Archives of Modernist Cinephilia

Anthology Film Archives's recent DVD collection, Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film, 1894–1941, offers nothing less than a fundamental redefinition of American avant-garde film and an expansive, iconoclastic vision of experimental film practice that should be enthusiastically welcomed by anyone invested in widening the cultural playing field of the modern. This final fruit of a much broader project of scholarly revisionism is, aptly enough, immense. With a running time of over nineteen hours, and including 155 films, many of which are rare and previously unavailable on DVD, Unseen Cinema hopes to make part of its revisionist argument about the early American avant-garde—that such a thing, in fact, existed before Maya Deren—through sheer volume. Size matters, then, but so does style, and the collection's surprising choices and irreverent juxtapositions add up to a kind of modernist Wunderkammer with the sympathetic expansiveness of Whitman's catalogues and the campy curiositas of Guy Maddin. Alongside canonical works like Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler's Manhatta (1921) or Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger's Ballet mécanique (1924), this embarrassment of digital riches finds room for early cinematic innovations; the cine-juvenalia of Orson Welles; Hollywood mavericks like Busby Berkeley, Slavko Vorkapich, and Robert Florey; corporate documentaries; the home-movies of one Archie Stewart, a car dealer from Newburgh, New York; and the cinematic debut of a lantern-jawed, inevitably bare-torsoed twenty-four-year-old Charlton Heston in David Bradley's Peer Gynt (1941). As astonishing, as dazzling, and as seemingly inexhaustible as those eye-popping Busby Berkeley dance numbers that feature so prominently in it, Unseen Cinema is a major achievement in film preservation and film history. It is also an indispensable archive for the explosion of scholarly interest in cinematic modernisms, modernism's visual culture, and the place of cinema in the cultures of early twentieth-century modernity.

The Unseen Cinema box set is only the most public product of a broad international effort of film preservation and a decades-old project of revisionist film historiography. Spearheaded by Anthology Film Archives, the archival and preservation work has drawn on, while making preservation masters of, films from the world's leading film archives, including the Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, the George Eastman House, the Library of Congress, the British Film Institute, Deutches Filmmuseum, and a range of regional archives. The preservation campaign was accompanied by Unseen Cinema, the traveling international film retrospective curated by Bruce Posner, independent filmmaker and historian, who has also edited the accompanying exhibition catalog. The ongoing exhibition itself premiered in 2001, and has now toured over fifty universities, museums, and archives worldwide, including most recently the Netherlands Architecture Institute, the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, and visits the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in the spring of 2007.

Posner's chief editorial goal is "altruistic": "to reclaim early American avant-garde film and to establish its accomplishments" by presenting "the broadest possible spectrum of experimental films produced between the 1890s and the 1940s."¹ In Posner's capacious view, experimental cinema is "the product of avant-garde artists, of Hollywood directors, and of amateur movie-makers working collectively and as individuals at all levels of film production during the last decade of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century" (UC, 42). This baggy definition of avant-gardism, surely too catholic for some, sustains Posner's most readily discernable revisionist claims: that early cinema was always already avant-garde; that, rather than functioning as commercial film's resistant other, avant-garde film "grew hand-in-hand with the supremacy of the Hollywood film as a social-economic institution"; and that the films of the early American avant-garde were "strictly American in attitude" rather than slavish derivatives of their European models (UC, 40).

The particular roster of films at the...