Joseph Cornell is one of the most significant American artists of the twentieth century. His famous boxes and his collage work have been widely admired and studied. His extraordinary body of film work, including Rose Hobart (1936) and By Night with Torch and Spear (1942), has been much less explored, vet, as Michael Pigott argues, it is consistent with his creative vision and a serious contribution to twentieth century avant-garde cinema. In Joseph Cornell Versus Cinema, Michael Pigott examines Cornell's filmmaking on its own terms, as a series of innovative, idiosyncratic and seminal engagements with the medium of film. He argues that Cornell's work is highly significant in terms of understanding how we relate and have related to moving images in both the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Pigott traces some of the key themes running through the artist's film work-found footage; texture and affect; and time and the everyday-revealing the extent to which Cornell Was ahead of his time in establishing radically new terms of aesthetic and cultural engagement and valuation. Key questions addressed in Cornell's film work include the role of the spectator as an active participant and the nature of knowledge transfer, understanding and aesthetic experience. His work predicts many current innovations.

Cornell remixes found materials from warehouses and Junkshops much as contemporary remix artists work with materials from the internet: an analogue prefiguring of the role of contemporary digital technology. Joseph Cornell Versus Cinema is an important contribution to our knowledge of twentieth century culture and especially the relationship between art and film. It will appeal to scholars and students in both fields, as well as American studies and cultural studies. Book jacket.