Slow Writing: Thom Andersen on Cinema
Edited by Mark Webber
The Visible Press, September 2017
Slow Writing is a collection of articles by Thom Andersen that reflect on the avant-garde, Hollywood feature films, and contemporary cinema. His critiques of artists and filmmakers as diverse as Yasujirō Ozu, Nicholas Ray, Andy Warhol, and Christian Marclay locate their work within the broader spheres of popular culture, politics, history, architecture, and the urban landscape. The city of Los Angeles and its relationship to film is a recurrent theme. These writings, which span a period of five decades, demonstrate Andersen’s social consciousness, humour and his genuine appreciation of cinema in its many forms. Thom Andersen’s films include the celebrated documentary essays Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1975), Red Hollywood (1996), Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), and The Thoughts That Once We Had (2015).
ISBN: 978-0-9928377-2-3
Hardcover
209 x 146 x 27 mm
304 pages, including 16pp of b/w & colour images
Square-backed case, debossed cover and spine
Ribbon marker, head and tail bands
Individually shrinkwrapped
Slow Writing: Thom Andersen on Cinema
Edited by Mark Webber
The Visible Press, September 2017
“There are few writers and few filmmakers who make me rethink what cinema is more than Thom Andersen. Sometimes this is a matter of introducing fresh perspectives, such as making cinema and architecture more mutually interactive. It’s always a political matter of figuring out just who and where we are, and why.”
—– Jonathan Rosenbaum
“In his disarmingly plainspoken introduction, Thom Andersen more or less apologizes for not becoming a film critic, and for not delivering a manifesto. Personally I’m relieved, and I think you should be as well, because we instead have his superb films, and that is something much more valuable. And now we have Slow Writing, where he shows us just how terrific a critic he hasn’t (mostly) bothered to be, and where he is also free to write brilliantly about his own films. The result of the resonance between this conjunction — writing about his own work alongside that of others — forms, in truth, a kind of quiet manifesto. This book belongs on a very small and special shelf of the most incisive and ungrandiose books by artists, alongside The Collected Writings of Robert Smithson.”
—– Jonathan Lethem
“This collection is a long time coming. Anyone who has seen Los Angeles Plays Itself, that most Proustian of contemporary films, surely agrees that there is no filmmaker quite like Thom Andersen. The intellectual pleasure found on screen comes across gangbusters in his alternately trenchant and jocular criticism. Thom’s writing may not concretely alter the way you see the given films he’s chosen to discuss; the power of his writing is a function of his selectivity. But in a period where generic writing has proliferated, it certainly might change the way you see film criticism. More critics should write so seldom!”
—– Mark Peranson, editor of Cinema Scope magazine
Slow Writing: Thom Andersen on Cinema
Edited by Mark Webber
The Visible Press, September 2017
Introduction
Why I Did Not Become a Film Critic, 2017
Essays
Sex in Limbo, 1966 (on exploitation films)
Camp, Andy Warhol, 1966
Two Films by Andrew Meyer, 1966
Eadweard Muybridge, 1966
De Mille’s Ded Zeppelin, 1978 (on Madam Satan)
What is Wrong with this Picture? Almost Everything, 1978 (on The Desert People)
JB, 1978 (on James Benning)
Twelve Films by Five American Filmmakers, 1979 (on Conner, Sharits, Gehr,
Brakhage & Fisher)
From the Cloud to the Resistance (Dalla Nube alla Resistenza) by Jean-Marie
Straub & Danièle Huillet, from two texts by Cesare Pavese, 1981
Reagan at the Movies, 1986 (on Ronald Reagan)
“The Time of the Toad”, 1992 (on the Hollywood Blacklist)
The Misogyny Game, 1993 (on The Crying Game)
Looking Over an Underground, 1994 (on the Los Angeles underground)
The Whole Equation, 2005 (on David Thomson’s The Whole Equation)
The Political Documentary in America Today, 2005
The Sixties Without Compromise: Watching Warhol’s Films, 2005
Painting in the Shadows, 2007 (on Pedro Costa)
Passing Through Twilight, 2007 (on Night on Earth)
Los Angeles: A City on Film, 2008
This Property is Condemned, 2008 (on The Exiles)
Pebbles Left on the Beach: The Films of Morgan Fisher, 2009
Against the Grain, 2009 (on Lorna’s Silence)
A Band of Outsiders, 2010 (on In Vanda’s Room)
Happy Daze, 2010 (on Dusty and Sweets McGee)
The Decade in Review: Sketches of History 2000-2009, 2010
Unchained Melodies: The Agony and the Ecstasy of Phil Spector and
It Felt Like a Kiss, 2010
Get Out of the Car: A Commentary, 2011
Random Notes on a Projection of The Clock by Christian Marclay
at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 4:32 p.m., July 28, 2011
– 5:02 p.m., July 29, 2011, 2011
Barbarians at the Gate, 2012 (on Los Angeles film culture)
Yasujirō Ozu: The Master of Time, 2012
Too Late to Stop Now, 2013 (on Jean-Marie Straub)
Fire in Every Shot: Wang Bing’s Three Sisters, 2013
The Allure of Failure, 2014 (on Francesco Vezzoli)
500 Words (as told to Travis Diehl), 2016
Images
16 pages of colour and black & white images including film stills and photographs
Thom Andersen Filmography
Thom Andersen Bibliography
Slow Writing: Thom Andersen on Cinema
Edited by Mark Webber
The Visible Press, September 2017
Thom Andersen has lived in Los Angeles for most of his life. His knowledge of and enthusiasm for the city has deeply informed his work, not least his widely praised study of its representation in movies, Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), which was voted one of the 50 Best Documentaries of All Time in a Sight & Sound critics’ poll. Andersen made his first short films and entered into the city’s film scene as a student of USC and UCLA in the 1960s. His hour-long documentary Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1974) was realised under an AFI scholarship and has lately been restored by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. His research into the victims of the Hollywood Blacklist, done in collaboration with film theorist Noël Burch, produced the video essay Red Hollywood (1996) and book Les Communistes de Hollywood: Autre chose que des martyrs (1994). Andersen’s recent films include Reconversão (2012) on the work of Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, and The Thoughts That Once We Had (2015), a personal history of cinema loosely inspired by Gilles Deleuze. A published writer since 1966, Andersen has contributed to journals such as Film Comment, Artforum, Sight & Sound and Cinema Scope. He has taught at the California Institute of the Arts since 1987, and was previously on faculty at SUNY Buffalo and Ohio State University. Also distinguished for his skills as a film curator, he has acted as programmer for Los Angeles Filmforum and curated thematic retrospectives for the Viennale. Slow Writing: Thom Andersen on Cinema is the first collection of his essays.
Mark Webber is a film curator based in London, who has been responsible for major screening events or touring programmes hosted by institutions such as Tate Modern, LUX and ICA (London), Whitney Museum (New York), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Oberhausen Kurzfilmtage, IFFR Rotterdam and international festivals, museums and art centres. He was a programmer for the BFI London Film Festival from 2000-12, and is also the editor of Two Films by Owen Land, Film as Film: The Collected Writings of Gregory J. Markopoulos, Shoot Shoot Shoot: The First Decade of the London Film-Makers’ Co-operative 1966-76 and co-editor of Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966–2016. www.markwebber.org.uk
