The Palgrave Handbook of Experimental Cinema

This book is a collection of newly commissioned essays by established and emerging scholars that maps out the current landscape of experimental cinema studies and sets agendas for future work in the field. Introducing new critical methodologies and calling overdue attention to neglected artists, regions, and topics, the contributions to this volume reassess and reassert experimental cinema as a site of formal exploration and interrogation as well as resistance to institutional, political, and social norms. This collection articulates what it means for experimental cinema to be these things in the contemporary moment, staking out new directions in thinking about the subject not only as a growing sub-field of cinema studies, but as an artistic and scholarly tradition in dialogue with art history, visual culture, philosophy, and the sciences. The contributions reflect a diversity of voices and perspectives, weaving together theoretical, poetic, and personal modes of writing and traversing questions of form, emotion, materiality, national, postcoloniality, the body, and ecology.

Kim Knowles is Senior Lecturer in Alternative and Experimental Film at Aberystwyth University, Wales. She is the author of A Cinematic Artist: The Films of Man Ray (2012) and Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

Jonathan Walley is Associate Professor of Cinema at Denison University, USA. He is the author of Cinema Expanded: Avant-Garde Film in the Age of Intermedia (2020).