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Although unprepossessing and including barely a hundred pages of text, four scant pages of bibliography, and an eccentric form of endnote, this book constitutes a handy guide to both the avant-garde and the thickets of modernism from which the cinema avant-garde grew. Rees notes the theorists that lighted the way (for example, Walter Benjamin); though most of these points of interest will be familiar to most students of the avant-garde, Rees recasts the familiar to serve fresh uses. Too short to be broken into chapters, the book comprises three of Rees's essays entwined into a unified whole: a 12-page introduction, which carries the reader into the modernist world; a long piece--more than half the book--slyly titled "The Canonical Avant-Garde"; and a closing essay that brings the discussion to recent British filmmaking. Rees sets all this as a charming narrative. Since the author begins with visual imagery in the age of high capitalism, the story takes on a persistent voice of resistance against industrialism, statism, and other enemies of the Left. A signature of stills provides thorough documentation. A must-read for graduate students, faculty, and professionals. T. Cripps Morgan State University