William Raban's Nautical Twilight

Fifty Years an Artist Filmmaker

William Raban

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9783031771132
• eBook ISBN: 9783031771149
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book explores the practice of artist filmmaker William Raban from 1970 to the present.  The trajectory from his early experimental, landscape and expanded cinema works of the 1970s leads into more recent films on the River Thames and London; his techniques are examined and engagingly explained to attract a wide readership including both experts and those with little knowledge of the subject.

This is a personal account of what it means to make work in a radical filmmaking context to explore both the political and perceptual/formal qualities of film through a period of immense social and technological change. 

Table of contents

• Experimental Film and Artists’ Moving Image
• William Raban's Nautical Twilight
• Foreword by Michael Chanan
• Foreword by William Fowler
• Acknowledgements
• About This Book
• Contents
• About the Author
• 1. Introduction
• 2. A Student at Saint Martin’s, River Yar and Other Early Works
• 3. Angles of Incidence, Moonshine, Thames Barrier, Autumn Scenes, Wave Formations
• 4. From 2′45″ to Pink Trousers, After Duchamp, 4′22″, Crosscurrents
• 5. Episodes from The London Filmmakers’ Co-op (1972–77) and Filmaktion
• 6. Black and Silver (1981)
• 7. Thames Film (1986)
• 8. From 60° North (1991) and Passion for the Sea
• 9. Under the Tower Trilogy: Sundial, A13, Island Race
• 10. MM and About Now MMX
• 11. Ron Haselden, Stephen Cripps at Acme, Beating the Bridges, Confessions
• 12. Firestation (2000) and 72–82 (2014)
• 13. The Houseless Shadow (2011) and Time and the Wave (2013)
• 14. Available Light, London Republic and Laki Haze
• 15. Reflection
• Correction to: William Raban’s Nautical Twilight
• Appendix
• Index