Publication as Autobiography

The goal of virtually all my writing has been to bring attention to cinematic (and, early on, literary) accomplishments that have not received the careful attention, or the audiences, they deserve. I'm hoping that this new collection might create awareness of cultural achievements that have remained underserved or are in danger of fading from cultural memory. Collecting essays for Publication as Autobiography, which is organized chronologically, has allowed me to consider how successive decades have transformed my writing and how recent developments are transforming the field of cinema and media studies.

The subjects of the essays collected here include the betrayal of a canonical Hemingway short story, Erskine Caldwell's experiments with dialog; and a range of films by Larry Gottheim, J.J. Murphy, Peter Watkins, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Robert Nelson, Taka Iimura, Shiho Kano, James Benning, Gustav Deutsch, Peter Hutton, and the team of Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi-along with multi-media works by Patrick Clancy and Robert Huot. Also included: the catalogue essay for "Frames of Mind," a breakthrough 1986 Munson show of filmic and photographic works by Central New York artists (Hollis Frampton, Marion Faller, Bill Brand, Alan Berliner, John Knecht...); a survey of North American pilgrimage sites where generations of cine-devotees accessed independent cinema; explorations of books by Fluxus artist Emmett Williams and subversive-cinema curator/writer Amos Vogel, and of the remarkable one-season television series, My So-Called Life-plus an interview with media scholar, Max Tohline, focusing on the recent emergence of the video essay and the "supercut."

Scott MacDonald