Light Moving in Time: Studies in the Visual Aesthetics of Avant-Garde Film - Tapa dura

To view a film is to see another's seeing mediated by the technology and techniques of the camera. By manipulating cinematic apparatus is unorthodox ways, avant-garde filmmakers challenge the standardized versions of seeing perpetuated by the dominant film industry and generate ways of seeing that are truer to actual human vision. Beginning with the propositions that the images of cinema and vision derive from the same basic elements - light, movement and time - Wees argues that cinematic apparatus and human visual apparatus have significant properties in common. For that reason they can be brought into a dynamic, creative relationship which the author calls the dialectic of eye and camera. The consequences of this relationship are what the author explores.

William C. Wees is Associate Professor of English at McGill University in Montreal. He has written articles for many film journals and has made several short experimental films.