Avant-garde cinema remains unseen for all sorts of reasons.
Because it's rare. Because it's elusive. Because the mainstream
distribution and exhibition apparatus is not designed to serve it
(and, arguably, to a large extent is designed to suppress and
deny it). Because people--that vast army of us proud to be
unpretentious "regular moviegoers"--basically don't want to see
it, fearing that it's esoteric and challenging and probably
boring. These are excellent--which is to say, very real--reasons.
Except that, as of autumn 2005, they're obsolete. All but the
personal-resistance part, anyway. Now, thanks to Anthology Film
Archives, curator Bruce Posner, and the cooperation of the
world's foremost film museums, anybody with a DVD player can make
the acquaintance of 20some hours of definitive avant-garde film
experiences through this often dazzling seven-disc set. And
whaddaya know: a lot of "unseen cinema" turns out to be
fascinating, thrilling, spectrally beautiful, tantalizingly
mysterious--in a word, eye-opening, to both the art of film and
the world we all share.
Moreover, it's not all precious, artist(or would-be
artist)-in-a-garret stuff. Some of it has glimmered on regular
movie screens, from nickelodeon days through the golden age of
Hollywood, doing its avant-garde thing (often without knowing
it's avant-garde) as one- and two-reel narratives or astonishing
sequences in commercial Hollywood pictures. A 1910 D.W. Griffith
two-reeler that compresses several decades (including the Civil
War) into 16 minutes. Prologue and transitional montages that
goosed up pedestrian feature films with lunges into jagged
surrealism and abstraction. The erotically crazed, visually
dynamic, sometimes nightmarish phantasmagoria that are Busby
Berkeley's "By a Waterfall" and "Lullaby of Broadway."
In Posner's own words: "American experimental film has existed
since the technological inception of cinema ... The background
against which the experimentalists toiled provides a fascinating
review of Americana coupled with numerous cross-currents ... and
an unfailing desire to create on film an image that can be viewed
as an independent and provocative art.... The goal [of this set]
is to present the broadest possible spectrum of experimental
films produced between the 1890s and 1940s."
Each of the seven discs is organized around a central theme, and
which one you first reach for will be determined by individual
curiosity and susceptibility. The Devil's Plaything: American
Surrealism steps off with Edwin S. Porter's 1902 Jack and the
Beanstalk, its visionary transformations of settings and
now-you-see-'em, now-you-don't appearances and disappearances of
cast members the more remarkable for having been entirely
achieved in the shooting, without postproduction optical
trickery. Griffith's cameraman-to-be Billy Bitzer sends time
scurrying dreamily backwards in Impossible Convicts (1905), while
such classic 1920s experiments as The Fall of the House of Usher
and The Telltale Heart seek to meet Edgar Allan Poe halfway by
portraying distorted/demented worlds via stylized lighting and
decor. The ambitious Robert Florey, whose feature-directing
career would be almost entirely confined to the B zone,
collaborates with montage maestro Slavko Vorkapich on The Life
and Death of 9413--A Hollywood Extra and with premier production
designer William Cameron Menzies on The Love of Zero.
Inverted Narratives: New Directions in Storytelling includes
Suspense, a 1913 two-reeler by Lois Weber that emulates and
occasionally tops her august contemporary, D.W. Griffith; the
adventurous selection of camera angles and big, then still-bigger
closeups continue to amaze. Charles Vidor's The Bridge, a 1929
rendering of the Ambrose Bierce story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek
Bridge," is starker than but not inferior to the more poetic
French version that won an O in the 1960s. Josef Berne's
Black Dawn, aka Dawn After Dawn, weaves a Gothic spell with its
account of love and death on an isolated farm, including a
startling passage of sunstruck eroticism. And twelve minutes of
Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand's agitprop, allegorical docudrama of
American corporate fascism Native Land, narrated by Paul Robeson,
inspires an urgent wish to see the entire film.
Light Rhythms: Music and Abstraction moves from surrealist
milestones such as Man Ray's Le Retour à la raison, Fernand
Léger's Ballet mécanique, and Rose Sélavy's Anémic cinéma (an
anagram many times over) to never-seen full-length versions of
montages created by Slavko Vorkapich for such films as Crime
Without Passion and The Firefly. Vorkapich's mesmerizing nature
poem Moods of the Sea, set to Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave, is
among the most relentlessly stunning passages on celluloid. An
ecstatically extended bal sequence from Ernst Lubitsch's So This
Is Paris inspires, again, a craving to see that unavailable 1926
feature film, while George L.K. Morris' Abstract Movies is an
encyclopedic and hilarious amateur re-creation of fond cliches
and tropes of generic filmmaking.
Still, if one had to pick a single DVD to luxuriate in (and one
can: it's the only disc available separately), it would have to
be Picturing a Metropolis: New York City Unveiled. The Blizzard,
a Gotham panorama grabbed by an unknown cameraman standing
outside the Muto film company office one day in 1898, is one
of the most enchanting moments you'll ever experience on film,
with an urban crowd sharing the bemusement of a winter day
slipping into evening, and the fairy-tale vastness of a nearby
park softened by falling snow: an absentminded documentary record
become sheer poetry. Bitzer's Interior New York Subway, 14th
Street to 42nd Street, an unbroken take from the front of an
onrushing train (with supplementary illumination supplied by
lights ed on another train on a parallel track!), was
in 1905, though the itinerary looks exactly the same today; only
the crowds have changed. (One comical, endearing touch: a mother
and her children, caught in passing at Grand Central, stop in
their bustling journey to stare at the camera.) The 1901
Demolishing and Building Up the Star Theatre uses time-lapse
photography to chronicle the taking down, and then to
imaginatively ordain the resurrection, of an urban show palace.
And Robert Flaherty's 24 Dollar Island (c. 1926) is so
razor-sharp and judiciously observed that it remains the
definitive portrait of Manhattan on film--truly a portrait of the
city itself as a living, dynamic space, with cely any
intrusion of humankind to distract us from the place, its light
and shapes and rhythms.
There's additional, virtually prehistoric contemplation of urban
spaces--including the 1900 Paris Exposition and the Eiffel
Tower--in The Mechanized Eye: Experiments in Technique and Form.
The Amateur as Auteur: Discovering Paradise in Pictures
celebrates the intentional and inadvertent sublimities of home
movies. And Viva la Dance: The Beginnings of Ciné-Dance collects
everything from the various Annabelle Dances of 1894-97 through
Mexican footage for Sergei Eisenstein's Que viva México to
one more bravura sequence by Busby Berkeley (from Wonder Bar) and
the avowedly avant-garde Tarantella and Spook Sport by Mary Ellen
Bute in 1940.
It cannot be overstated that much of this footage is beautifully
preserved, whether transferred from paper prints or exhumed from
still-luminous nitrate footage cached in a European archive. And
the brief headnotes by such authoritative commentators as
Jan-Christian Horak, David Shepard, Kevin Brownlow, and Bruce
Posner himself are marvels of lucidity and concision, supplying
just the right context--in a mere 50 words or so--to enable the
uninitiated viewer to appreciate the film he or she is about to
witness. Unseen Cinema is not just (just!) an awesome collection
of film landmarks--it's a landmark achievement in its own right.
--Richard T. Jameson
