VES 176n: Facing Reality: A History of Documentary Cinema
VES 177e: Critical Cinema: A History of Experimental and
Avant-Garde Film

The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). Reproduced with the permission of University of California Press.

Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
Reproduced with permission of University of California Press.

MacDonald is author of the ongoing series, A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, now in five volumes (Berkeley: University of California Press). His Avant-Garde Film/Motion Studies (Cambridge University Press) was published in 1993; Screen Writings: Scripts and Texts by Independent Filmmakers (Berkeley: University of California Press), in 1995. Recent books include The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); two books on American film societies: Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society and Art in Cinema: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002, 2006); and most recently, Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). His articles and interviews have been published in Film Quarterly, the Independent, Artforum, October, the Chicago Review, American Studies, ISLE (Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment), Feminist Studies, and other journals. For thirty years MacDonald’s passion has been introducing students and public audiences to the worlds of alternative cinema. In 1999 he was an Anthology Film Archives Film Preservation Honoree for his service in helping to preserve the history of alternative cinema. He has curated film events at the Museum of Modern Art and at Anthology Film Archives (New York), the Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley), the Chicago Historical Society, and at many other venues. He has taught film studies, American literature, and American studies at Utica College of Syracuse University (where he is professor emeritus), at Hamilton College, and at Bard College. Current research interests include nature filmmaking, meditative forms of avant-garde and documentary film and video, relationships between avant-garde cinema and African American cinema, and Cambridge-made documentary film.