Light Is A Kind Of Rhythm

Light Is a Kind of Rhythm provides a speculative history of cinema: Alena Williams investigates the relationship of light and moving images from an early moment in the history of film to that of the present day. She assumes that contemporary artists like Jan Hammer, Jutta Koether, Andreas Wutz, Die Tödliche Doris, and Matthias Müller return to a 1920s-style engagement with cinema. In their films, videos and digital slides, the moving image offers an alternative mode for thinking through abstraction; static paintings, collages, and walls are reconstituted as animate, reflective objects, while transient light effects are extracted from life and assigned entirely new meanings.

In a critical essay included in the book, Alena Williams sets out a theoretical background for the analysis of the interrelation of cinema, works of art, and the contexts in which the films were shown in the early twentieth century. Light Is a Kind of Rhythm furthermore contains three new English translations of seminal articles on art and cinema by the film theorist Siegfried Kracauer as well as artist interviews.