Dusinberre, Stephen Dwoskin, Gill Eatherley, Steve Farrer, Simon Field, Chris Garratt, Peter Gidal, Marilyn Halford, David Hall, Roger Hammond, Simon Hartog, Ron Haselden, Jim Haynes, Roger Hewins, Tony Hill, Jeff Keen, Ian Kerr, Jonathan Langran, David Larcher, John Latham, Malcolm Le Grice, Mike Leggett, Carla Liss, John Mathews, Harvey Matusow, Anthony McCall, Barry Miles, Jack Henry Moore, Annabel Nicolson, Jenny Okun, David Parsons, Sally Potter, Stuart Pound, William Raban, Anne Rees-Mogg, Lis Rhodes, Carolee Schneemann, Anthony Scott, Guy Sherwin, John Smith, Chris Welsby. Illustrated throughout in full colour, this book brings together a wide variety of texts, images and archival documents, and includes newly commissioned essays by Mark Webber, Kathryn Siegel and Federico Windhausen.

LUX, London / 2016

Paperback, 288 pages incl 193 full colour illustrations

Captivated by the liberated glamour of Jean-Luc Godard’s young stars as a teenager, Joanna Walsh rediscovers his films as an adult and finds herself resisting the temptation to identify with or desire the women on film. Instead, echoing Jean-Luc Godard’s pronouncement that ‘cinema is truth at 24 frames per second’, Walsh’s essay turns its gaze on the dynamics of the camera itself and demands a new kind of art. This is an experimental, bold, and wide-ranging book that refuses to setltle for easy answers. An essential read for anyone interested in women on film.

Meggy Rustamova’s (b. 1985) practice explores films and spatial installations, in which she incorporates photographs, essays and audio material; often the work has a performative character. Concerned with the relations between individual and collective memory, language and human behaviour, her works look for ways to translate the current matters and phenomena in the world.
The title of the book and the exhibition, HORAIZON, refers to the phonetic pronunciation of the English word ‘horizon’, the boundary line on which the earth’s surface and the sky seem to touch. The horizon, interpreted as ‘boundary’ or ‘line’, is equally perceptible in language, when reading between the lines, or when travelling between international borders. The contours of the land, trees or buildings, which contrast with the sky, but also the contours of shadows can be observed in many of the images in the exhibition. The works also suggest a longing for what lies behind the horizon and invite the viewer to make an imaginary journey.

On the occasion of Rustamova’s exhibition at the Vrienden v/h S.M.A.K. and the book ‘Horaizon’, the artist created a multiple. The multiple is entitled 1000 km in Vogelvlucht — 621.371 miles at Bird’s Eye View and unfolds as a storyboard, with a collection of sky views and birds the artist has captured over the past two years. From a condor in Arizona to the black-backed gulls in Iceland in the North Atlantic Ocean all through the Sea of Marmara, the book seeks to create a tale that reflects on a person’s daily need for freedom, travel and nature.

The materials collected in the publication have been developed departing from the documentation, transcription and translation of textual, visual, sculptural and audio materials produced between March and November 2021 for STILI DRAMA. 

STILI DRAMA is an open-ended episodic para-cinematographic project, which functions as a spontaneous expression of MRZB research. STILI DRAMA XVIII-XXI and LA GIOSTRA DI LULU XLI-XLIV are the two first fragments of the work.

Language: English, Italian
Edition of 100 copies