Fields of View

Al Rees's testament is a cinematic thinking: film and world swooping towards each other across a landscape of fields and intervals, projections and geometries, movements in and of time and space. On every page, the generosity of the man, the curator and the teacher shape new insights into our audiovisual century and its lineage. A work of permanent illumination. -- Sean Cubitt, Professor of Screen Studies, University of Melbourne, Australia
In the unlikely event that there was any doubt, Fields of View affirms A.L. Rees as one of experimental cinema's most erudite, insightful, and passionate critics and advocates. His writings, which range across a breathtaking array of subjects, ideas, works, and references, are intelligent - frequently brilliant - without ever devoting into intellectualism. They are astonishingly well-read without succumbing to mere scholasticism; we never lose the sense of an original voice, a distinct sensibility, and a great mind. Like all the best critical writing, Rees's is itself elegant, artful, provocative, and personal. This collection of essays is an excellent introduction for those unfamiliar with Rees, and a reminder to those of us who already knew his writing how important he was (and remains), and what great writing about art looks like. -- Dr Jonathan Walley, Associate Professor, Department of Cinema, Denison University, USA
In this posthumous collection of essays, A.L. Rees has woven his outstanding knowledge of avant-garde film into a startlingly original, and non-linear, reconfiguration of its history. With great agility and lightness of touch, his perceptive but unexpected juxtapositions between theorists and artists, ideas and technologies, movements and moments throw new light on key issues of film theory and aesthetics. This radical rejection of chronology, however, has an underlying message. Rees traces ways in which experimental art and artists' film have challenged traditions of space and time that, rather than abrupt rupture, create a direct connection with the forms of digital art. In the brilliant last chapters of the book, he zeroes in on this dialectic. -- Laura Mulvey, Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, UK.