The Moving Image Without Photography
FAIN: FT-249114-16
Gregory Zinman
Georgia Tech (Atlanta, GA 30332-0001)
Writing and website development leading to publication of a book on the 19th- and 20th-century history of moving images created without cameras and an online supplement presenting related essays and videos.
Handmade: The Moving Image Without Photography reveals a new history of the moving image, told through its engagement with other media and art forms. Think of a Jackson Pollock painting that moves, or a hand-drawn score that produces music when read by a film projector, or a hand-crafted machine that fractures light and bends time without a camera. Through a traditional scholarly monograph complemented by a custom-designed digital companion, Handmade provides a historical and theoretical framework for understanding these artisanal moving-image works and the technologies that make them. Handmade moves from film to performance to video, crossing from the Americas to Asia, so as to demonstrate the global, cross-disciplinary impact of this seemingly anomalous subset of experimental films and practices. In doing so, Handmade also illuminates the intersection of global cinema with other arts, and fundamentally reorients our understanding of the moving image’s past, present, and future.
Media Coverage
Exploded View | For a Cameraless Cinema: Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts (Review)
Author(s): Chuck Stephens
Publication: Cinema Scope
Date: 3/13/2020
Abstract: "Lucid, smart, but entirely readable, and compellingly illuminated with colour illustrations of the wonders it describes, Making Images Move is formidable historiography: it’s a volume you’ll want to display proudly on your shelf, somewhere between Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema and Amos Vogel’s Film as a Subversive Art. High praise indeed, but Zinman easily earns it….Making Images Move is a song of everything, and the lattice of names, gizmos, artifacts, cultural moments, and political manifestos written in light that Zinman has interwoven throughout is exhilarating….It’s a major work."
URL: https://cinema-scope.com/cinema-scope-magazine/exploded-view-for-a-cameraless-cinema-making-images-move-handmade-cinema-and-the-other-arts/
Scratching the Surface: Handmade Cinema in the Digital Age (Review)
Author(s): Holly Willis
Publication: Los Angeles Review of Books
Date: 12/13/2021
Abstract: “Written with careful precision and breadth. . . chronicling a rich, 100-year history of handmade moviemaking in which artists similarly trespass into other areas of creative practice.”
URL: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/scratching-the-surface-handmade-cinema-in-the-digital-age/
Making Images Move (Review)
Author(s): Abby Sun
Publication: Film Comment
Date: 3/13/2021
Abstract: “Devoid of zeitgeisty romanticizations of the analog, Gregory Zinman’s book, Making Images Move, presents a defiant yet clear-eyed alternative history of the origins of cinema.”
URL: https://www.filmcomment.com/
A Politics of Joy (Review)
Author(s): James Hansen
Publication: Millennium Film Journal
Date: 12/13/2020
Abstract: “Despite the difficulty of abstract visual description, Zinman’s writing is clear and direct, informed by historical research, incorporating artist’s interviews with rich theoretical insights…If formalism is a starting point, however, it is clearly not Zinman’s endgame, as he elucidates significant political implications throughout.”
URL: http://www.mfj-online.org/
Making Images Move (Review)
Author(s): Ken Eisenstein
Publication: Critical Inquiry
Date: 8/13/2021
Abstract: "Zinman’s is the book perched on our balconies. It is worth way more than two in the bush. That’s the great thing about books that are also birds. Their singleness multiplies in hands that hold them. Running fingers through their feathered figures to thread additional ones in responds to their song."
URL: https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/ken_eisenstein_reviews_making_images_move/
Making Images Move (Review)
Author(s): Sam Litmann
Publication: Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
Date: 11/13/2020
Abstract: "Zinman explores the history of camera-less filmmaking in an exciting intervention that ennobles an underdiscussed mode of film production and challenges our very conception of what constitutes a 'movie.' . . . A groundbreaking immersion into a previously uncelebrated filmmaking practice."
URL: https://www-tandfonline-com.prx.library.gatech.edu/toc/chjf20/41/1?nav=tocList
Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts (Review)
Author(s): Pierre-Jacques Pernuit
Publication: CAA Reviews
Date: 12/13/2021
Abstract: "Regardless of the value of Zinman’s theoretical proposition of the use of the handmade as a heuristic tool to study the material history of the moving image—a suggestion that incites debate—the scholarly merit of his impressive exploration at the margins of cinema and art history is unquestionable and of tremendous value for both fields."
URL: http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/3790#.YbeicH3MLKg
Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts (Review)
Author(s): Lyuwenyu Zhang
Publication: The Moving Image
Date: 12/13/2020
Abstract: "As a book that seeks to uncover and present a largely unstudied history in relation to contemporaneous critical and art historical accounts, Making Images Move does a brilliant job of chronicling and identifying crucial moments and artworks in the history of the handmade moving image. Zinman, through precision and a bold departure from the traditionally photographic definitions, uncovers an alternate history that defines the handmade moving image using a novel set of parameters. Through retelling, rethinking, and connecting early celluloid film with light art and video art, Zinman looks to a future when the moving image "persists as a hands-on enterprise" (293). Intended for art historians, archivists, and media scholars of any period, Making Images Move redefines the very idea of cinema and offers a futuristic outlook for the development of the handmade moving image."
URL: https://muse-jhu-edu.prx.library.gatech.edu/article/803484
Uncovering in-betweens: On photochemical practices and handmade cinema (Review)
Author(s): Melinda Blos-Jáni
Publication: NECSUS
Date: 5/13/2021
Abstract: "The book provides a conceptual and historical framework to illuminate a set
of converging practices resulting from the confluence of art forms. The author identifies it as a tendency towards time-based abstraction in media practices beyond film, across media. Zinman’s book also has a broader scope, to
orientate cinema studies towards the understanding of moving images instead of film. Zinman talks about the cinematic as an idea or sensation perceived in different kinds of works, regardless of their medium or art form."
URL: https://necsus-ejms.org/uncovering-in-betweens-on-photochemical-practices-and-handmade-cinema/
April Books (Media Coverage)
Author(s): David Hudson
Publication: The Criterion Collection
Date: 4/13/2020
Abstract: Gregory Zinman’s Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts is “formidable historiography,” writes Chuck Stephens in the latest issue of Cinema Scope. “Ten minutes after picking up the book I was noting the names of artists and filmmakers whose work I’d yet to explore, setting the book briefly aside to search for titles on Vimeo and discovering, for example, the ‘handmade Rorschach test’ abstractions of Josh Lewis’s Doubt films, and feeling cinema expand once again, page by fascinating page.”
URL: https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6915-april-books
Messing With the Medium (Media Coverage)
Author(s): Holly Willis
Publication: Filmmaker Magazine
Date: 3/13/2020
URL: https://filmmakermagazine.com/109342-messing-with-the-medium/?fbclid=IwAR2Brg40QLblrvOy5epFko7tOv6Z2TCH138zhlQT3XGjnpFF5ijlEJ2pTU8#.Ybek6X3MLKi
Associated Products
Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts (Book)Title: Making Images Move: Handmade Cinema and the Other Arts
Author: Gregory Zinman
Abstract: Making Images Move reveals a new history of cinema by uncovering its connections to other media and art forms. In this richly illustrated volume, Gregory Zinman explores how moving-image artists who worked in experimental film pushed the medium toward abstraction through a number of unconventional filmmaking practices, including painting and scratching directly on the film strip; deteriorating film with water, dirt, and bleach; and applying materials such as paper and glue. This book provides a comprehensive history of this tradition of “handmade cinema” from the early twentieth century to the present, opening up new conversations about the production, meaning, and significance of the moving image. From painted film to kinetic art, and from psychedelic light shows to video synthesis, Gregory Zinman recovers the range of forms, tools, and intentions that make up cinema’s shadow history, deepening awareness of the intersection of art and media in the twentieth century, and anticipating what is to come.
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520302730/making-images-movePublisher: University of California Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780520302730
Copy sent to NEH?: No
Handmade Cinema (Web Resource)Title: Handmade Cinema
Author: Gregory Zinman
Abstract: A digital companion to Making Images Move—site that lets you explore the world of artisanal moving image production by providing information on the practices and themes of a sampling of the field’s major figures. “Handmade Cinema” is designed for you to quickly glean the many connections between artists, their ideas, and the media they used.
Year: 2020
Primary URL:
http://www.handmadecinema.com