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

With 155 films on seven DVDs and a total running time of just under nineteen hours, Unseen Cinema represents a major effort to present, in the words of its curator, Bruce Posner, "the broadest possible spectrum of experimental films produced between the 1890s and 1940s."¹ Thus Posner joins Jan-Christopher Horak and the contributors to his anthology Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919–1945 in an effort to open the canon of American experimental/avant-garde film to work made before 1943, when Maya Deren and Alexander Hammid made Meshes of the Afternoon–"the quasi-official inauguration of the American avant-garde"² and starting point for P. Adams Sitney's extremely influential study of American avant-garde film, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943–2000. By making these films available for multiple viewings, Unseen Cinema contributes significantly to the study and enjoyment of what Horak calls the "first avant-garde" in American cinema.³

Information preceding each film includes its source, the title, date, director(s), musicians (for the silent films), or, when relevant, the title of the composition heard on the soundtrack. Brief notes introduce most of the films, and among extra features (accessible on a computer's DVD-ROM drive) is information on the authors of the film notes and the musicians who provided accompaniment for the silent films. Most useful of all is a "Bios" section with information on "filmmakers, artists, musicians, and related individuals and groups active in experimental cinema between 1894 and 1941." Many entries include photographs; there are also examples of artwork, frame enlargements, and other relevant visual material. The list is organized alphabetically, but there is no way to call up a name directly; you must find it by scrolling through its 253 "pages" or by selecting the number of a "page" and hoping you land close to the one you are seeking.

The visual quality of the films varies considerably, but all were, according to Posner, "digitally mastered from newly preserved and restored 35mm and 16mm prints," and a note on the DVD box promises, "Films are presented in their original 1.33:1 aspect ratio." Presumably that is how they can be seen when properly projected, but on my TV screen the full frame is not visible. This is especially annoying when viewing films with the most carefully composed images and films with abstract, geometrical patterns. Nevertheless, given the challenges involved in collecting and making presentable prints for Unseen Cinema, Posner and DVD producer David Shepard have done a commendable job.

Sound quality also varies. As one would expect, the early sound films tend to have rather thin, tinny soundtracks. The quality of the sound added to the silent films is good; the music itself ranges from imaginative to cliché and banal. In a few instances, a new recording of the original music was made for the print in the collection. A few films are "intentionally silent." A special case is Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger's Ballet mécanique (1924). With the aid of computers, player pianos, live performances, synthesizers, and samples of sound effects, Paul D. Lehrman, a composer and expert in music technology at Tufts University, created a shortened version of Georges Antheil's Ballet mécanique for the soundtrack of a good quality, partially tinted print of the film.⁴ The result is the collection's pièce de résistance as far as the use of sound is concerned.

The films on each disk appear in roughly chronological order and are nominally illustrative of a particular subject, theme, or set of formal devices. I say "nominally" because the relevance of some films to the organizing principle of the disk in which they appear is tenuous at best. While this dilutes the conceptual and aesthetic impact of the disk, it allows Posner to include a number of interesting films that might otherwise...