Books & Edited Journals
Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film, Minnesota UP 2005.
In his book, Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History on Avant-Garde Film,Jeffrey Skoller challenges the myth that avant-garde films are obscurantist and disconnected from the realities of social and political history, and identifies a group of experimental films which take up some of the most important historical events of our era. This is a cinema of evocation rather than representation calling attention to those aspects of history that often exceed the visible and representable, but nonetheless profoundly impacts our experience of everyday life.
As a cine-poetics, Shadows, Specters, Shards offers in-depth readings of works by some of today’s most innovative filmmakers including Ernie Gehr, Abigail Child, James Benning, Zoe Beloff, Craig Baldwin. Abraham Ravett, Ken Jacobs, Daniel Eisenberg, Charles Burnett, Eleanor Antin, Jean-Luc Godard, Patricio Guzmán. Using the materiality of cinematic time, Skoller argues, the films defy our understanding of historical knowledge as fossilized artifact, revealing it to be a constantly transforming phenomenon of the present. Skoller’s analyses are informed by his own practice as a filmmaker and a range of cultural theories. Using Benjamin’s concept of allegory and Deleuze’s notion of the “time-image,” Skoller suggests a new ethics of image-making--one that deepens the relation between making art and making history.
"A passionate and close reading of a body of previously neglected avant-garde films, which in Jeffrey Skoller's hands are revealed to be at the cutting edge of some of the most significant social and intellectual debates of the last three decades. Shadows, Specters, Shards is a timely and provocative contribution to film culture and scholarship.' -Yvonne Rainer, Filmmaker, Journeys From Berlin/1971, Privilege, Murder and MURDER
“Jeffrey Skoller addresses some of the richest, least acknowledged, avant-garde movies of the last two decades; in his scrupulous analysis these movies are revealed both as artifact and art work”--J. Hoberman, film critic, The Village Voice.
"A singularly important work in the fields of film studies and visual historiography. Students and scholars of avant-garde film, history and representation, visual culture, Jewish studies, and progressive political activists will find this book especially useful." -Akira Mizuta Lippit, Professor of Film Studies, University of Southern California
Editor: POSTWAR The Films of Daniel Eisenberg. London, black dog pub, 2010
POSTWAR: The Films of Daniel Eisenberg is the first major critical study of the unique American filmmaker Daniel Eisenberg. With essays by some of the most respected scholars on contemporary film and media art, history and cultural studies, POSTWAR places the film maker's work in the context of contemporary cultural theory and experimental media practice.
Over the last three decades, Eisenberg has forged a unique body of films that have become internationally recognized for expanding the boundaries between traditions of the personal avant-garde film and historical documentary. POSTWAR focuses on Eisenberg’s four thematically connected films, made between 1981 and 2003, exploring the on-going implications of the events of the Second World War and the fall of the Berlin Wall as they continue to unfold in the present. Eisen berg's cinema of time, shows how such events continue to be structuring elements in our personal and political lives. As works of visual history, these exquisitely made films engage contemporary questions about the relationships between the past, present and future, how the meanings of events transform over time, and the representation of those elements of past events that defy linear narrative forms.
Richly illustrated, POSTWAR creates an exciting new dialogue between text, photographs, film stills, and other visual documents; crafting a new discourse between critical analysis and visual thinking. The refracted and reconfigured elements of the book mirror the ways in which Eisenberg·s films bring image and text into direct contact, and how this poetic textuality constructs a dialogue with history.
Contributing writers: Nora Alter, , Tom Gunning, Jeffrey Skoller, Raymond Bellour, Christa Blumlinger Leora Auslander, , Scott Durham with a post-script by Daniel Eisenberg.
Guest Editor: “Making it (Un)real: Contemporary Theories and Practices in Documentary/Animation.”
Special Issue: Animation: An interdisciplinary Journal. Vol 6, #3, 2011. Sage Press
Table of Contents
Editorial
Suzanne Buchan
Introduction to the Special Issue Making It (Un)real: Contemporary Theories and Practices in Documentary Animation (Click on Title for PDF)
Jeffrey Skoller
Absence, Excess and Epistemological Expansion: Towards a Framework for the Study of Animated Documentary
Annabelle Honess Roe
Experiments in Documentary Animation: Anxious Borders, Speculative Media
Tess Takahashi
Drawing Voices
Jacqueline Goss
Animation on Trial
Karen Beckman
Reenacting Ryan: The Fantasmatic and the Animated Documentary
Steve Fore
Animating with Facts: The Performative Process of Documentary Animation in the ten mark (2010)
Paul Ward
Calligraphic Animation: Documenting the Invisible
Laura U. Marks
Everything’s For You: Reflections on Animating a ‘Fierce and Inexorable Bond’
Abraham Ravett
Animating the Real: A Case Study
Agnieszka Piotrowska
Animated Recollection and Spectatorial Experience in Waltz with Bashir
Ohad Landesman & Roy Bendor
Animating the Photographic Trace, Intersecting Phantoms with Phantasms: Contemporary Media Arts, Digital Moving Pictures, and the Documentary’s ‘Expanded Field’
Ji-Hoon Kim
Flotsam and Jetsam: The Spray of History
Lewis Klahr
Guest Editor: CINEMATOGRAPH A Journal of Film and Media Art Volume 4.
San Francisco Cinematheque, 1991.
Table of Contents
Introduction.
Jeffrey Skoller
Friction/non-friction.
John Knecht
Science and the Film Avant-Garde
Lisa Cartwright
Le Voyage de l'Ogre (The Path of the Ogre)
Jack Walsh
Pushing the Envelope with RocketKitCongoKit
Kathleen Tyner
Two Fragments from Practice
Johan Van der Keuken
Erica Suderberg's Displayed Termination: The Interval Between Deaths
Marina de Bellagente LaPalma
Truth Serum.
Abigail Child
A Picture a Day Keeps the Doctor Away– Sometimes: An Interview with Anne Robertson.
Scott MacDonald
Between Charybdis and Scylla: A Correspondence about Alternative Media
Helen De Michiel and Christine Tamblyn
Camcorder Politics
Alexandra Juhasz
Celia Dougherty/Grapefruit
Valerie Soe
The Overflow of Ecstasy into Speech: Leslie Thornton‘s There Was an Unseen Cloud Moving
Linda Peckham
From Archive to Archiveology
Joel Katz
Stories of Travel: The Films of Amos Gitai
Liz Kotz
Can Cinema Lie?
Daniel Barnett
Sink or Swim
Su Friedrich
Three Asian Films: For a New Cinematic Language
Bérénice Reynaud
In Defense of Sodom: A Gut Response
Michael Wallin
The Videotapes of the Latino Midwest Video Collective
Raúl Ferra-Balanquet
Fissure (Your Voice, Adjacent, Absent)
Allan Sondheim
Documentary on the Margins: Bill Stamets' Super-8mm Ethnography
Chuck Kleinhans
Orson Welles' Essay Films and Documentary Fictions: A Two-Part Speculation
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Outlaws Through The Lens of Corporate America
Ellen Spiro
An Interview with Steve Fagin
Jeffrey Skoller