“I had the fortune to spend some time, mostly during the summers, with Jackie Kennedy's and her sister Lee Radziwill's families and children. Cinema was an integral, inseparable, as a matter of fact, a key part of our friendship.” —Jonas Mekas
Read More"On October 9th, 1972, half of the music world gathered in Syracuse, N.Y., to celebrate the opening of John Lennon/Yoko Ono Fluxus show, designed by George Maciunas. [The] same day, a smaller group gathered in a local hotel room to celebrate John's birthday." —Jonas Mekas
Read More"Bits of Fluxus events and performances, and picnics with friends (Almus, Andy Warhol, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, etc.), George's wedding and footage I took of him in Boston hospital three days before he died." —Jonas Mekas
Read MoreIn SCENES FROM THE LIFE Of ANDY WARHOL: FRIENDSHIPS AND INTERSECTIONS, Jonas Mekas continues in his tradition of creating rapid-fire diary films, chronicling not only Andy Warhol, but also the social and cultural excitement that swirled around him, throbbing to a hypnotic Velvet Underground beat.
Read MoreIn THE TENTH LEGION, Sonbert presents his college age friends at work and play, wandering the streets of NYC, lounging, shopping, and posing for the camera. The film stylistically exemplifies Sonbert’s masterful use of a constantly moving hand-held camera as it trails the teenage protagonists in choreographed fashion, and of chiaroscuro lighting effects in interior scenes.
Read MoreOne of the most profound themes coursing through Sonbert’s work is that of love between couples in all its pitfalls and perfect moments. To express this theme, Sonbert employed diverse cinematic strategies. These include in-camera editing (in THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL,1967), twin-screen effects (in two “lost” films -- CONNECTION and TED AND JESSICA -- also both from 1967), and montage sequences (beginning with TUXEDO THEATRE, 1969).
Read MoreGME presents key works published by RE:VOIR, a label that publishes and distributes classic and contemporary experimental cinema including films from the Dadaist, Surrealist and Letterist movements, films from the American avant-garde, diary films, arthouse features, animated works and hand-painted films.
Read More“Being located in the “antechamber of language, even of consciousness,” her newly restored films occupy a state of in-betweenness that cannot be easily interpreted nor approached verbally. Their associative stream of images and sounds acts as a deliberation on their sensuality. In a dream-like density and strange suspension of time, O.’s films induce a heightened sense of perception between hypnosis and clarity.”
Read MoreNew York filmmaker born in Paris, Marie Losier begins filming, with portraits of people she met in New York, documenting their lives from what she sees and what she feels after many years in theater and painting which had a great influence on her. Then she uses her imagination to represent these characters or situations as in a tableau vivant. Always with the materiality of the film which requires a certain way of working, her cinema develops a mystery, a magical moment.
Read MoreJay Rosenblatt is a master practitioner of found footage filmmaking. Working since the 1980s, Rosenblatt’s films uniquely deal with the human condition – incorporating the passage of time, birth and childhood, the experience of personal, family and community space, religious faith and tyranny, mortality and death, and the function of memory in evoking emotional states. Rosenblatt’s films are psychologically gripping, often bringing the spectator to the darker places of the human experience, including fear and anxiety, loss, grief, and mourning.
Read More“Jay Rosenblatt makes short, pointed, poetic films, and to see a collection of his work is to know he's a major artist. His specialness has no single source. He's a master at matching music and image, and the nature of his work, which usually involves discovering and using found footage, requires profound patience. Yet mostly, I suspect, what makes almost every Jay Rosenblatt film a full emotional experience is his empathy, his deep, unfeigned and unmistakable respect for life in its many forms.” - Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle.
Read MoreGME presents key works published by INDEX Edition from the Austrian Avant-Garde (1957-present), including films by Martin Arnold, Kurt Kren, Gustav Deutsch, Valie Export, Peter Tscherkassky, Dieter Brehm, Maria Lassnig and Peter Weibel, among many others; this section also includes representation of selected artists from Eastern European countries.
Read MoreFilmed with a 1924 hand-crank Cine-Kodak camera, Shaman Trail Scout 'Coyote' takes a journey which transcends time, from Inwood Park (where the island was traded for beads and booze), down a native trail (now 'Broadway'), into lower Manhattan (sacred burial ground, now including the newest natives of this island empire). Shot before, during and after 9/11, 'Native New Yorker' took several years of filming, with a running length of 13 minutes. Original score composed by William Susman.
Read MoreWarren Sonbert (1947-1995) was one of the seminal figures working in American experimental film. He started making films in 1966 while a student at New York University, and before he was 20 years old, his first career retrospective drew the attention of the film critic for the commercial trade journal Variety, who wrote that “Probably not since Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls had its first showing at the Cinematheque... almost a year and a half ago has an ‘underground’ film event caused as much curiosity and interest in N.Y.’s non-under- ground world as did four days of showings of the complete films of Warren Sonbert at the Cinematheque’s new location on Wooster St.”
Read More“Sonbert began making films in 1966, as a student at New York University's film school in New York. In his first films, he uniquely captured the spirit of his generation, and was inspired both by his university milieu and by the denizens of the Warhol art scene. In both provocative and playful fashion, AMPHETAMINE depicts young men shooting amphetamines and making love in the era of sex, drugs and rock and roll.” - Jon Gartenberg
Read MoreWHERE DID OUR LOVE GO? is an homage to the artistic and social milieu of New York City in the 1960s, as portrayed by the youthful protagonists in the film. Sonbert chronicles his friends and colleagues at the Janis and Castelli galleries, MOMA, Warhol’s Factory, the Bleecker Street Cinema, a rock concert, shopping, dancing, partying, and simply hanging out.
Read More“This film is an outgrowth of one of Sonbert's film classes at NYU, in which he was given outtakes from a Hollywood film photographed by Hal Mohr to re-edit into a narrative sequence. Adding to this found footage, Sonbert filmed Warhol's superstars Rene Ricard and Gerard Malanga in more private and reflective moments.” - Jon Gartenberg
Read MoreGME presents key landmark silent, documentary and experimental works published by Edition Filmmuseum – Vienna, including films by James Benning, Martina Kudláček, and Josef von Sternberg (US), Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov (USSR), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Thailand), and others.
Read MoreGME presents key film and video work published by Cameo Media & Filmoteca de Catalunya covering experimental, avant-garde, animation, documentary and historical films from Spain and Latin America, including films by Val del Omar, Segundo de Chomón, and others who have made their mark in this area.
Read MoreFollowing a series of films questioning commitment and politics in America and culminating with MILESTONES 1975, and a 1977 documentary on Lisbon’s Carnation Revolution, SCENES FROM THE CLASS STRUGGLE IN PORTUGAL, Robert Kramer moved to France with his family. The first film he made there was GUNS, an intricate feature which echoed the paranoid films of 1970’s Hollywood. With GUNS, Kramer continues his exploration of the militant psyche, while at the same time experimenting with different forms of narration.
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