The Vienna Action Group formed the most provocative, insurgent, and challenging of all the worldwide art movements of the 1960s. Their sexually charged and antisocial actions exacted a profound and irreparable upheaval in the way in which art was conceive

Sitney analyzes in detail the work of eleven American avant-garde filmmakers as heirs to the aesthetics of exhilaration and innovative vision articulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson and explored by John Cage, Charles Olson and Gertrude Stein. The films discussSitney analyzes in detail the work of eleven American avant-garde filmmakers as heirs to the aesthetics of exhilaration and innovative vision articulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson and explored by John Cage, Charles Olson and Gertrude Stein. The films discussed span the sixty years since the Second World War.

Indiscretions follows the path of U.S. avant-garde film and video from the underground of the 1960s to the academy of the 1980s. Patricia Mellencamp traces and charts the intersections of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the desiring male subject, Roland Barthes and texts of pleasure, Michel Foucault and the disciplinary society, the grotesque body and Mikhail Bakhtin, the rhizomatic alogic of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and the female subject of feminist film theory.

Despite being a consummate polymath, George Kuchar (1942-2011) is best known as a pioneering underground film and video maker with a disarming do-it-yourself aesthetic and a hilariously eccentric sensibility. Quirky and ingenious, heartfelt and campy, Kuchar's movies know no boundaries and are an entirely unique development in the history of cinema. The artist's characteristic instinct for kitsch, his humor and conceptual brilliance, were not confined to the screen alone; they can be glimpsed in all the activities he carried out throughout his life. The George Kuchar Reader, edited by Andrew Lampert, collects a wide swath of previously uncollected and newly unearthed writings and visual work, including essays, comics, drawings, paintings, photographs, film stills, scripts, movie blurbs, correspondence, letters of recommendation for his students, documentation of his UFO sightings, excerpts from his dream journal, selections from his private notebooks and much more.