Thom Andersen (born 1943 in Chicago) is an American filmmaker, film critic, and teacher best known for his works of experimental film, including his 1975 film Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer and the 2003 essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself . [1] [2] [3] [4]
Anderson went to high school in Los Angeles, where one of his classmates was future colleague, Michael Asher. Andersen attended the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1960s and then returned to his hometown of Los Angeles to attend USC School of Cinematic Arts, where he studied with Arthur Knight and eventually assisted on Knight's project The History of Sex in Cinema. While at USC, Andersen met long-time friend and collaborator Morgan Fisher, who assisted on Andersen's student film Melting, a portrait of a sundae. He regularly attended local screening series including shows by the Trak Film Group and Movies Round Midnight and famously wrote about an unpopular screening of Andy Warhol's Sleep . [5] After USC, Andersen attended UCLA and completed his experimental documentaries Olivia's Place and Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer. During the 1970s, his films screened at Los Angeles' Theatre Vanguard and Berkeley's Pacific Film Archive. He was the programmer for LA Filmforum in Los Angeles during the late 1990s.
Andersen's film Los Angeles Plays Itself won the National Film Board Award for Best Documentary at the 2003 Vancouver International Film Festival, was voted best documentary of 2004 by the Village Voice critic's poll, [6] and was voted one of the "Top Ten Films of the Decade" by critics at Cinema Scope. [7] In 2010 he completed Get Out of the Car, a portrait of signs and abandoned spaces set to Los Angeles music. In spring 2012, Andersen took part in the three-month Whitney Biennial. [8]
He has taught at the SUNY Buffalo and Ohio State University and had taught film theory and history at the California Institute of the Arts from 1987 until 2021. [9] He lives in a two-bedroom modernist house designed by the architect Rudolf Schindler. [10]
Andersen coined the term film gris, a type of film noir which categorizes a unique series of films that were released between 1947 and 1951. [11]
The Academy Film Archive has preserved a number of Thom Andersen's films, including Olivia's Place, Melting, and --- ------- (aka The Rock n Roll Movie). [12]
Eadweard Muybridge was an English photographer known for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection.
The University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts (SCA) houses seven academic divisions: Film & Television Production; Cinema & Media Studies; John C. Hench Division of Animation + Digital Arts; John Wells Division of Writing for Screen & Television; Interactive Media & Games; Media Arts + Practice; Peter Stark Producing Program.
Abraham Lincoln Polonsky was an American film director, screenwriter, essayist and novelist. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for Body and Soul but in the early 1950s was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios, after refusing to testify at congressional hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee, in the midst of the McCarthy era.
The USC Center for Visual Anthropology (CVA) is a center located at the University of Southern California. It is dedicated to the field of visual anthropology, incorporating visual modes of expression in the academic discipline of anthropology. It does so in conjunction with faculty in the anthropology department through five types of activities: training, research and analysis of visual culture, production of visual projects, archiving and collecting, and the sponsorship of conferences and film festivals. It offers a B.A. and an MVA in Visual Anthropology.
The Los Angeles International Film Exposition, also called Filmex, was an annual Los Angeles film festival held in the 1970s and early 1980s. It was the predecessor of the American Film Institute's Los Angeles International Film Festival. After the final Filmex festival in 1983, the founders/organizers of the festival devoted their attentions to developing a new nonprofit cultural organization, the American Cinematheque, which they created to be a permanent year-round film festival in Los Angeles.
Andrew Berardini is an American writer known for his work as a visual art critic and curator in Los Angeles. Described as "the most elegant of all art critic cowboys", Berardini works primarily between genres, which he describes as "quasi-essayistic prose poems on art and other vaguely lusty subjects."
Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer is a 1975 student documentary film directed by Thom Andersen about the English photographer Eadweard Muybridge.
Film gris, a term coined by experimental filmmaker Thom Andersen, is a type of film noir which categorizes a unique series of films that were released between 1947 and 1951. They came in the context of the first wave of the communist investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee, often made by associates, fellow travellers and supporters of the convicted Hollywood Ten.
Los Angeles Plays Itself is an American video essay by Thom Andersen, finished in 2003, exploring the way Los Angeles has been presented in movies.
Gordon Hendricks (1917–1980) was an American art and film historian.
The Horse in Motion is a series of cabinet cards by Eadweard Muybridge, including six cards that each show a sequential series of six to twelve "automatic electro-photographs" depicting the movement of a horse. Muybridge shot the photographs in June 1878. An additional card reprinted the single image of the horse "Occident" trotting at high speed, which had previously been published by Muybridge in 1877.
L.A. Plays Itself is a 1972 American experimental gay pornographic film, directed and produced by Fred Halsted.
The Decay of Fiction is a 2002 American 35mm part color and part black-and-white experimental film noir project directed by independent filmmaker and artist Pat O'Neill. The film, initially conceived as a documentary, was produced by O'Neill and Rebecca Hartzell for Lookout Mountain Films. Filming took place in Los Angeles.
Morgan Hall Fisher is an American experimental filmmaker and artist best known for his structuralist and minimalist films referencing the material processes of celluloid film and the means and methods of producing moving images, including the camera, the director and crew, and the editing process. Since the 1990s, Fisher has also been producing paintings and installation works. His work has been included in three Whitney Biennial exhibitions, 1985, 2004 and 2014. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987.
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West is a 2003 book by American writer Rebecca Solnit, published by Viking; in the United Kingdom it was published by Bloomsbury as Motion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge. The book is a biographical portrait of photographer and inventor Eadweard Muybridge, a history of the development of technological change in the West during the later half of the nineteenth century that led to development of the modern film industry in Hollywood and later the information technology industry in Silicon Valley, and an essay focusing on a series of connections between Muybridge's life and the changing human landscape of the American West.
Todd Gray works in photography, performance and sculpture as a contemporary artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California and Akwidaa, Ghana.
Ross Lipman is an American restorationist, independent filmmaker and essayist. He is best known for his 2015 documentary Notfilm, his work with the Bruce Conner Family Trust and as Senior Film Restorationist at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, where he restored numerous independent and avant-garde works.
A video essay is an essay, but unlike a written essay, utilizes a video's structure to advance an argument, persuade, educate, analyze, or critique; often in an entertaining way. A video essay allows an individual to directly quote from film, video games, music, or other digital mediums, which is impossible with traditional writing. While many video essays are intended for entertainment, they can also have an academic or political purpose. This type of content is often described as educational entertainment.
A still image film, also called a picture movie, is a film that consists primarily or entirely of still images rather than consecutive still images in succession, forgoing the illusion of motion either for aesthetic or practical reasons. These films usually include a standard soundtrack, similar to what is found in typical sound films, complete with music, sound effects, dialogue or narration. They may also use various editing techniques found in traditional films, such as dissolves, zooms, and panning.
Animal Locomotion: An Electro-photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements is a series of scientific photographs by Eadweard Muybridge made in 1884 and 1885 at the University of Pennsylvania, to study motion in animals. Published in July 9, 1887, the chronophotographic series comprised 781 collotype plates, each containing up to 36 pictures of the different phases of a specific motion of one subject.
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