Chico News & Review: Unseen cinema
Bruce Calvert
Unseen cinema
DVDs provide unprecedented access to underground films--both old and
new
By Juan-Carlos Selznick
Unseen Cinema, the title of a remarkable new DVD box set on early
experimental film, is an apt term for what movie-lovers are
encountering in the era of digital video. Contemporary cineastes live
in a world which, thanks to the DVD in particular, has extensive and
unprecedented access to film history and to world cinema. But we're
also stuck in a period in which it's less and less likely that we'll be
able to see the best new films, foreign-language films in particular,
in actual movie theaters.
The continuing good news with the DVD phenomenon is that many of the
outstanding foreign films that don't appear in local theaters--our
contemporary "unseen cinema"--do still come to us, and often with some
dispatch, on DVD. Part of the bad news of this phenomenon is that it
looks as though DVD is altering the whole business of film
distribution, here and everywhere else, with the net result that, here
in the United States, some major foreign films go "straight-to-DVD" and
never get into the theaters at all.
[snip]
And those box sets of 'unseen" experimental short films definitely
deserve a closer look as well:
Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant Garde Film 1894-1941 This box set
(seven discs, 155 films, 19 hours) is a monumental gathering of early
and rare short films in a range of experimental and innovative modes.
There are entire discs devoted to American surrealism, portraits of New
York City and experiments with abstract imagery. A perhaps overly broad
application of the term "avant garde" permits the inclusion of brief
pioneer efforts by Thomas Edison, Edwin S. Porter, Billy Bitzer, D. W.
Griffith, etc., all of which prove to be of genuine interest. But
Unseen Cinema is especially noteworthy for its splendid, wide-ranging
offerings of beautifully restored gems from the heroic
between-the-world-wars period of avant garde art. There are generous
and intriguing selections from the film work of artist Joseph Cornell
and photographer Rudy Burckhardt. For example, the New York City films
include little treasures like the Paul Strand-Charles "Sheeler
Manhatta" (1921) and Jay Leyda's "A Bronx Morning" (1936). The classic
"Ballet Mecanique" (1924), a collaboration between American filmmaker
Dudley Murphy and French artist Fernand Leger, appears here in a fully
restored version, complete with a rendition of Georges Antheil's
original score. And it's also very nice to see a couple of rare lyrical
documentaries by big-name artists getting wider circulation at long
last--photographer Walker Evans' "Travel Notes" and playwright Lynn
Riggs' "A Day in Santa Fe." But perhaps Unseen Cinema's biggest
surprises for lovers of film art are in eye-opening experiments, little
known and rarely shown, like Jerome Hill's archetypal "Fortune Teller"
and Henwar Rodakiewicz's oblique "Portrait of a Young Man."
Avant Garde: Experimental Cinema from the 1920s and 1930s This smaller,
less costly set (two discs, six hours of film) has some overlap with
Unseen Cinema, but it is a first-rate collection with a European focus.
Even in the absence of key titles by Bunuel/Dali and Rene Clair, it
boasts excellent editions of landmark work by Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp,
Germaine Dulac, Hans Richter and Robert Florey. Rare items that are
especially welcome include one of Jean Painleve's "surrealist" nature
documentaries and two exceptional films from the much-discussed but
little-seen Jean Epstein. And where else can you find all that
alongside evocative music-and-montage shorts by old masters like Sergei
Eisenstein ("Romance Sentimentale") and Joris Ivens ("Rain"), plus
Pauline Kael's favorite silent film, Dmitri Kirsanoff's "Menilmontant"
(France, 1926), with a new musical score?