Avant-Garde, Experimental & Non-narrative Films on DVD

[denti alligator]

Anyone have anything to say about this Bill Morrison film.

[zedz]

(Cross-posting from the BFI subforum)

I just watched the recent Flipside release of Requiem for a Village and made a wonderful discovery in the form of David Gladwell's 1964 An Untitled Film.

It's an incredibly great experimental film, predicated on virtuoso slow motion effects and a superb electronic score by the memorably named Ernest Berk (possibly the most appropriate name ever for an experimental composer!), and its nine minutes fully justified my purchase - a cascade of unforgettable images. I expect this film will appear on my 60s list next time around. As a bonus, it boasts an absolutely stunning HD transfer, direct from the original 35mm camera negative (and it shows).

[MichaelB]

a superb electronic score by the memorably named Ernest Berk (possibly the most appropriate name ever for an experimental composer!)

I know it's bad and wrong to mock people's names and I apologise most sincerely, but that really did make me laugh out loud.

And I fully second the recommendation for An Untitled Film - if nothing else, it's black-and-white 1080p demonstration material.

[zedz]

Yes, the evidence is really piling up that good black-and-white transfers are the real stunners on BluRay, and this film is seriously one of the best B&W transfers I've ever seen. Definitely demo material.

[antnield]

Anyone have anything to say about this Bill Morrison film.

The Digital Fix

[matrixschmatrix]

I emailed the Center for Visual Music about the possibility of a second volume of Fischinger films, and this was the response I got:

Well, a lot...we are working on DVD #2 now though, trying to raise enough $ to finish and release in 2012. We still need to preserve Muratti Greift Ein, though we may have half of the funding for that coming in, tentative. And looks like we have funding for Study nr 5. We're in the middle of preserving a few other titles for it; and the extra bonus features are preserved but not digitized.

Then we need a few thousand for HD transfers & audio, and a few thousand for design/packaging/authoring and replication.

We have a funding project set up, where people can donate either towards their favorite film, or digitization or the next DVD project...

So, nothing in stone, but I'd say this is pretty exciting news nonetheless.

[antnield]

This one's been out for a few months, but I've only just gotten around to watching it...

Lux's Jo Ann Kaplan set, Body of Work contains four of her short films and her hour-long documentary Invocation: Maya Deren which screened on Channel 4 back in 1988. The documentary alone justifies a purchase: a personal and analytical take on Deren and her body of work with contributions from Jonas Mekas, Amos Vogel, Stan Brakhage and others. (Helen Mirren narrates.) There's also plenty of enticing clips, not only of Deren's famed works but also the later, comparatively minor films and the unfinished projects. Kaplan's own films are an intriguing mixture of animation, dance and VALIE EXPORT-isms, but the doc is the key work here.

(I've linked to the Lux site, but the disc can also be purchased through MovieMail.)

[rockysds]

Microcinema is releasing a three-disc dvd collection of Rudy Burckhardt's films April 24th.

This just shot up alongside the Frampton and Epstein sets as one of my most anticipated releases of the year.

[rockysds]

Re-voir recently upgraded their release of Rameau's Nephew by Diderot (Thanx to Dennis Young) by Wilma Schoen, so there's a dvd now! Still priced at 69 euro, but it does contain two discs and a book.

[rockysds]

There's a dvd box release of three films by Ken Jacobs: "RAZZLE DAZZLE The Lost World", "Return to the Scene of the Crime" and "Anaglyph Tom (Tom with Puffy Cheeks)" available through Electronic Arts Intermix priced at $75. I haven't found any reviews of the discs and I'm curious if anyone on the board has purchased the set/has thoughts on it.

[Adam]

It's a 3-D set - Razzle Dazzle & Anaglyph Tom, both of which we've screened at Filmforum, are anaglyph 3-D. Haven't seen the third one.

[Gregory]

Microcinema is releasing a three-disc dvd collection of Rudy Burckhardt's films April 24th. This just shot up alongside the Frampton and Epstein sets as one of my most anticipated releases of the year.

I just received this set and was a little sad to see that it's 3 DVD-Rs. I did notice that the retail price of this one is only $50, compared to $60 for their 3-disc Joel Schlemowitz set (on pressed discs) from a few years back.
The transfers look about what I'd expected so far. The prevalence of digital artifacts, compression flaws, and haloing is distracting at times, but most of the time the transfers seem serviceable, especially on smaller displays. It's nice just to have these available to watch at home for the first time. There are sides to Burckhardt I'd never seen here. In his more familiar modes, his views of city life are by turns beautiful, wistful, funny, dramatic, frightening, and a lot more.
It would have been great if they could have included the little-seen documentary on Burckhardt, Not Nude Though.

[htshell]

Following rampant Internet speculation, Bad Lit: The Journal of Underground Film has received official confirmation and lots more detailed information regarding the films of Jonas Mekas that will be released on DVD in 2012.

Mekas’ films will indeed be released by a trio of Paris-based organizations — fashion icon agnes b., DVD distributor Potemkine and avant-garde film distributor Re:Voir — and are scheduled to come out in November. A box set collection, pictured above, will only contain a selection of Mekas films: Lost, Lost, Lost; The Brig; Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania; Walden; As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty; and a DVD of Mekas’ shorter films.

However, the DVDs will also be sold separately and several other films will also be made available through Re:Voir, including Guns of the Trees, Mekas’ first film.

Most exciting, though, is that all the DVDs will be released as Region 0, meaning that they will be playable on devices all over the world.

To coincide with this momentous release of the films of arguably the most significant figure in underground film history, there are several retrospectives and an exhibition being planned as well. In November, there will be a Mekas retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, followed in December by an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London and a retrospective at the British Film Institute (BFI).

Stay tuned for even more details in the coming weeks! And special thanks to Mekas’ son Sebastian for providing Bad Lit with this information.

http://www.badlit.com/?p=23565" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Gregory]

Great. I hadn't heard that was coming and just a few days ago purchased an expensive copy of Walden. I expect the box will be the most economical way to get all the rest. Anyway, it'll be great to see the rest (again). I found Lost, Lost, Lost and Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania wonderful and moving, for example.

[SpiderBaby]

Can't wait for this. Thanks for the news.

[Matt]

Most exciting, though, is that all the DVDs will be released as Region 0, meaning that they will be playable on devices all over the world.

Except not because they will most likely be PAL and unplayable on most players sold in the US. But still, great news.

[zedz]

Re:Voir's release of Walden is essential. I hope they'll be retaining the massive book. The Brig is also already available, but I'll be happy to double dip on those if the box option is economical.

[onedimension]

Anyone familiar with the works of Lawrence Jordan or James Broughton? Amazon's offering a 2-pack of FACETS releases.. I haven't seen them mentioned on this thread before.

[Gregory]

They've been talked about a little in other threads, such as this one (Jordan set discussed in that link), which is an earlier thread on "avant-garde/experimental" that has long run concurrently with this one.
Anyway, I've never enjoyed Broughton that much, myself. I wouldn't want to discourage anyone from checking out that set but I'd recommend sampling his work through the films of his included on Kino's Avant-Garde 2 and 3 sets (which everyone who doesn't have should probably be picking up soon due to rumors of them going OOP).
I love Larry Jordan's work but was disappointed in how it was presented in the Facets set. From what I know of some of Jordan's compositions, the transfers seemed highly cropped/zoomed-in, not to mention rife with artifacts from compression or bad conversions or who knows what. The films still look decent and it'll probably be the only chance to have them, so I still recommend the set if it can be found discounted.
On that score, ImportCDs.com has a much better price on the 2-pack (and on either set by itself) than Amazon.

[zedz]

They're both great sets, even though neither Broughton nor Jordan are among my favourite experimental filmmakers. Major retrospective sets like this are rare as hen's teeth, and probably getting rarer, so they're well worth supporting, and chances are there will be a handful of films on each that you'll like, plus lots that will provide context for the work of experimental filmmakers of the period in general.

With the Broughton set, for example, I think there's only one film on there that I absolutely love (Devotions), but it was great for providing a survey of the times and tides of American experimental filmmaking from the surrealistic sketches and psychodramas of the 40s and 50s to the more personal and idiosyncratic explorations of the 70s and 80s, with Broughton bouncing off the various filmmaking trends he passed through or passed by. It's also a fascinating survey of social attitudes in general, with Broughton using his films to explore and express his own sexuality, and obviously the ways he could do that changed radically over four decades.

[Alan Smithee]

Can anyone recommend some great living critics who cover experimental film? Worldwide for sure but New York based especially.

[knives]

I would imagine Mekas still gets some writing in.

[AlexHansen]

Not NY based but Michael Sicinski is as good as there is.

[Alan Smithee]

Not NY based but Michael Sicinski is as good as there is.

Cool this is new to me, thanks!

I would imagine Mekas still gets some writing in.

I follow Mekas on Facebook, if he does he doesn't post it. He seems to be pushing his own work in his twilight years.

[zedz]

Hot on the heels of the big, essential Jonas Mekas box set from Potemkine / Re:Voir, the latter has released more Mekas, in the form of Guns of the Trees and The Sixties Quartet.