From the dustjacket, "Sidney Peterson was one of the originators of the American avant-garde cinema. The five films he made in San Francisco between 1947 and 1950 have become classics; they have influenced the cinematic education of many of the best filmmakers of the subsequent generations. For years Peterson had an underground reputation as a man of immense and arcane learning, surprising wit, and unorthodox insights into the working of advanced cinema and modern art. In The Dark of the Screen he writes about the cinematic experience and his role as a filmmaker. It is a book in the tradition and spirit of Marcel Duchamp. Elegantly written, drolly irreverent, it tells the story of his involvement with cinema during what has been called the San Francisco Renaissance (1945-50) and his subsequent adventures as the first consultant on the artistic future of television for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. After attempting to make a documentary film about Kwakiutl Indians, he worked in Hollywood as an intellectual maverick at the Disney Studios. The Dark of the Screen is a unique memoir which fuses intellectual history with the theory of cinema. No sooner had Peterson finished it, than he returned to independent filmmaking after a hiatus of thirty years. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.