Pop Cinema
Edited by Glyn Davis, Tom Day
Examines how the tropes of Pop Art are expressed in film
- First book to explore Pop thematics and aesthetics in relation to the moving image
- Adopts a global perspective on Pop cinema, examining work by artists from (amongst other countries) Japan, Colombia, Brazil, and Poland
- Moves beyond the Pop canon to interrogate critically neglected works and lesser-known artists
Pop Cinema is the first book devoted to moving image works which engage with the central thematics and aesthetics of Pop Art. The essays in the collection focus in on the core concerns of Pop as a widespread and ideologically complex art movement, and examine the ways in which artists in various global locations have used forms of film practice outside of the mainstream to explore those preoccupations.
The book’s contributors also identify the ways in which dominant Pop aesthetics – flat planes of bold colour, mechanical forms of repetition, appropriation of materials from popular culture sources – were adopted, reworked, or abandoned by such filmmakers.
At root, the book asks three basic questions: what shapes might a Pop form of cinema take, what materials would it engage with, and what might it have to say?
List of Figures/illustrations
Notes on the Contributors
Introduction: Towards a Pop Cinema
Glyn Davis and Tom Day
Part 1: Framing Pop Cinema
1. Notes on Pop Cinema, Revisited
William Kaizen
2. Pop and Cinema: Three Tendencies
Ed Halter
Part 2: Pop Cinema’s Parameters
3. Times Square as Pop Readymade: William Klein’s Broadway by Light (1958)
Tom Day
4. Arocha’s Black and White Pop: History, Desire and Politics in 1960s Colombia in Las ventanas de Salcedo (1966)
Juan Carlos Guerrero-Hernandez
5. Psychedelic Agit-Pop: The Animated Films of Tadanori Yokoo
Clint Enns
Chapter 6. Some Like It Pop: Replication and Repetition in Bruce Connor’s MARILYN TIMES FIVE (1968-73)
Justin Remes
7. A Lost White Girl of Pop: Writing the Drive to Fantasize in Daddy (1973)
Kimberly Lamm
Part 3: Pop Cinema, Mass Production and the Politics of Consumption
8. Always Crashing in the Same Car
Glyn Davis
9. Wynn Chamberlain’s Brand X (1970) and the Politics of the Generic
Kara Carmack
10. The Other Children of Marx and Coca-Cola: Pop Cinema in Eastern Europe
David Crowley
11. 'Mouthpiece of the Dictatorship': Television and the Domestic Sphere in Brazilian Women’s Pop Cinema, 1972-77
Gillian Sneed
12. 'Manhandle the Merchandise': Michael Snow’s Breakfast (Table-Top Dolly) (1976)
Jon Davies
Appendix: A Pop Cinema Filmography
Index
Lively, informed, and incisive, the essays in this collection make crucial contributions on the history, theory, and global range of what has been called “pop cinema,” a label that has been used all too often with little grounding or rigor. Glyn Davis and Tom Day’s edited volume offers the first book-length, in-depth treatment of the topic. As it decisively expands our understanding of pop art, of 1960s and 1970s experimental cinema, and of the symbiotic rapport between both, this volume is poised to become a key reference in all future discussions of these topics.
This is a fascinating and valuable collection, filled with brilliant essays on individual films and filmmakers who, in their various and surprising combinations of mainstream and underground, expand our sense of what “Pop cinema” was and is. It is a vital contribution to ongoing work in film studies, in queer theory and on Pop itself.
