Expanded Cinema

Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood is a classic in the field for its time. Published in 1970, it describes state-of-the-art cinema effects and techniques to speculate upon the incredible emerging possibilities in film, video art and cybernetic cinema. The book could be termed visionary, particularly in respect to what has happened to cinematic technology in recent years, also in its critique of the falling of commercial television and mainstream cinema. Mostly the book reveals how abstract cinema, without narrative, can take us to visual poetic spaces that anticipated laptop production, Vj’ing, Installation works and even generative art. Subchapter titles from the book reveal the terrain, Cathode Ray Videotronics, Computer Generated Holographic Movies, Teledynamic Environments, Synaesthetics and Kineasthetics: The way of experience.

The book examines the work of all the key filmmakers of the time, The Whitney Brothers, Stan Vanderbeek, John Stehura and Lillian Schwartz to name a few. The book even has a whole dedicated section to the extraordinary work of Jordan Belson, probably the only detailed commentary on Belson’s work. Stills of these works are hard to find on the web so your be happy to know the book contains quite a few.

A PDF of the book can be found at two sources which is great as the out of print editions are very difficult to track down, at least without paying a price.

http://www.ubu.com/historical/youngblood/youngblood.html
http://www.vasulka.org/Kitchen/PDF_Expanded/Expanded.html

The latter is broken down into chapter PDF’s. (Thanks the Peter for pointing me to this link).