Media artist John Knecht's work, and particularly his recent projects, made for flat-screen gallery installation and digital projection, has been finding an expanding audience on Facebook, as well as in galleries and on his website.1 The various single- and multi-channel video works that Knecht has produced since the early 1990s, including such recent projects as Deluge: Studies in the Super Natural (2010) and after math (2017)—which he sometimes calls “electronic paintings”—have roots in both surreal and expressionist painting, and in the early history of animation; from the Thaumatrope and Emil Cohl's Fantasmagorie (1908), to Krazy Kat, the Fleischer Brothers' silent and sound films, and the early Disney/Iwerks sound cartoons; as well as in the work of more contemporary experimental animators such as Robert Breer and Susan Pitt. The seam between stillness and motion remains fascinating for Knecht; he says he's never really moved beyond Monkeyshines, No. 1 and No....
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December 2019
Research Article|
December 01 2019
Continuing Deluge: John Knecht's Video Work
Scott MacDonald
Scott MacDonald
Scott MacDonald's many books on independent cinema include collections of interviews with independent filmmakers, the five-volume Critical Cinema series from University of California Press, and more recently Avant-Doc and The Sublimity of Document: Cinema as Diorama (Avant-Doc 2)—as well as explorations of particular moving-image artists and films/videos, and of institutions that have kept independent media alive. He teaches film history and programs film events at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York.
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Afterimage (2019) 46 (4): 39–55.
Citation
Scott MacDonald; Continuing Deluge: John Knecht's Video Work. Afterimage 1 December 2019; 46 (4): 39–55. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2019.464004
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