In this book, Yvonne Spielmann argues that video is not merely an intermediate stage between analog and digital but a medium in its own right. Video has metamorphosed from technology to medium, with a set of aesthetic languages that are specific to it, an

Filmmaker, painter, anthropologist, musicologist and occultist--Harry Smith (1923-1991) was an incomparable polymath and seminal figure in the realms of beat culture and avant-garde art. Smith's kaleidoscopic experimental films have influenced generations of artists and cinephiles, while his landmark three-volume compilation, the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), laid the foundation for the folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s.

Girl Head shows how gender has had a surprising and persistent role in film production processes, well before the image ever appears onscreen. For decades, feminist film criticism has focused on issues of representation: images of women in film. But what are the feminist implications of the material object underlying that image, the filmstrip itself? What does feminist analysis have to offer in understanding the film image before it enters the realm of representation?