Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894–1941, and: Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893-1941 (review)

Sometimes film history really is revisionist

Unseen Cinema, both the DVD set and the catalogue of the touring exhibition which inspired it, are significant pendulum swings, exasperated correctives to the general line imposed on the history of American avant-garde (or experimental, or 'amateur') cinema since at least the 1960s.

The target is not the usual laziness or lethargy that still marks much film historiography, but a specific, institutional orthodoxy. Although it goes unmentioned here, one can't help thinking that this film retrospective, catalogue, and DVD set were assembled as a direct response to an earlier internationally touring retrospective and its catalogue, A History of the American Avant-Garde Cinema, organised by the American Federation of Arts in 1976.

In that narrative, American avant-garde cinema literally begins with Maya Deren in 1943. 'The precursors and models of the American avant-garde film', the catalogue told us, 'are the avant-garde films produced in Europe during the 1920s and 1930s and the cinema of the Soviet Union produced during the late 1920s'. End of story.¹ But Bruce Posner, in a 15-page pamphlet included in the DVD set, dismisses the notion that 'there was NO early American avant-garde cinema' as a 'fairy tale', a seductive fiction from which it is long since time to awaken.

There were good institutional reasons for the defence of one particular concept of avant-garde cinema in the 1960s, and the Museum of Modern Art, the Anthology Film Archives, and the New York University Cinema Studies department, as well as the American Federation of the Arts, all expended considerable energy in establishing it. Those standing in the way, like Amos Vogel, wound up in the dust bin of history, at least for awhile.

Historians have recently begun to pick apart these battles, documenting the series of academic and curatorial strategies that led to the triumph of the cinematic vision canonized in the touring AFA show. Posner enters the fray with ammunition of his own. Not only was there an earlier American avant-garde, he insists, but its history was consciously suppressed, its accomplishments consigned to the realm of the 'unseen'. To win this argument, he assembles 19 hours of film and asks us to believe the evidence of our own eyes.

The set is a treasure trove, an elegantly produced collection of rarities, and a few familiar favourites, which takes full advantage of the possibilities of this digital format (ironic, though, that the vehicle responsible for rehabilitating the reputation of this avant-garde is a technology which its creators would never have imagined). Image quality is nearly always superior to existing show prints, and considerably better than battered 16mm library copies. Projection speeds have been 'corrected'. Great care has gone into the musical accompaniments. Some titles are presented without sound, 'as intended'; many are sensitively scored by excellent contemporary musicians, including Donald Sosin, Robert Israel and Rodney Sauer; at times, such historic accompaniments as George Antheil's for Ballet mécanique have been scrupulously recreated. (Ballet mécanique can find a home here because, in line with another strand of historical revisionism, it is now largely attributed to Dudley Murphy.) Orchestrating all this was an accomplishment of great judgment and skill. Negotiating with numerous film archives and artists' estates could not have been an easy task – not to mention raising the funding for so elaborate a package. David Shepard, Bruce Posner and Robert Haller are all to be congratulated, along with Cineric and the other underwriters.

Fig 1.

Emlen Etting's Oramunde (1933) from Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant...