Annette Michelson and the Radical Aspiration in American Avant-Garde Cinema

This critical anthology of newly commissioned essays by established and emerging scholars examines the work and legacy of Annette Michelson (1922–2018), pioneering critic and theorist of avant-garde cinema. Michelson’s insights transformed our understanding of cinema through her provocative and profoundly original analyses. As a contributor and editor for Artforum in the 1960s and early 1970s, then founding editor of the journal October, Michelson defined the terms of moving image art and its relation to painting, sculpture, and performance. Enriched by her deep, first-hand knowledge of emerging discourses of phenomenology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, and post-structuralism, Michelson’s writings heralded a new paradigm of philosophical, interdisciplinary film scholarship that reverberates today. This book chronicles how that paradigm emerged, its effects, and its decisive consequences for cinema studies. While Michelson is among the great film critics and theorists of the twentieth century, her work remains largely unexamined. The book provides a critical apparatus, informed by in-depth primary research, to reveal Michelson’s singular place as a defining figure in American film theory and criticism.