Making images move

In Making Images Move, Jan-Christopher Horak looks at the work of eight European and American photographers whose films illustrate the gradual fragmentation of realistic narratives during the last eighty years. In close analyses of specific works, he shows how the visions of early practitioners such as Paul Strand and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who tried to create meaningful political statements using modernist techniques, gave way to the more personal - though no less socially conscious - creations of 1960s and 1970s filmmakers such as Chris Marker, Robert Frank, and Danny Lyon. Even documentary became more subjective, with Helen Levitt pioneering the use of the handheld camera and intuitive editing in her 1946 film, In the Street. Horak argues that photographers who have ventured into filmmaking, while fruitfully exploiting the differences between the two genres, often have been able to retain both their technical styles and complex thematic concerns. Including a filmography of more than 130 photographer-filmmakers, Making Images Move illuminates the instrumental role of these artists in the evolution of experimental cinema.