The Edges of Cinema: Book Launch + Panel Discussion

Join us to celebrate the publication of Erika Balsom's The Edges of Cinema: Essays on Twenty-First Century Film Culture with a panel discussion between Erika Balsom, Lola Lemke, Maria Palacios Cruz, and Jonathan Romney.

Recent years have seen a panic over the future of mainstream film. Yet in her new collection The Edges of Cinema, Balsom argues that film culture is at its most vital on the margins, where the moving image meets visual art, documentary brushes up against experimentalism, and curators are reshaping established histories. Bringing together a decade of selected essays and reviews, the book explores subjects ranging from computer-generated animation to the effects of digitisation, and from the status of observational cinema to a new golden age of repertory cinema, in order to make a case for the politics, provocations, and pleasures of a less ordinary cinema. In response to Balsom's collection, the panelists will discuss key transformations and tendencies in the last quarter-century of vanguard filmmaking.