He is also the only UK filmmaker of his generation to become a leading writer about the avant-garde cinema. His book Film Art Phenomena lucidly surveys the creative process in experimental film, and he has written precisely notated interpretations of films by Stan Brakhage, Peter Kubelka, Michael Snow, Steve Farrer, Lis Rhodes, Guy Sherwin and many others. To expanded cinema, with which he entered the frame back in 1974, he has contributed site-specific and installation work, exploiting the looped or lens-less projector as an instrument for vision, rather than as a spuriously semi-sculptural object in the gallery. His work in this respect is firmly but unobtrusively polemical. It makes the case for a direct cinema of unhidden surfaces and visual declaration. A.L. Rees is a research tutor in the Department of Visual Communication at the Royal College of Art, London, UK. He writes and teaches about artists’ film, video, and digital media, and has curated numerous film programs for both the cinema and the gallery. His book A History of Experimental Film and Video was published by the British Film Institute in 1999 (revised edition, 2011). He was co-editor of the publication Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film published by the Tate in 2011. Recent essays have appeared in Millennium Film Journal (USA), Iconics (Japan), MIRAJ and Sequence (UK). A former chair of the Artists’ Film and Video Committee at Arts Council England, he was also head of Time-Based Media at Maidstone College of Art (1989–96). He is an advisory reader to British Film Institute publications (Palgrave Macmillan), s (Oxford University Press, New York), and is on the editorial board of Film Quarterly (USA). He is currently editing a book, together with Nicky Hamlyn, about the Austrian filmmaker Kurt Kren.
Film. Develop. Project. 16mm workshop led by Nicky Hamlyn, Art Gallery of Windsor, 2012; Photo: Oona Mosna