This book - accompanied by a DVD containing excerpts of all featured works and additional materials - tracks 40 years of German video art, from 1963 to the present. It offers a comprehensive overview of historical and current tendencies in video art, via 59 individual artworks. The included texts reflect on current strategies involving moving images and issues of presentation, conservation and restoration.

This ambitious reference work charts the major works and art movements, the most important theoretical developments, and the historical, socio-political, and aesthetic issues since 1945, primarily in the Euro-American context. Bringing together the leading critics and historians from art to comment on the historical and theoretical issues, the book offers new approaches towards the analysis of visual arts in general.

This major new book is the first comprehensive history of artists' film and video in Britain. Structured in two parts ('Institutions' and 'Artists and Movements'), it considers the work of some 300 artists, including Kenneth Macpherson, Basil Wright, Len Lye, Humphrey Jennings, Margaret Tait, Jeff Keen, Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Malcolm Le Grice, Peter Gidal, William Raban, Chris Welsby, David Hall, Tamara Krikorian, Sally Potter, Guy Sherwin, Lis Rhodes, Derek Jarman, David Larcher, Steve Dwoskin, James Scott, Peter Wollen and Laura Mulvey, Peter Greenaway, Patrick Keiller, John Smith, Andrew Stones, Jaki Irvine, Tracy Emin, Dryden Goodwin, and Stephanie Smith and Ed Stewart.

Written by the leading authority in the field, A History of Artists' Film and Video in Britain, 1897-2004 brings to light the range and diversity of British artists' work in these mediums as well as the artist-run organizations that have supported the art form's development. In so doing it greatly enlarges the scope of any understanding of "British cinema" and demonstrates the crucial importance of the moving image to British art history. 

The book tracks the movement of the film avant-garde between, on the one hand, the cinema, and, on the other hand, modern art. It also reconstitutes the film avant-garde as an independent form of art practice with its own internal logic and aesthetic discourse. This is the first major history of avant-garde film and video to be published, ranging from Cézanne, dada, and Brakhage, to the new wave of British video artists in the 90s.

A critical introduction to video art in Europe and North America covering the period from the early 1960s -- when video art first appeared as a distinctive medium -- into the 1990s, when video through digital technology with independent film-making and photography. Richly illustrated, Video Art is essential reading for anyone interested in art history and contemporary art practice.