Subversion

Subversion, by Duncan Reekie is the first book to explore not only avant-garde art cinema and film-making collectives but the entire history of underground films, from the 1920s onwards. The book is a strange combination of dry theoretical discussion and personal polemic. Amos Vogel's Film As A Subversive Art, with its frame-enlargements from hundreds of obscure films, remains an essential study of underground cinema [and is probably my all-time favourite film book]; Subversion does not quite live up to its subtitle (The Definitive History Of Underground Cinema), but it does provide an opportunity to consider underground films within their historical contexts.