The four-aperture "Animator" device operates as a variant of the zoetrope, innovating-upon the cylindrical design to develop a set of animation chambers or cells (quite literally). Typical subject matter here includes athletics (dog jumping through hoop, gymnast performing a cartwheel), labour (men working on machines, bricklayers at work), and relatively-dark tales (i.e. a devil placing a child into an oven).
 

The praxinoscope was invented by Emile Reynaud (i.e. ER) in 1877, as an improvement on the zoetrope; the interaction between the shaded-candle and the mirrored interior of the drum ensured that the device could be effective in low-light situations. The present example includes a complete set of thirty strips, including subjects such as girl feeding fish, monkey playing cello, boy with dog jumping through hoop, plate spinner, foot juggler, proto-psychedelic abstractions, and surreal horse jumpers (who manage to overlap the discrete frames).
 

One year after his invention of the praxinoscope, Emile Reynaud soon improved upon the immersive dimension of the experience, by embedding the rotating animation within an inventive theatre apparatus. Opening-up the self-contained box, the viewer would peer through a peep-hole to view the rotating praxinoscope through an intermediary glass plate; an optical strategy that would transport the animated image into a variable (and thematically-appropriate) scene, with the glass reflecting the interchangeable proscenium illustrations that were positioned in perpendicular fashion into the slots that were fastened to the underside of the box’s lid. The present device includes five such scenes: a bourgeois interior, a circus, a peaceful countryside, a snow scene (with a lower metallic plate that was curved to afford a “sliding" animation), and a pond (simulated by a mirrored bottom).
 

When Lumière patented the Kinora viewing machine in France in September 1896 (followed by Great Britain in October), he was already piggy-backing on the patented Mutoscope of Herman Claser in the United States. Lumière would eventually pass-on the patent to Gaumont in Paris, which started marketing the Kinora around 1900, on the strength of approximately 100 reels of subjects provided by Lumière and other cinematographic pioneers. In 1902, the device received great acclaim in Britain, after Queen Alexandra, an enthusiastic photographer in her own right, bought one such viewer, which is still extant in the Royal collections.
 

As evident with the Kinora machine above, the dawn of cinema did not relegate pre-cinema devices to total obsolescence. With new cinematic concepts ready-to-hand, innovation continued. Here: the example of the "Cinématograph-toy"—winner of the 1902 Gold medal at the prestigious Concours Lépine for French inventors—for which the vertical pull-down mechanism of Lumière's cinematograph machine was mimicked in surprisingly-sturdy paper form. The four (documentary) subjects here include two chefs preparing a meal, two gymnasts in action, a pair of boxers sparring, and a young ballerina in performance; the latter's movements so precise that she was almost certainly illustrated after motion picture film—yet another instance of  the "post-pre-cinema" aesthetic.
 

An incredible source of information regarding domestic cinema in inter-War Japan, as well as a testament to the vibrant modernism of Japanese graphic design. These weekly film programmes issue from the Teikokukan theatre chain that first emerged in the Asakusa neighbourhood of Tokyo, eventually branching out into other neighbourhoods and cities.

Evidence of the theatres’ commercial success (and audience demographics) unfolds on the rear covers; by the time of issue 139, announcements for upcoming films are replaced by strikingly-designed advertisements for Club Cosmetics.

“C’est un film surréaliste.” Although published in 1932, and intended as a follow-up to Dali's films with Luis Buñuel (Un chien andalou and L'age d'or), Dali's new screenplay wouldn't be produced  until almost a decade after his death, in 1998. With eerily prophetic accuracy, Dali sets the action of the film in the near-future of 1934, “dans n’importe quel pays d’Europe, pendant la guerre civile.” This copy bears a wonderful association, belonging to the Surrealist actor and director Jacques Brunius, after having passed through the hands of the Surrealist bookseller John Lyle, whose playfully-illustrated nameplate appears to the front pastedown.
 

Eventually appointed Chief Architect for the Pathé group, Eugene Bruyneel (“ingenieur-architecte”) was responsible for the design of numerous theatres that were either adapted to, or purpose-built for, the era of sound-film, including the Saint-Marcel and Pathé-Élysées in Paris (1930) and the Omnia in Brest (1935). In 1933, his great success came with the opening of Pathé’s crown jewel: the Marignan (which survives today as the Gaumont Champs-Élysées-Marignan); praised by the press for its commitment to both modernization and art-deco elegance. “Un nouveau temple du cinéma” (Comoedia). Dating from the same period: this glamorous design for a Cinema Roxy in Cannes, under the patronage of the couture house of Rouff, which pre-dated the late-1930s vision of an international film festival in the town. This unbuilt theatre was to boast over 940 ground-floor seats, in addition to two balconies, two screens of differing aspect ratios, a musicians' pit, a sprawling second floor salon-du-thé, an innovative scale-like roof design, and lush full-length wall décor. Bruyneel's visual rhetoric is masterful, with the entire composition bathed in projected rays of light.
 

Under the directorship of Adonis Kyrou, L’age du cinema briefly provided a surrealist counter to the formalist criticism of Cahiers du cinema, with the two serials debuting in the same year. Contributors included Man Ray, André Breton, Antonin Artaud, Hans Richter, Benjamin Péret, Elia Kazan, Billy Wilder, Henry Miller, Jacques Audiberti, and Le Groupe Surrealiste Roumain. Number 4/5, represented here in the signed deluxe edition, made their editorial position plain, with an introductory table of what-to-watch (Méliès, Chaplin, Eisenstein, Clouzot, etc.) and what-not-to-watch (Lumière, Disney, Riefenstahl, Vertov, etc.). In addition to the manifesto-like signatures and randomized cut-up of film-strips (which the colophon cryptically names ""filmomanies symptomatiques"), this issue includes a signed lithograph from Wilfredo Lam (of more-projections-than-screens) and an illustrated proposal from Bernard Roger for a cinema at the bottom of the sea.

For one week in 1957, Chris Marker was part of a small delegation of journalists invited to visit North Korea, just four years after a devastating war, and shortly before the border was closed-off. Coréennes (“Korean Women”) contains over 120 images from this journey, combined with poetry, ancient maps, Korean tales and legends, comic book images, and anecdotes about the properties of ginseng. Stylistically, the composition of the work calls-forward to Marker’s cinematic aesthetic—most famously executed with the still-work of La jetée (1962)—with page layouts seamlessly sequenced as film frames; the bustle of a marketplace, followed by couples dancing. The expressive gestures of a woman recounting her life story in a chain of images moving across two separate spreads. The book object as film; “l’on souhaite voir apparaître un genre distinct de l’album et du reportage, qu’on appelerait faute de mieux ciné-essai, comme il y a des ciné-romans.”
 

This folksy Belgian press kit sings sweetly of its subject: "Kaneto Shindo a voulu réaliser un essai aux aspects multiples. Il en a supprimé les dialogues et les commentaires; seuls les sons et la musique accompagent l'action de façon à créer un véritable poème cinématographique." Winner of the Grand Prix at the second Moscow International Film Festival, Shindo’s hypnotic quasi-silent film—about a peasant family’s struggle for existence on a barren island off Hiroshima—would save his independent film company from bankruptcy.

Warhol and Malanga’s artist book documenting the extraordinary friends and colleagues who visited the Factory in New York between 1964 and 1966. With each visitor asked to sit for a “screen test” and instructed to sit as motionless as possible for four minutes of filming by Warhol. Here, 54 black-and-white portraits are reproduced from these short films, printed on translucent paper as enlargements from the original film strip. Each portrait shows about two-and-a-half frames of the film, thereby giving the impression of a moment-in-time rather than a still image. These portraits are accompanied with prose poems by Malanga, printed to opposite pages; intended as loose diary entries on each sitter, as well as narrating the general daily comings-and-goings of the Factory; phone calls, quality of light, activity happening outside the window. More often than expected: “today not much happened.” Sitters include Edie Sedgwick, Salvador Dali, Lou Reed, Allen Ginsberg, and Nico.
 

In 1968, Maïmé Arnodin and Denise Fayolle would combine forces to launch the first all-female-directed publicity agency in Paris: MAFIA (i.e. Maïmé Arnodin Fayolle International Associées). Their aestheticized white-on-white office also housed a screening room, installed by the cinephile Arnodin. In 1968, she screened Loin du Vietnam, the militant film produced by Chris Marker’s SLON, featuring a collection of New Wave directors, including Jean-Luc Godard, William Klein, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, and Claude Lelouch. Such a screening was in-keeping with the radical distribution strategy devised by Marker, with the film’s premiere arranged for a group of striking factory workers in Besançon. Impressed with what she saw at the MAFIA screening, Arnodin immediately declared her intention to produce a photo-book to help further promote the film. A scarce survival, which more resembles an artist book than a promotional tool, with no institutional copies discovered. Not at Cinémathèque française, nor at the Berkeley Pacific Film Archives, which holds extensive material relating to this production.

Timed to coincide with the second installment of Art Cologne, Birgit and Wilhelm Hein (founders of the curatorial group XSCREEN) organized a five-day programme of experimental film in October 1968, set within an unfinished U-Bahn station. Featuring works from Kenneth Anger, Robert Beavers, the Heins, Werner Nekes, Shirley Clarke, and the already-controversial Otto Muehl. On the second night, the screening was interrupted by police, who harassed audience members and confiscated a number of reels, leading to protests and flare-ups for the remainder of the week. A remarkable item of curatorial ephemera, with no OCLC/COPAC records discovered.
 

In 1970, the Danish provocateur (and sometimes-Situationist) Jens Jorgen Thorsen released his cinematic adaptation of Henry Miller’s Quiet days in Clichy; a scandal that would occasion Jörgen Nash to declare it “a film that will revolutionize sex in cinema.” As advertised, the film was subject to bans in both France and the United Kingdom. 

The present dossier of materials issues from an audit of the film conducted by the arguably-more-liberal German Freiwillige Selbstkontrolle der Filmwirtschaft (FSK), with nine scenes originally identified as worthy of suppression, as well as 11 instances of dialogue. One such instance, loosely translated: “The first scene between the Surrealist, Joey, and Carl has to be shortened considerably; in any case, what must be removed: Joey’s groping between the thighs of the woman bent forward; the close-up of the male buttocks showing the sexual member. Furthermore, the moan is to be withdrawn.” The correspondence here documents two quasi-successful appeals of these proposed cuts, based on the concept of artistic license, with the distributor of the film represented by Horst von Hartlieb, one of the founders of the FSK. An exemplary document from the lifecycle of a cinematic Situation.

Encouraged to venture to Italy by Roman Polanski to create sexually-explicit monster films in 3D, Paul Morrisey convinced Carlo Ponti to produce two such films starring Joe Dallesandro and Udo Kier: Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood for Dracula (1974). In the latter, Dracula sets his sights on pre-Mussolini Italy, thinking it a good bet to find virgin blood in a Catholic country; disappointment ensues. Both films received their initial releases in Germany, where the Pop-styled posters attempted to cash-in on the Warhol association, reworking the films’ titles to Andy Warhols Dracula and Andy Warhols Frankenstein. NB: we also have a linen-backed & framed copy of the latter poster available for sale.
 

An unrecorded brochure for the two short films that Agnès Varda made during her 1981 stay in Los Angeles; intended as companion pieces, or as “shadows,” as Varda writes here. Mur murs is a documentary about the colourful murals that decorate the city, while Documenteur describes the life of a divorced mother and her child trying to establish a home in LA. The two films subtly interact with overlapping narrative and images. The brochure is illustrated with imagery from the films and a portrait of Varda behind-the-camera. Credits and filmography are joined by a number of short texts by Varda, where she expands upon her ideas and working methods, shares influences, offers quotes from books she is reading (“these famous drops of lemon that bring the taste”), and reflects on the conditions of shooting in Los Angeles, with its unique light that she “loves like a painter.” Also including an interview with her nine year old son Mathieu, about the experience of starring in Documenteur. With no records discovered in OCLC; not in BnF.
 

With Blue (1993), Derek Jarman sought to solve the problem of representing the experience of HIV/AIDS by constructing a “film without image.” Or, more precisely, by constructing a film-without-image-but-one: a steady screen of International Klein Blue, accompanied by lush, poetic soundscape; the same overwhelming sense of blue that the virus had imposed on Jarman, with his vision having deteriorated into a movement of bluish shades. This sublime conceit, which afforded his audience an experience of “the admirable austerity of the void,” also afforded Jarman’s final 35mm feature a life across manifold media. First premiering at the Venice Biennale, the work was then simulcast in September 1993 across both television (Channel 4) and radio (BBC Radio 3), with radio listeners receiving advance invitations to request IKB postcards on which to fix their gaze. The following year, being the year of Jarman’s death, Blue would migrate once more—into the form of an edition. Never completed, save for a handful of proof copies, this iteration centred-upon a loose Klein Blue screenprint signed by Jarman, with his poetic screenplay letterpress-printed by Tom Shaw and casebound in a blue paper that persistently frames the text. A limited number of copies were further set to be housed in commissioned hand-painted solander boxes.

The present proof is one of only a handful of recorded copies with said solander box, albeit differing from the others, with its exterior eschewing the solid IKB for a frame of overlapping pale-blue strokes. A truly remarkable artifact, from the afterlife of one of the twentieth century’s most powerful artworks. With one copy located at Chelsea College of Art (which includes chemise for screenprint); none otherwise discovered via OCLC or COPAC. In addition, our private census has identified four other proofs: one without screenprint, another without solander box.
 

From a one-night concert/exhibition of Paik’s work; his first one-man show in the United States. The verso features a text from Paik (“Electronic TV & Color TV experiment”) illustrated with circuit diagram, along with various press quotes. The evening also featured live performances by Carol Bergé and Mieko Shiomo. With single OCLC / COPAC record discovered (Northwestern).
 

Monday, October 4, 1965 holds mythical status in the natural history of video art. Pope Paul VI’s visit to NYC—the first of a Pope to the United States—resulted in a traffic jam. Stuck in a cab in that traffic jam, on his way to a Fluxus event downtown, was Nam June Paik, along with his newly-acquired Sony portapak camera. The video footage that he captured from that cab was exhibited later that night at Cafe Au Go Go. This is the invitation to that not-yet event (which ironically includes the typo “Nam June Pai”); unrecorded on OCLC.
 

In 1970, Lawrence Weiner first experimented with motion pictures with To the sea / on the sea / from the sea / at the sea / bordering the sea; a 50 second contribution to Gerry Schum’s Identifications programme, which was broadcast over Sudwestfunk television. (Other contributors included Joseph Beuys, Daniel Buren, Hamish Fulton, Gilbert & George, Alghiero Boetti, and Richard Serra). Over the next year—as Schum abandoned his idea of avant-garde television, and instead developed his Videogalerie production/distribution model in Düsseldorf—Weiner would create two more black-and-white video works with Schum: Beached and Broken off. Each of the videos explored the material possibilities of the medium, in sets of five variant actions (i.e. of relocating drift-wood onto the beach and breaking material objects with his hands), whilst holding to the ethos of creating “public freehold example[s] of what could be art within my responsibility.” In the fifth and final possibility explored in Broken off, Weiner pulls the plug on the camera itself.

Later reflecting on these early video works, Weiner lamented: “there is an inherent mistake in the idea of video being used just as a historical way to present what an artist’s actions have been. [Instead] you had some kind of obligation to the idea that this was other people’s real time, and they were going to be sitting and they were going to be watching and they were going to give up part of their lives. You had to give them a full package... You had to remember it was a reasonable theatrical performance, that it was other people’s real life you were imposing on.”

After Schum’s premature death in 1973, responsibility for the Videogalerie and its works transferred to his wife (and artist) Ursula Wevers, who produced this distribution copy in 1990. Institutional holdings for these works are scarce, with Chicago’s Video Data Bank having produced a compilation of Weiner’s first four videos (1970-1972), from which copies are reporting at Emory and Virginia Commonwealth.
 

An evocative print-supplement to Vostell’s first long-form motion picture (45 min.), released in the year after he helped found the Videothek in Berlin. A pounding heartbeat accompanies post-Nazi/post-industrial images of latent violence, with the recurring figure of a naked woman having various of her body parts fused with concrete. With single OCLC/COPAC record discovered (Northwestern).
 

“Consider these facts: the TV set is on an average of five hours and forty-five minutes a day; ninety-seven percent of all families in the United States have at least one TV set; and between the ages of two and sixty-five, an average American will spend nine full years watching television—one-quarter of his waking life... Television has created TV spine, TV eyes, and the TV habit. With the continuing growth of television it will become more and more difficult to separate what is inside and what is outside the TV Environment.” In this number of their Radical software publishing project (1970-1974), The Raindance Foundation—founded in 1969 to explore the possibilities of video art and alternative television—explores the ecological dimensions of the television medium (as evolutionary fact), with illustrated reflections on Richard Nixon (as the first TV president), talk shows, game shows, baseball, wrestling, women on TV, the homes of TV stars, a typology of TV sets, and separate interviews with a TV repairman and TV salesman. This copy having belonged to the Centre for Advanced TV Studies in London, being the formal face of the radical media group IRAT (the Institute for Research in Art and Technology).
 

One of the first video pioneers, Fluxus artist Robert Filliou often-meditated on the medium in the early-to-mid 1980s, before retiring to monastic life. Here, the Janus-faced figure that reappears throughout his oeuvre is mobilized within a “modern video model” of measured gazes and screens. With single OCLC record discovered (BnF).
 

"This exhibition presents artists' work in video which has as its object language and sign systems. Each investigates various aspects of this form/code/channel matrix. Most utilize the inherent ability of video to deliver visual and auditory information equally. Some of these artists are well known and have exerted influence. Others are less known. All are investigating and expanding video and the code by which it operates as a language." Mobilizing the thoughts of Baudrillard, Eco, and McLuhan, Scott Rankin here curates a catalogue of 18 works of video art from 1972-1986, each represented in the catalogue by a screenshot image, brief synopsis, and metadata. 

Artists included: Gary Hill, Marina Abramovic/Ulay, Richard Serra, Linda Montano, Hans Breder, Laurie Anderson, John Baldessari, Annette Barbier, William Wegman, Skip Arnold, David Bunn, Juan Downey, Jacques Nyst, Peter Rose, Ken Fiengold, Pier Marton, Caterina Borelli, Carole Ann Klonarides/Michael Owen, and Rene Pulfer/Herbert Fritsch—with the latter attempting to hold a smile for 45 minutes. With only 2 OCLC records discovered (Alberta, UC Santa Barbara).