Annette Michelson

Book Presentation and Film
Annette Michelson: Euphorie des Erkennens. Denken in Filmen und anderes

November 29, 2023

Annette Michelson (1922–2018) is one of the most important contemporary film scholars. Born in Brooklyn, she worked in Paris from 1956 to 1966 as the Art Editor for the European edition of the Herald Tribune. After returning to the United States, Michelson taught at the recently opened Department of Cinema Studies at New York University and founded the influential journal October. Her texts circle around three fields of cinematic thinking: the historical avant-garde of the 1920s, Godard and the American Independents of the 1960s, and, finally, feminist artists such as Yvonne Rainer and Martha Rosler. For her, however, film was always an instrument of recognition, the camera a machine that generates a "general epistemological euphoria," a euphoria of knowledge – and physical experience.

"Vienna was my decompression chamber," Michelson once said, having made many stopovers here while doing research on Dziga Vertov in archives in Moscow. Her relationship to Vienna was multifaceted: Freud, the Second Viennese School, the Wittgenstein House, and, later, the Institute for Theater, Film and Media Studies.

Euphorie des Erkennens. Denken in Filmen und anderes appears on Michelson's 101st birthday and collects several of her central works as well as an unpublished conversation with Alexander Kluge. (Klemens Gruber, Aki Beckmann / Translation: Ted Fendt)
  
Klemens Gruber was Professor for Intermedialität at the University of Vienna until 2020 and most recently published Kluges strategische Vermögen (2022). Aki Beckmann is the editor of Maske und Kothurn and TFMJ at tfm Institut at the University of Vienna.

Annette Michelson, Euphorie des Erkennens. Denken in Filmen und anderes. Böhlau: Vienna 2023, edited by Aki Beckmann, Klemens Gruber, Antonia Lant; translated by Werner Rappl.
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