Early avant-garde cinema on DVD
Kingo Gondo
FILM
DVD Access to the Avant-Garde
By DAVID STERRITT
Quick, name Orson Welles's first movie. Citizen Kane, right? Guess again.
It's The Hearts of Age, which the 19-year-old prodigy co-directed with a
friend in 1934.
This eight-minute trifle isn't much of a movie. Still, its story-free parody
of modernist mannerisms gives a tantalizing glimpse of the visual
preoccupations - startling images, fluid cinematography, eye-jolting
montage - that would become Welles's trademarks.
Want to check it out? Until recently, that meant tracking down one of the
movie's few existing prints - or getting hold of the ultra-low-quality
videocassette that presented Welles's film (with other works of
"experimental" cinema) in a murky, muddy transfer that made it difficult to
see, much less analyze and appreciate.
But that was then. Now the elusive avant-garde item is viewable and
re-viewable with a flick of your DVD remote. So are an imposing number of
similarly adventurous films produced outside the money-driven frameworks of
major movie studios.
Unsupported by the film industry's marketing and promotion, such proudly
independent works usually plummet straight to obscurity - joining the vast
unseen cinema, to borrow the title of a new DVD set devoted to making that
cinema (including Welles's early effort) more seeable than ever before.
Not only is this a great development for movie buffs and avant-garde
connoisseurs. It also marks a quantum improvement in the plight of
film-studies and art-history professors wanting to illuminate this shadowy
continent in the classroom.
The territory is so shadowy that its inhabitants have never agreed on a name
for it. Usually they settle for "experimental," despite the connotation of
cinéastes fiddling with film like so many mad scientists, or "avant-garde,"
which means "advance guard" and therefore suggests that Steven Spielberg and
George Lucas must somehow "catch up" with high-toned artists whose works
play mainly in museums and galleries. I have no better nomenclature to
offer, so I'll do what most critics do - use both terms interchangeably.
Celluloid prints of key experimental works have long been available from
such specialized sources as the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, and the
Canyon Cinema cooperative in San Francisco, to name just two. But most of
these movies were made years or decades ago, and the revenues from renting
them don't justify making many copies, or maintaining the existing copies in
tiptop condition. So you can't be sure what you're going to get - assuming
the movie is available at all - until it's actually unspooling on the
screen. Irritating scratches, sloppy splices, and badly faded images are
common.
As a film professor, I've been down this path many times. Like others I
know, I stuck with the purist position - films should be viewed as films,
not as videos or digital clones - until I realized those scratches, splices,
and washed-out images were making students tune out challenging yet
rewarding works without giving them a fair chance.
When your audience has been weaned on Terminator and Lord of the Rings
epics, it's not easy sparking interest in the abstract tone poem H2O, made
by Ralph Steiner in 1929, or the surrealist hallucination Le Retour à la
raison, shot by Man Ray in 1923, or the colorful Spook Sport, animated by
Mary Ellen Bute, Norman McLaren, and Ted Nemeth in 1940. It's that much
harder if the film snaps in two, slips off the projector's sprockets, or
registers on the screen as a barely legible blur. So bring on the DVD's -
assuming their images have been carefully transferred from top-quality
celluloid prints stashed in archives, collections, and cinematic storehouses
around the globe.
The hunt for rare movies can take many forms, but sometimes a DVD company
finds that the hard work has already been done. An example is Kino Video's
recent release, Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and '30s,
comprising 25 pictures (from two to 37 minutes long) gathered by the
cinephile Raymond Rohauer over the past half-century. Having acquired
Rohauer's collection, Kino needed only to transfer them well and supply DVD
extras - pithy annotations by the veteran film critic Elliott Stein,
optional English subtitles where appropriate, and music for silent movies.
In compiling Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941, the
New York cinema museum Anthology Film Archives faced a harder job. It
accumulated the 155 movies on seven discs (running time: about 19 hours)
from 60 international archives consulted by the curator Bruce Posner, who
originated the project, and the historian David Shepard, who produced the
DVD set. Combing through such treasure troves as the Library of Congress,
the Museum of Modern Art, and the British Film Institute, these moving-image
detectives selected not only complete, properly stored films but also
partially preserved copies whose unscratched, unfaded portions could be
spliced together with other bits of footage to create crisp composite
prints.
Virtually all the Unseen Cinema items are striking, and some are downright
dazzling. One example is Ballet Mécanique (1924), directed by the French
artist Fernand Léger and the American cinéaste Dudley Murphy, who provided
many of the movie's playful, collagelike visual ideas. A staple of modernist
programs in classrooms and elsewhere, the film contains many seminal
Dadaesque images: a woman swooping upside down on a garden swing, a
newspaper headline with animated letters, a washerwoman trudging up a
staircase that never ends. What's new in the Unseen Cinema presentation is
the presence of George Antheil's music, composed for the film in 1924 but
never before paired with the movie in a readily available edition - not
surprisingly, since Antheil's score calls for an unorthodox orchestra
including a siren, three xylophones, numerous electric bells, and three
airplane propellers.
After years of viewing Ballet Mécanique in silence, I found it thrilling to
see and hear it in a form even more authentic than that experienced by its
original Vienna audience some 82 years ago, when the music - too unwieldy to
sync up properly with the movie - was ingloriously omitted. Its
unprecedented sounds and images remind me why I love exposing students to
such audacious, inimitable work. In an age when movies and TV shows are
straitjacketed in a tiny number of iron-clad formulas, the obstreperous
sights and sounds of a Ballet Mécanique are eruptions of liberating artistic
freedom that wake and shake our habit-ridden sensibilities.
Like all ambitious film endeavors, the Unseen Cinema and Avant-Garde
collections have been criticized. Unseen Cinema, for instance, has been
faulted in a Film Comment review for presenting an enormously diverse array
of works as if they represented a single cinematic tradition. That complaint
strikes me as wrongheaded, since a major point of the collection is its
anything-goes eclecticism - historically rich items by D.W. Griffith,
meditative travelogues by Rudy Burckhardt, cine-poems by people even
specialists have rarely heard of, and forays into film by major painters and
sculptors like Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell. Not to mention outlandish
montage sequences from Hollywood entertainments like So This Is Paris and
Footlight Parade, which are as idiosyncratic and eccentric as anything else
on view. That said, I do see minor flaws in the set, which includes some
items that hardly seem avant-garde at all - the early-1930s documentaries
Windy Ledge Farm and A Day in Santa Fe, for instance - and a few that are
closer to casual amateurism than to truly creative work, such as the aptly
labeled Stewart Family Home Movies of the late 1930s, which are more
charming than artistic.
Kino's more-modest Avant-Garde has inherited a bit of the controversy that
greeted Rohauer's involvement with reissued Buster Keaton comedies in the
early 1970s, when he allegedly tinkered with original content in order to
recopyright films in his own name to make new profits from them. If minor
meddling has indeed affected any of the pictures in Kino's new collection,
that will be visible only to the most scrupulous movie mavens - certainly
not to the cinema students and film buffs who will use the DVD's as their
first gateway into a world of strange and marvelous visual expression.
The possibilities for eye-opening new DVD experiences are not limited to old
movies, moreover, since an increasing number of contemporary avant-garde
filmmakers are moving away from their celluloid-only bias and embracing
DVD's - the first nontheatrical format with a sufficiently strong image
quality - for distributing and exhibiting their works. After decades of
presenting his movies only through celluloid prints, the late Stan Brakhage
cooperated with the Criterion Collection to compile By Brakhage: An
Anthology shortly before his death in 2003. The result is a two-disc set by
a towering artist who combined aspects of romanticism and modernism into a
profoundly personal style, imitating the mind's eye via radically nonlinear
photographed images, and painting and carving the surface of the film
itself.
Newer still is The Films of Su Friedrich, a five-disc set from Outcast Films
summing up the career (to date) of America's most influential
radical-feminist filmmaker. The highlight is Sink or Swim, a 1990 memoir of
Friedrich's relationship with her linguistics-professor father. I regard it
as one of the most intellectually lucid, aesthetically accessible, and
emotionally moving avant-garde films produced in the past 25 years.
But as exciting as it is to have these recent masterpieces at one's
fingertips, it's the availability of timeless classics that constitutes
DVD's most invaluable contribution to avant-garde history, appreciation, and
pedagogy. I even value the flaws found in transfers of old, imperfectly
preserved prints of old, meagerly budgeted movies.
In an uncharacteristically ill-considered statement, English avant-gardist
Peter Greenaway asserted in 1994 that "material changes in film are
irredeemably disadvantageous. Film will not sustain aging processes or be
made profitably resonant by them." I thought of this as I watched the dances
by a vaudevillian called Annabelle that were filmed by Thomas A. Edison's
studio more than a century ago - a time when, as a film historian once put
it, every film was experimental. Even the superb Unseen Cinema transfers of
the Edison movies are marked by "aging processes" galore - deep scratches,
patches of congealed graininess, missing frames that turn the flow of
choreography into a rumpus of fits and starts.
But these "flaws" are integral aspects of the Annabelle movies as they now
exist, and they are as visually beautiful, as aesthetically expressive, and
as historically genuine as anything on the "real" film that ran through
Edison's camera. They don't subtract a thing. What they add is magical,
unpredictable, unique - touches of the "abstract" imported into an art form
that normally does everything it can (even in most avant-garde work) to look
realistic. Unplanned though it is, this is a different sort of realism that
I find positively poetic.
Then comes the capper - a printed statement, signed by Edison himself, shown
immediately after the Annabelle footage: "This film is sold subject to the
restriction that it shall not be used for duplicating or printing other
films from it. Any use of it for those purposes is an infringement of the
patents under which it is made and sold."
Sound familiar? It's the 1893 version of the copyright warning found at the
start of virtually every DVD and videocassette sold in today's market. I
find the contemporary warning's 19th-century doppelgänger a poignant
reminder that motion-picture creativity has always traveled hand in hand
with commercial preoccupations. Sometimes art and money have been mutually
supportive, and sometimes one has killed the other off. But they've been
chronic codependents since the first moments of cinema's existence.
As William Faulkner once wrote, "The past isn't dead; it isn't even past."
The stimulating new wave of avant-garde DVD's makes the same point, with a
vengeance.
David Sterritt is an adjunct professor of language, literature, and culture
at the Maryland Institute College of Art, chairman of the National Society
of Film Critics, and author, most recently, of Guiltless Pleasures
(University Press of Mississippi, 2005).