Eyes Upside Down: Visonary Filmmakers and the Heritage of Emerson

Sitney analyzes in detail the work of eleven American avant-garde filmmakers as heirs to the aesthetics of exhilaration and innovative vision articulated by Ralph Waldo Emerson and explored by John Cage, Charles Olson and Gertrude Stein. The films discussed span the sixty years since the Second World War. With three chapters each devoted to Stan Brakhage and Robert Beavers, two each to Hollis Frampton and Jonas Mekas, and single chapters on Marie Menken, Ian Hugo, Andrew Noren, Warren Sonbert, Su Friedrich, Ernie Gehr, and Abigail Child, Eyes Upside Down is the fruit of Sitney's lifelong study of visionary aspirations in the American avant-garde cinema.

P. Adams Sitney is a Professor of Visual Art at Princeton University. He has taught at Bard College, New York University, The Cooper Union, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the School of Visual Arts. He is the author of Visionary Film: The American Avan-Garde 1943-1200; Modernist Montage: The Obscurity of Vision in Film and Literature; Vital Crises in Italian Cinema; and he edited the Film Culture Reader; The Essential Cinema; The Avant-Garde Film; and Stan Brakhage's Metaphors on Vision. In 1969 he co-founded Anthology Film Archives in New York.