Fields of View

"Fields of View" is an investigation of point of view in film and digital media. A. L. Rees traces the links between the classic avant-garde or experimental cinema, focusing on innovators, such as Vertov and Brakhage, to present-day artists using digital technologies. Two key terms in Rees's enquiry are the field and the frame, which occur in many contexts from science to art history. Rees contrasts non-linear visual cinema to its realist counterpart in the drama film, but gives examples of how and where the narrative cinema breaks free of realism to approach the fragmented vision of the experimental film. The book concludes with a discussion of the reinvention of abstract art since the 1990s, by way of film and digital imaging for the silver screen and for the expanded frame of the art gallery, exploring the background to the recent explosion of media arts beyond the cinema and into the gallery and other new sites for projection.