Film as a Subversive Art - Amos Vogel

Film as a Subversive Art by Amos Vogel / a nice new hardcover edition from Film Desk Books (2021) / ISBN 9780999468388 / 336 pages, 6.5 x 9 inches

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"Film as a Subversive Art takes an outstanding place…in the already extensive literature on film. It’s pictorial enlightenment and its text make it an invaluable work.”—Luis Buñuel

“Vogel’s masterpiece is one of the truly iconic books on cinema.”—Greg de Cuir Jr., independent curator and writer

“A manifesto that wages war on cinema’s orthodoxies.”—Nick Pinkerton, The Village Voice

“Amos Vogel is the moral conscience of the world of cinema.”—Werner Herzog

“One of the great pioneers of the avant-garde film.”—Yoko Ono

“The man was a giant.”—Martin Scorsese

Amos Vogel’s seminal book Film as a Subversive Art was first published in 1974 and, in Vogel’s own words, detailed, “the accelerating worldwide trend toward a more liberated cinema, in which subjects and forms hitherto considered unthinkable or forbidden are boldly explored.” It is now available again in this newly restored edition, in which hundreds of errors have been corrected. Accompanied by over three hundred rare film stills, newly sourced and re-scanned for this edition.

This revised edition of the book edited by Jim Colvill and Herb Shellenberger. New foreword by Herb Shellenberger.

Amos Vogel (1921–2012) was born in Vienna and emigrated to the United States in 1938, eventually ending up in New York City. From 1947 to 1963 Vogel and his wife Marcia ran Cinema 16, the most successful and influential membership film society in North American history. In 1963 Vogel founded the Lincoln Center Film Department and was co-founder of the New York Film Festival, which he ran until 1968. He was a longtime faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School and a regular contributor to The Village Voice and Film Comment.