Endorsements

Peter Gidal – Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966–2016
Edited by Mark Webber and Peter Gidal
The Visible Press, 2016

“This book is an essential point of access to the questions and considerations through which Peter Gidal has consistently fought for film – and vision itself – as a process of interrogation, displacement and resistance. While rooting the reader in the specifics of Gidal’s call for an active place of seeing, this collection of texts renews the agency of his primary question: ‘What it is to view, how to view the unknown?’”
—– Stuart Comer, Chief Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art at The Museum of Modern Art, New York

“Radical, spirited, provocative … Inspiring and invaluable, really. In here we find a welcome voice, singularly unpatronising, nuanced yet fearless in the face of the mind-narrowing opacity of ‘everyday life’.”
—– Cerith Wyn Evans

“Flare Out confirms that Gidal is undoubtedly one of cinema’s great polemicists. He summons a vast knowledge of philosophy, film and art to interrogate a question that remains pressing today: the vexed relationship between politics and form. Ever provocative and never dull, this collection underlines Gidal’s central importance as a critic of his own work and that of others, while also reminding the reader of what it means to take a stand.”
—– Erika Balsom, King’s College London

“The singular way that Peter Gidal wrestles with language is a continual lesson in philosophy, aesthetics, ideology, and politics. Flare Out: Aesthetics 1966–2016 charts his ongoing struggles with wit, lucidity, and genuine brio.”
—– Jonathan Rosenbaum

“This book is a stunning object – radical as in manifesto and aesthetic as in beautiful at the same time, which is not easy.”
—– Jacqueline Rose, Birkbeck Institute London, author of “Sexuality in the Field of Vision”.

“A marvellous production … almost too beautiful to read.”
—– Malcolm Le Grice, filmmaker/theorist.

“I shall be eternally grateful to Peter Gidal for depriving me of so much.”
—– John Smith, artist/filmmaker and former RCA student