"Unseen Cinema:
Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893-1941"
"Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893-1941" is a treasure trove of rare material from the first decades of cinema. The films bear witness to a world gone by and provide a missing link in the history of experimental filmmaking in the United States.
"Unseen Cinema" presents more than 160 films in newly restored or preserved 35mm and 16mm film prints. Many have not been available since their creation, some have never been screened in public, and most have been unavailable in fresh prints until now.
Taking an innovative and even controversial perspective, the series views experimental cinema as having been created by a combination of avant-garde artists, Hollywood directors, and amateur filmmakers working collectively and individually at all levels of film production during the last decade of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century.
It covers a broad spectrum, from the work of popular filmmakers like Busby Berkeley, Ernst Lubitsch and Dorothy Arzner to the films of artists like Rudy Burckhardt, Mary Ellen Bute, Oskar Fischinger and Joseph Cornell.
"Unseen Cinema" reclaims early American avant-garde film in light of the filmmakers' genuine and uncompromising approach to film as an art form. Whether one considers early American avant-garde films collectively, as part of an ongoing historical process, or as a series of individual experiments in style and technique, the material available here reveals a grand experiment in cinema that continues to reverberate to this day through all genres of American filmmaking.
The early American films made from 1893 to approximately 1913 were experimental in their method of production and content. Finding new techniques and styles, they directly influenced later American filmmaking, both experimental and mainstream.
Alternative practices in film at this time included, for example, an emphasis on states of mind over narrative and an exploration of social and political injustice.
At the same time, many of the films experimented with an ever-evolving technology. Newly available lenses, film stocks, methods of lighting or sound recording, the availability of post-production facilities, and advancements in camera design permitted startling cinematic discoveries. With these various influences, early American avant-garde cinema pushed forward what would become a vast cinema frontier.
The period from 1925 to 1929 was not only a Golden Age for Hollywood silent feature film, but was equally vibrant for avant-garde filmmaking as well. The momentum peaked during the early 1930s when industry professionals, amateurs, and other cinema enthusiasts produced an astonishing array of experimental shorts and feature films.
From the 1940s onward, many experimental filmmakers began working in isolation. Their work continued to expand the boundaries of the genre and led to an experimental film renaissance in New York and San Francisco in the postwar era.
The series brings together many seemingly disparate early films, including American Mutoscope and Biograph pieces such as Frederick Armitage's Star Theater (1902) and Down the Hudson (1903), Edison/Edwin Porter's Ghost Train (1903), and kinetoscope loops from 1893 and 1894, including Cockfight no. 4. It also includes later films such as Autumn Fire: A Film Poem (Herman G. Weinberg, 1930%9633), Jerome Hill's La Cartomancienne [Fortune Teller] (1932), Marcel Duchamp's Anemic Cinema (1925) and Fernand L@eacute;ger's Ballet mécanique (1924).
The series opens a window onto the past with works like the four-minute Interior N.Y. Subway, 14th Street to 42nd Street (1905), shot by the legendary G.W. "Billy" Bitzer, and film pioneer Edwin S. Porter's Coney Island at Night, made the same year.
