Alternative Projections

A collection of papers discussing Los Angeles’s role in avant-garde, experimental, and minority filmmaking.

Alternative Projections: Experimental Film in Los Angeles, 1945-1980 is a groundbreaking anthology that features papers from a conference and series of film screenings on postwar avant-garde filmmaking in Los Angeles sponsored by Filmforum, the Getty Foundation, and the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, together with newly-commissioned essays, an account of the screening series, reprints of historical documents by and about experimental filmmakers in the region, and other rare photographs and ephemera. The resulting diverse and multi-voiced collection is of great importance, not simply for its relevance to Los Angeles, but also for its general discoveries and projections about alternative cinemas.

“Alternative Projections provides a useful corollary and often a corrective to what has become a somewhat unilateral approach to experimental cinema in the period taken up here.” —Millennium Film Journal

“[T]here are enough examples of ingenuity and achievement contained in this volume to unite a new generation of independent artists, exhibitors, and audiences in maintaining a viable outlet for cinematic creativity in Los Angeles.” —Los Angeles Review of Books