EXPERIMENTAL NARRATIVES & AVANT-GARDE SHORTS (I-Z)
ICI ET MAINTENANT
Serge Bard (France)
"Here and now consists of the dreams of the solitary rambler, post-revolution... The moralist has given up on chaos; he takes his own pulse; he listens to the world, perhaps vibrating with it; he is in sympathetic ecstasy. The filmmaker holds his position, stiff as the statue of the commander, on alert for the phenomena which approach him; he resembles the lighthouse…
IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR? - STRATEGIES OF APPROPRIATION AND AUDIO-VISUAL COLLAGE
Abigail Child (US)
The condensed filmic work of Abigail Child, borrowing strategies from found footage, Appropriation Art, Language Poetry and experimental music, stands a a landmark in the experimental cinema of the 1980's. The processing of interruption and fragmentation inform the series IS THIS WHAT YOU WERE BORN FOR?, reactivating the stakes of montage applied...
Jacques Perconte (France)
"Technology is no stranger to Jacques Perconte; he uses its defects as inspiration, pushing it to its limits and incorporating its margin of error into his creative practice. For Perconte, information technology is capable of providing an accurate representation of the world — not because of its capacity to capture and process the appearance of reality, but because of the chromatic vibrations that it emits, which are not merely mimetic vibrations, but can be compared to the vibrations of reality itself."
- Nicole Brenez
JONAS MEKAS: THE MAJOR WORKS
Jonas Mekas (US)
This 7-Disc DVD Box Set, co-published by Re:Voir Video, Agnès B DVD and Potemkine, brings together, for the very first time, the key films created by Jonas Mekas. These collected works, that span a filming career of more than 60 years, re-affirm his stature as one of the most prolific avant-garde filmmakers and pre-eminent cinema poets.
JOOST REKVELD – 11 FILMS
Joost Rekveld (Netherlands)
“Joost Rekveld's films combine a remarkable ingenuity and facility with the image-making capabilities of various machines (many of his own design) with his radically inventive theories and approaches to form, motion, and perception. The result has been a startlingly diverse, ever-expanding body of work marked by formal rigor, breathtaking imagery, and a rich, expressive audiovisual poetry.”
- LA Film Forum
LIGHT YEARS
Gunvor Nelson & Dorothy Wiley (US/Sweden)
The Swedish-American artist Gunvor Nelson figures among the most important experimental filmmakers of her generation. Her work considerably influenced the New American Cinema at the end of the 1960s, as much by its themes (women, the body, memory, dreams) as by its formal investigations (animation, collage, found footage).
2008 - SPECIAL MENTION
Philippe Garrel (France)
“I believe my point of view on the Christian myth is quite clear in LE LIT DE LA VIERGE (THE VIRGIN’S BED). It is a non-violent parable in which Zouzou incarnates both Mary and Mary Magdalene, while Pierre Clémenti incarnates a discouraged Christ who throws down his arms in face of world cruelty. In spite of its allegorical nature, the film contains a denunciation...
MANDALA FILMS
Paul Sharits (US)
In the mid-1960s, Paul Sharits developed an abstract cinema in radical opposition to the pictorial tradition. His works taken together propose a reflection on the very nature of cinema and its component parts: the film strip, single frames, the flow of film through the projector, sprocket holes, screen, projection… Using mainly the flicker technique (flickering between…
MARIE POUR MÉMOIRE
Philippe Garrel (France)
MARIE POUR MÉMOIRE represents the missing link between the New Wave filmmakers and the Zanzibar group -- an informal association of young filmmakers situated within the revolutionary movement of May 1968. A return to childhood, to the primitive gesture of the filmmaker, to his teenage years of cries and revolts, mutism and withdrawal. MARIE POUR MEMOIRE is one of the more distant fiction conceived in autobiographical approach in the filmmaker's filmography, tending towards a slow dive into madness and fabulation.
MASTERWORKS OF AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE EXPERIMENTAL FILM 1920-1970
Various Directors (US)
Commencing in 1920 with Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s creative collaboration on MANHATTA, successive generations of experimental filmmakers and artists have worked in collaboration or alone to create a cinema capable of expressing dynamic unspoken concepts in totally abstract…
MAURICE LEMAÎTRE - LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ ? (HAS THE FEATURE STARTED YET?)
Maurice Lemaître (France)
LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ ? (HAS THE FEATURE STARTED YET?) became a major event during its first screenings in Paris in 1951. According to Lemaître himself, “This film must be projected under special conditions: on a screen of new shapes and material and with spectacular goings-on in the cinema lobby and theatre (disruptions, forced jostling, dialogues spoken aloud, confetti and gunshots aimed at the screen...). This is not just a projection, but a true film show, the style of which Maurice Lemaître is the creator.” Lemaître’s film also anticipated the auteur cinema that would arise in the late 1950s with Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard and Marcel Hanoun.
MAURICE LEMAÎTRE - FILMS IMAGINAIRES (IMAGINARY FILMS)
Maurice Lemaître (France)
“A major figure in the lettrist movement, Maurice Lemaître revolutionized cinema in 1951 with LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ ? ( HAS THE FEATURE STARTED YET?) and invented a new form of performance: “Syncinema.” His many cinematic works, made between the 1960s and the present day, confirm his position as one of the most important avant-garde filmmakers of his generation."
- Christian Lebrat
MAYA DEREN: DANCE FILMS
Maya Deren (US)
Maya Deren (1917-1961) developed an interest in dance during her first years living in New York City. According to scholar P. Adams Sitney, “In the early forties she conceived the idea of writings a theoretical book on modern dance and looked for a professional dancer to work with her. She interested Katherine Dunham in her project and traveled with her on her…
MAYA DEREN: EXPERIMENTAL FILMS
Maya Deren (US)
Maya Deren was one of the most pre-eminent avant-garde filmmakers of the 20th century; her first film MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943), is the most renown experimental film throughout all of film history. She became known as a major proponent of the “trance” film, and her movies are a transitional link between the European avant-garde films…
NATURAL HISTORY / RUHR
James Benning (Germany / Austria)
Since the late 1970s, James Benning's films have been a regular fixture at festivals in Germany and Austria, while frequent television broadcasts have helped expose his work to an even larger audience here than perhaps at home. This 2-disc set presents the products of this intercontinental relationship: RUHR, Benning's first foray into…
NICHOLÁS PEREDA: 6 FILMS
Nicholás Pereda (Mexico, Canada, Netherlands)
Nicolás Pereda is a filmmaker whose work explores the everyday through fractured and elliptical narratives using fiction and documentary tools. His award winning films have been exhibited in festivals around the world like Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, Rotterdam, Toronto and San Sebastian. He…
OCTOBRE À MADRID
Marcel Hanoun (France)
“An ambitious film, disarming in its simplicity, OCTOBRE À MADRID (OCTOBER IN MADRID) is the prototypical ‘film about film’ that every filmmaker dreams of. That’s what Hanoun has filmed here: the life of the filmmaker as a film in the making; the blurring and reversing of the boundaries between desire and work, film and life.”
- Jean-Louis Comolli
PASSION
Jürgen Reble (West Germany)
"The basic idea is that it is impossible to fix film. Film is something which is always in a state of flux... The images, "real" in the beginning, gradually disintegrate and the gelatin layer – where the chemicals are embedded – dissolves. All that's left in the end is the 'raging of the elements'..."
PAUL CLIPSON - LANDSCAPE DISSOLVES
Paul Clipson (UK)
Paul Clipson (1965-2018) was a San Francisco-based filmmaker and experimental film artist whose work involves projected installation and live collaborative performances with sound artists and musicians. Many of his films were the result of collaborations with sound artists or groups, such as Tarentel, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Joshua Churchill, all of whose methods of experimenting with sound and instrumentation, incorporating improvisation, mistakes and accidents into live performances and recordings, greatly influenced his work. Over time, shorter film pieces were carefully created from this work, utilizing the accidental, unexpected juxtapositions of sound and image that have been discovered live.
THE PRIMAL SCENE (DIE URSZENE)
Christine Noll Brinckmann (Germany / US / China)
"The term 'avant-garde' is only outdone in its perfidy by the adjective 'experimental'", writes Heinz Emigholz, who in 1993 inaugurated the "Experimental Film Design" class at the Berlin University of the Arts. Christine Noll Brinckmann uses this citation in her 1993 text "Experimental Film 1920-1990: Collective Movements and Solitary Thrusts," which remains...
2013 - BEST SPECIAL FEATURES ON DVD (BONUS)
'RAMEAU'S NEPHEW' BY DIDEROT (THANX TO DENNIS YOUNG) BY WILMA SCHOEN
Michael Snow (Canada)
Each of Michael Snow's works, spanning across painting, sculpture, video, film, photography, holography, drawing, publishing and music, invites us to experience, question and contemplate the representation, its process and material.'RAMEAU'S NEPHEW' BY DIDEROT (THANX TO DENNIS YOUNG) BY WILMA SCHOEN illustrates his research both in...
Jeff Scher (US)
"A lot of these films were genuine experiments — starting with a simple “I wonder what would happen if...” The ideas come from everywhere — friends’ pets, objects picked up from the street, the walk of an overweight man in shoes too tight or the way two different watercolors bleed together to make a hundred new colors. Some of these films started from the love of film and the greedy desire to fill every frame with as much color and shape as possible.”
- Jeff Scher
2008 - SPECIAL MENTION
LE RÉVÉLATEUR
Philippe Garrel (France)
In LE RÉVÉLATEUR, the first of his four Zanzibar films, Philippe Garrel (LA CONCENTRATION, LE LIT DE LA VIERGE, LA CICATRICE INTÉRIEURE) creates an elegy in simple language that follows a sinuous path enclosing its spectators in a timeless, symbolic universe that seems prone at any moment to self-destruct. The shots drip with a desperate poetry...
ROBERT TODD INTERIOR LANDSCAPE
Robert Todd (US)
"Todd records the world with a sympathetic eye. Feathers and fields, stones and skin are rendered with sculptural accuracy, emerging from darkness into light, from focus to blur, refreshing and refining our own sense of vision. From prisons to playgrounds, streetscapes to landscapes, interiors to underbrush, there seems to be no place or object that resists transformation through the deft manipulations of Robert Todd’s lens."
- LIFT, Toronto
Mark Rappaport (US)
“Impudently insightful in its wisdom... This film is a subversive delight, refracting a revisionist cast on the relationship between illusion and reality as embodied by perhaps the greatest myth-maker of the 20th century - the Hollywood movie machine.”
-Duane Byrge, ‘The Hollywood Reporter’
SANDY DING: PSYCHOECHO
Sandy Ding (US, China)
Sandy Ding is an experimental filmmaker who lives and works in Beijing, China. He graduated from CalArts in 2007 and started teaching in China Central Academy of Fine Arts in 2008. As a modern proponent of the postwar American "trance film" he produced psycho-active films with the idea of combining ritual processes in both projection and sound. His work is…
2010 - BEST CRITICAL RESEARCH ON A DVD
THE SEASHELL AND THE CLERGYMAN
Germaine Dulac (France)
Directed in 1927 by Germaine Dulac and scripted by Antonin Artaud, THE SEASHELL AND THE CLERGYMAN is generally considered to be the first Surrealist film, even if at its Studio des Ursulines premiere, the Surrealist group provoked an uproar that would become one of the great “scandals” of the 1920s. Along with contemporary musical...
2017 - BEST REDISCOVERY OF A FORGOTTEN FILM
THE SEASONS (LES SAISONS)
Marcel Hanoun (France)
“LE PRINTEMPS is one of those rare films which is on par with the modern novel... For example, the film loops in on itself, as does the 360° panoramic shot at its end.. It’s full of analogies, resemblances, auto-quotations. Above all, its a film whose pretext — a human interest newspaper clipping — remains merely a pretext; whose essence consists of what…
SHOOT, SHOOT, SHOOT: BRITISH AVANT-GARDE FILM OF THE 1960S & 1970S
Various Directors (UK)
The 1960s and 1970s were groundbreaking decades in which independent filmmakers challenged cinematic convention. In England, much of the innovation took place at the London Film-Makers’ Cooperative, an artist-led organization that incorporated a distribution agency, cinema space and film workshop…
Mike Kuchar (US)
Along with Anger's SCORPIO RISING and Warhol's CHELSEA GIRLS, Mike Kuchar's SINS OF THE FLESHAPOIDS remains one of the most influential films of the '60s American Underground. Mike and his brother George (who co-wrote FLESHAPOIDS), were the godfathers of bargain basement cinema, pioneering a hilariously campy, lurid style between Ed Wood exploitation and Douglas Sirk melodrama.
THE SIXTIES QUARTET
Jonas Mekas (US)
SCENES FROM THE LIFE Of ANDY WARHOL: FRIENDSHIPS AND INTERSECTIONS: Jonas Mekas is know for his rapid-fire diary films. His Scenes from the Life chronicles not only Andy Warhol, but also the social and cultural excitement that swirled around him, throbbing to a hypnotic Velvet Underground beat...
SLOW SUMMER (LANGSAMMER SOMMER) / CLINCH (SCHWITZKASTEN)
John Cook (Austria)
"To live in Vienna, you either have to be cynical or stupid," says the director’s alter ego at the end of the semi-documentary feature SLOW SUMMER. John Cook (1935-2001), a Canadian fashion photographer who had ended up in Vienna, was certainly neither cynical nor stupid. With only four films, made between 1972 and 1982, he gave Austrian cinema a taste of the...
SPRING NIGHT SUMMER NIGHT
Joseph L. Anderson (US)
Italian neorealism meets the coal-mining country of southeast Ohio in this little-seen film emerging from the 1960s American independent cinema movement. Director Joseph L. Anderson, a film professor at the University of Ohio, utilized non-professional actors, on-location photography, a shoestring budget, and a passionate knowledge of international film to create what Richard Brody of The New Yorker calls a “tense, myth-drenched drama of liberation and retribution.”
2006 - Experimental Film
STEPHEN DWOSKIN: 14 FILMS BOX 1/3
Stephen Dwoskin (UK / US / France / Germany)
This 5-disc set is a limited edition of 1,000 copies and includes a 58-page full-color bilingual booklet with specially commissioned texts in English & French.
Containing 12 hours of material, the 14 works included were chosen with the artist and represent the first of three planned publications of Stephen...
STORY OF MY HAIR: ON THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE
Boris Lehman (France)
The story of my hair can be told in two lines. My hair was long and black. It has turned white. It hasn't been cut since 1982, almost thirty years ago. Story of my Hair is a journey, both in space and in time. Anyone looking for truths, whether geographical, scientific or historical, will be disappointed. After looking at real events…
STUDIO EEN: EXPERIMENTAL FILMS FROM THE LOWLANDS
Various Directors (Netherlands)
At the end of the 1980s, many artistic, avant-garde, underground and counterculture movements seemed to be over. The rise of video and its academic use began to compete with Super8. To work against the decline of the Super 8 format and techniques, Karel Doing and two of his friends (Saskia Fransen and Djana Mileta) from the art school in Arnhem…
Suzan Pitt (US)
“Pitt’s work is like a dream. Things exist out of proportion, shapes shift, characters emerge and then disappear. But like any dream, they also exist with a backbone of reality, and in every way celebrate the things that make life such a mixed bag of joy and sorrow. They are amazing works of art, and for any fan of animation or unique cinematic experiences, they are not to be missed.”
-Steven Snyder - TimeOut
TRAITÉ DE BAVE ET D'ETERNITÉ
Isidore Isou (France)
Isidore Isou arrived in Paris from Romania in 1945 where he founded the Letterist movement, an art and literary movement that owed inspiration to Dada and Surrealism. Letterism attempted to break down poetry into letters and syllables, and then all arts into their constituent parts, to build up new languages for each art form. Isou wrote, directed, photographed...
2016 - BEST CONTRIBUTIONS TO FILM HISTORY
UNDERGROUND NEW YORK
Gideon Bachmann (Germany)
"A rare behind-the-scenes view of the exploding New York “underground” in the late sixties, a turbulent time and place that was to change American culture forever. A German TV crew, led by journalist Gideon Bachmann, explores the epicenter of the sixties revolution in art, music, poetry and film and interviews the main players in the “New American Cinema,”…
VAL DEL OMAR: ELEMENTAL DE ESPAÑA
Various Directors (Spain)
José Val del Omar (1904-1982) was one of the most significant figures of Spanish avant-garde cinema. He was a contemporary and comrade of Federico García Lorca, Luis Cernuda, María Zambrano and other figures of the Silver Age of Spanish culture, interrupted by the Civil War, that formed the Generación del 36 (Generation of ’36). He was a…
VIRGIL WIDRICH - SHORT FILMS
Virgil Widrich (Austria)
Each of Wildrich’s films is rooted in different aspects of artistic, cinematic, and scientific research. The primary components of Virgil Wildrich’s works are images on paper and clips from motion pictures. Collectively, they can be seen primarily as dedicated to exploring time and space (especially the illusion of 3-dimensionality in cinema), as well as exposing the process of creation. Thus, quite a number of the films in this DVD edition contain companion works (also filmed by Widrich and his collaborators) about the “Making of” his movies.
VISIONS OF WARHOL
Jonas Mekas, William Mass & Marie Menken (US)
VISIONS OF WARHOL presents images from the life of Andy Warhol, as seen by three pioneer avant-garde film-makers and close friends of the Pop-artist. Jonas Mekas, the irrepressible force behind the promotion and preservation of experimental film, is also known for his rapid-fire diary films. Mekas documents giving Warhol the Film Culture Independent Film Award...
VIVIAN OSTROVSKY - PLUNGE
Vivian Ostrovsky (US)
"An intimate – yet humorous – act of cultural resistance, the cinema of Vivian Ostrovsky is a gesture, implying the filmmaker’s entire body – as she travels around the world, carrying the gear, framing with a camera-eye. She digs in archival footage for an immense repertory of cinematic gestures performed by others – and playfully edits them with her own Super-8 shots. Multiculturalism and polyglotism are woven into this poetics of displacement."
WHEEL OF ASHES
Peter Emanuel Goldman (US, France)
"All the American film-makers we admire came into the cinema young. Now they're old but no one's taking their place. When Hawks started out he was the same age as Goldman and Goldman is alone...There will be other great American film-makers (there's already Goldman, Clarke and Cassavetes)."
– Jean-Luc Godard, Cahiers du Cinema, 1967