Fields of View

A.L. Rees was Head of the Time Based Media course at Maidstone College of Art from 1988 – 1995 and then Research Tutor at the Royal College of Art until 2014. At various times he was the chair of the Arts Council’s artists’ film and video committee, and an adviser on experimental film to the British Film Institute, Tate, the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Channel 4. His book A History of Experimental Film and Video (BFI, 1999/2011) remains a key text, supplemented by the wide range of essays he wrote for journals and books on film and art.Simon Payne is Reader in Film and Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin University,UK. In addition, he is an experimental video maker whose work has shown in numerous venues including Tate Modern; the Serpentine Gallery; The Hermitage, St Petersburg and the London, Edinburgh and Rotterdam Film Festivals. He has written widely on experimental film and video, and recently co-edited Kurt Kren: Structural Film with Nicky Hamlyn and A.L. Rees.

• Foreword: Harvesting FieldsAcknowledgementsFieldsFilm MachineFilm as Optic and IdeaExpanding CinemaRoom FilmsFilm ObjectsProjection SpaceTime FramesRealismsAsymptoteDigital DialecticFields in Braque and GehrClassic Film Theory and the SpectatorField and GestaltMonet, Lumière and Cinematic TimeDisplacement, SculptureBodies in MotionIntervalsMethods of MontageFramesFrames and WindowsConstructivism and ComputersGeometry of IntervalsNotes

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.