Early Video Art and Experimental Films Networks

Early Video Art and Experimental Films Networks traces the diffuse international networks through which video art and experimental films circulated during the late sixties and early seventies. It explores forgotten exhibitions both in Switzerland and France, the activities of public television channels and alternative art spaces in the US, a production art center dedicated to video in Italy and an Argentinian collective of conceptual artists, aiming to shed new light on the production and diffusion of moving images.
This volume is divided into two parts: the first part, which is longer and more extensively documented, explores the emergence and consolidation of video art networks at international level; the second focuses more specifically on two exhibitions of artists' films (New Forms in Film and Une histoire du cinéma) and one of the main instances of the museification of experimental cinema, Anthology Film Archives. Indeed, this particular story has wider currency insofar as several important works in recent years have focused on artists' films 23 and expanded cinema 24. We have adopted the principle, wherever possible, of providing rare and previously unpublished images and documents alongside the essays specifically commissioned for this volume, the choice of which has been left to the discretion of the author of each particular chapter.