This comprehensive new monograph on the influential British artist-filmmaker—renown for his playful and formally ingenious subversion of the everyday world—contains essays by Ian Christie, Martin Herbert, Kathrin Meyer, and Ethan de Seife.

Cinema was the single medium capable of capturing what Alexander Kluge describes as the “the impossible moment”—a moment we couldn’t think of beforehand, and which cannot be repeated later. Thus cinema leads the way to what later becomes reality: to cities, bridges, ideas, gestures, skyscrapers, literature, and art. This anthology traces some of the paths of this “becoming.”