RECAP OF THE SPRING GME STREAMLINE DSL & GME DVD/BLU-RAY RELEASES
/
This semester, Gartenberg Media has presented a number of new selections on the GME Streamline section of our website for the distribution of films and videos, now available as Digital Site Licenses (DSL), exclusively to the academic community for the streaming of moving image works via the university’s own intranet or closed circuit network, in order to further enrich curricula as well as for library and research use.
Through GME Streamline we have presented limited, free streams of select titles this past semester, including Marie Losier's WALTZ ME TRUST ME. We are currently streaming Warren Sonbert's THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL, and Jay Rosenblatt's THE D TRAIN. These films are representative samples of the recently added releases now available through GME Streamline and GME DVD and Blu-ray distribution. Collectively, they constitute a wealth of cinematic history that we now make available as direct 1080 HD and standard definition (SD) digital file downloads, and as DVD/DSL bundle releases.
◊
THE FILMS OF MARIE LOSIER
THE BALLAD OF GENESIS AND LADY JAYE (FRANCE, 2011) by Marie Losier - Trailer
"Seven years in the making, THE BALLAD OF GENESIS AND LADY JAYE is a mesmerizing and deeply romantic love story between pioneering musician and performance artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and soul mate Lady Jaye. Breaking new ground in its depiction of gender transformation and identity, the film chronicles the physical and spiritual merging of two beings into one. Eschewing the classic talking heads documentary format, Losier's film employs Genesis as the narrator of her own life story. Losier animates this soothing narration with experimental techniques, including the breathless pace of her 16mm moving camera, accelerated and slow motion, rapid montage, over- and underexposed images, camera flares, archival material, and reenactments that enliven this heartfelt tale of love and loss. Losier's film also captures unique behind-the-scenes preparations and live performances of their bands that pioneered industrial music, Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, closing in perfect form with the evocative and poignant love ballad "The Orchids."
-Jon Gartenberg, Tribeca Film Festival Program Note
FELIX IN WONDERLAND (US, 2019) by Marie Losier - Trailer
In FELIX IN WONDERLAND one falls into the world of Felix Kubin’s experimentation and creation of music sound and his mastering of his instrument of predilection, the KORG MS20. A portrait of a great artist who never stops living with music in his head.
◊
THE FILMS OF DORE O.
FIGURES OF ABSENCE (GERMANY, 1968-1976) by Dore O. - Trailer
Dore O.’s films defy categorization, genre, and in some cases, even basic description. According to Masha Matzke, “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, Dore O.’s films induce a heightened sense of perception between hypnosis and clarity.”
Engaging in a wide range of film manipulations (numerous exposures, double-impositions, abrasive cuts, inexplicable other varietals), O. introduces us to a world of intimacy (family portraits, ethereal landscapes, architectural meanderings), only to hold it at arm’s length from us. Our visual perceptions are constantly challenged with imagery that continuously overlaps, intertwines, refracts, and implodes. Narrative is generally intangible; however, specific motifs repeat themselves throughout many of the films, slowly unveiling the poetic ensemble at hand: disparate figures, boundless environments, and domestic interiors entered through, or barred by, doors and windows.
◊
THE FILMS OF JAMES BENNING
GME is proud to announce our unprecedented release of the 7th digital edition of the films of James Benning, comprising O PANAMA (1985) and GRAND OPERA. AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE (1979). Altogether, GME now offers a total of 16 feature length films (and one short form work) by this renowned independent American auteur. We make all of these films available (either as DVDs or DVD/DSL bundles) exclusively to North American academic institutions so as to afford professors, librarians, students and researchers an in-depth study of the arc of this noteworthy artist’s career, from 11x14 (1977) to NATURAL HISTORY (2014). About his filmmaking oeuvre, Benning has observed, that “since I started making films, I’ve always tried to open a new narrative space from the juxtaposition of sound and image, or text and image — how the spectator experiences them, how they quote each other.” Benning’s films are carefully planned in terms of the placement of the camera, the duration of the individual extended takes, and the juxtaposition of shots, creating mesmerizing contemplations of both the natural and man made world.
◊
THE FILMS OF JAY ROSENBLATT
GME Streamline is excited to announce the release of two volumes of short films by internationally recognized artist Jay Rosenblatt, now available as standalone DVD editions as well as collections of DSL downloads, all available for our North American university clientele. Rosenblatt has been working as an independent filmmaker since 1980. His films have been shown worldwide, in film festivals, museum retrospectives, and on television, and have garnered many awards. His most recent movie, WHEN WE WERE BULLIES (2021), was nominated for an Academy Award.
Jay Rosenblatt is a master practitioner of the found footage genre of filmmaking. His movies acutely address the human condition – incorporating birth and childhood, the experience of personal, family and community space, religious faith and tyranny, mortality and death, the passage of time and the function of memory in evoking emotional recollections. Rosenblatt’s training and work in the mental health field helped him acutely understand the individual’s inner state of being. These moving image works are psychologically gripping, often bringing the spectator to the darker places of the human experience, including fear and anxiety, loss, grief, and mourning.
Unique among his found footage contemporaries, his collages comprising found footage material begin with a mood or a tone. Beginning his films with a personal experience, Rosenblatt builds his narratives so that by the end of each of his movies, he enlarges the field of vision to a commentary on the universal human condition. Rosenblatt’s mastery of image and sound montage reflects back from the screen so as to evoke emotional reactions in the viewer’s experience. These are exquisite, sensitive, poetic films.
◊
THE FILMS OF WARREN SONBERT
Warren Sonbert Collection Trailer - The Early Films
The Estate of Warren Sonbert has previously named GME as the custodian of the legacy of experimental filmmaker Warren Sonbert (1947-1995). Since Sonbert’s untimely passing, GME has worked on an extensive project to preserve, distribute and curate career retrospectives of his films on an international basis, as well as publish original documents from the paper archive of his writings, which are now housed at Harvard University, and reprinted in a special issue of Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media.
Warren Sonbert 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-underground world as did four days of showings of the complete films of Warren Sonbert at the Cinematheque’s new location on Wooster St.”
For the first time ever, we are pleased to announce the release in digital format of Sonbert’s first three films, all from 1966: AMPHETAMINE, WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO?, and HALL OF MIRRORS, all from1966, as well as THE TENTH LEGION and THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL, both from 1967. THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL is available on GME Streamline for free streaming for a limited time.
Sonbert’s earliest films, in which he captured the spirit of his generation, were inspired first by the university milieu and then by the denizens of the Warhol art scene, including superstars Rene Ricard and Gerard Malanga. In these loosely structured narratives, Sonbert boldly experimented with the relationship between filmmaker and protagonists through extensively choreographed hand-held camera movements within each shot. The mood of these films was further modulated by chiaroscuro effects, achieved primarily through natural lighting (in both indoor and outdoor shots), combined with variations in the raw film stock and the exposure and the use of rock-and-roll music on the soundtrack.
◊
DOUGLAS SIRK’S TARNISHED ANGELS
THE TARNISHED ANGELS (US, 1957) by Douglas Sirk - Trailer
As part of GME’s ongoing distribution collaboration with Kino Lorber, we are pleased to announce our release of Douglas Sirk’s THE TARNISHED ANGELS (1957), now available exclusively for acquisition by our North American university clientele. This complements GME’s distribution of other key genre films, directed by such filmmakers as Ida Lupino, Richard Fleischer, and Curtis Harrington. Sirk was one of the major directors of melodrama during the 1950s, including MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS, WRITTEN ON THE WIND, IMITATION OF LIFE. Based on a novel by William Faulkner (Pylon), THE TARNISHED ANGELS evokes depression-era New Orleans, enhanced by glorious black-and-white CinemaScope photography, Sirk's riveting chronicle of personal obsession, romantic longing and irreconcilable desires is one of the most noteworthy films to emerge from 1950s Hollywood.
Set in the 1930s Depression era during Mardi Gras in New Orleans, THE TARNISHED ANGELS (US, 1957), covers three days in the lives of a trio of flying-circus performers, headlined by former WWI fighter-pilot hero Roger Shumann (Robert Stack) and his beautiful blonde wife, LaVerne (Dorothy Malone). Romantic complications arise when newspaper reporter Burke Devlin (Rock Hudson) falls in love with LaVerne while covering their daredevil aerial show. Legendary filmmaker Douglas Sirk (MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION, ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS, WRITTEN ON THE WIND, IMITATION OF LIFE) directed this masterpiece based on a novel by William Faulkner (Pylon), adapted for the screen by George Zuckerman. Featuring Troy Donahue in one of his earlier roles.
Warren Sonbert’s NOBLESSE OBLIGE (1981). pays direct homage to Douglas Sirk’s film, in both its narrative structure and visual iconography. Sonbert’s film also contains themes and images of flying and falling, of masked parades, and of the manner in which media reportage shapes public perceptions of personalities and events. In order to directly underscore his esteem for Sirk and his movies, Sonbert also includes in his own film shots of THE TARNISHED ANGELS on video monitors and of Sirk himself conversing with filmmakers Nathaniel Dorsky and Jerome Hiler while attending a tribute at the San Francisco Film Festival.
DOUGLAS SIRK WITH NATHANIEL DORSKY AND JEROME HILER IN WARREN SONBERT’S NOBLESSE OBLIGE (1981)
Click here for a complete list of GME Streamline DSL titles currently available.