'Film and Art After Cinema' Now Available in an English Edition
The German first edition was quickly sold out and followed by a second German edition in 2017. Now Lars Henrik Gass’ book 'Film and Art After Cinema' is finally available in English, published by Multimedijalni institut (Zagreb, Croatia). “A polemic against the disappearance of cinema in a multimedia world of consumerism,” wrote the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about the book, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung stated: “The book’s strategic thrust and nuanced line of argument are engaging.”
Lars Henrik Gass, director of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, has written a partisan, often critical book about the decline of cinema. His thesis: film is disappearing from cinema, which itself is slowly losing its status as a mass medium. The cinema itself gave rise to an autonomous social mode of perception that distinguished it from all other forms of art. In his purposefully controversial and knowledgeable collection of essays he describes the conditions under which films are now created and shown as works of art, examining numerous films and video installations (by Cyprien Gaillard, Douglas Gordon, Christian Marclay, Jesse McLean, Jon Rafman, Julian Rosefeldt, Steven Spielberg, Andy Warhol and others), and historical manifestations of film (Expanded Cinema, experimental film, found footage, installations, music videos, etc.).
But he focuses mainly on issues regarding the institutional, media and systemic logic of film funding, the internet and the art world. Gass analyses the social and economic conditions of a post-cinematographic present through the examples of television, DVD, internet, film festivals, exhibitions and museums. More than anything, however, Film and Art After Cinema must be read as a manifesto in favour of a specific mode of perception: we may only be able to grasp what cinema truly is in the moment of its disappearance. And we may never have needed cinema’s teachings and critique more than we do today.
Lars Henrik Gass is the director of the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, the co-editor of the collections Provokation der Wirklichkeit. Das Oberhausener Manifest und die Folgen (2012) and after youtube. Gespräche, Portraits, Texte zum Musikvideo nach dem Internet (2018), as well as the author of Das ortlose Kino. Über Marguerite Duras (2001) and Filmgeschichte als Kinogeschichte. Eine kleine Theorie des Kinos (2019).
Lars Henrik Gass
Film and Art After Cinema
210 pages, paperback: 11.2 x 16.5 cm
Publisher: Multimedijalni institut, Zagreb, Croatia
ISBN: 978-953-7372-47-7
Price: 12 €
Sold at the bookstore of the 65th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen.
Also available via Amazon.
Cover photos: Lars Henrik Gass; the book cover