In these eight biographies, Stan Brakhage brings us into intimate acquaintance with some of America’s most influential independent filmmakers; Jerome Hill, Marie Menken, James Broughton, Christopher MacLaine, Maya Deren, Sidney Peterson, Bruce Conner and Ken Jacobs.

This book extends into book form Nick Mauss’s 2018 exhibition Transmissions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which was heralded by the New York Times as “an installation, a collage of several art forms, a revisionist investigation of New York modernism and sexual expression, and an essay in queer theory…”

Including never-before published reproductions of documents and artworks by Eugene Berman, Ilse Bing, Paul Cadmus, Maya Deren, Walker Evans, Peter Hujar, George Platt Lynes, Elie Nadelman, Isamu Noguchi, PaJaMa, Dorothea Tanning, Pavel Tchelitchew, Carl Van Vechten, and many more. The essays consider subjects of ballet and the body, Mauss’s work as artist and exhibition maker, performance and historiography, and dance in museum spaces.