News from elsewhere: a constellation of avant-garde cinemas and my place in It

Abstract

In the second half of the 1970s, two Francophone filmmakers each made a film which was to define a significant milestone in the histories of both avant-garde cinema and gallery-based moving image practice. Chantal Akerman's News From Home (1976) and Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1976-1983) emerged from a cinematic idiom that dates back to the Lumiere brothers' earliest films of 1895. However, it was the incorporation of the practices of experimental 1960s structuralist film that was to take the legacy of these two works out of the cinema screen and into the gallery space.

This thesis views this legacy through the microcosm of my art practice, linking several formal and conceptual characteristics present in News from Home and Sans Soleil through to my work, as well as the work of several contemporary gallery-based film and video artists. These characteristics, common throughout the history of the essay film tradition, are grouped under three headings: The Voice, Politics in the Era of Capital, and To Be Elsewhere.