The Films of Alan Berliner (review)

For those of us interested in experimental short cinema, the limited amount of work available on DVD has long been a frustration. While recent years have seen the emergence of labels dedicated to experimental film (Other Cinema DVD, Peripheral Produce, Lowave) as well as a few blockbuster collections of key works from the history of underground-experimental- avant-garde film (e.g., Kino's three Avant-Garde volumes and the National Film Foundation's wonderful Treasures from American Film Archives, Vol. 4), there is still an extraordinary amount of work that is difficult to see outside of occasional screenings in the major film capitals of the world. Bootleg copies, often of exceedingly bad quality, circulate on aging VHS tapes or now on file-sharing or other open-access sites, but these copies are often the slightest ghosts of what these films are meant to be, like a black-and-white Xerox of the Mona Lisa.

With that in mind, the release of even a single major film from this tradition is significant. In June 2011, thanks to Kino Lorber's release of The Films of Alan Berliner, a five-volume box set, we now have not one but four more important experimental films in commercial circulation. While the box set is nominally dedicated to Berliner's longer and more recent documentary work, four of the five disks also include the four parts of a suite of short found-footage films that Berliner made in the early 1980s. These films—City Edition (1980), Myth in the Electric Age (1981), Natural History (1983), and Everywhere at Once (1985)—are among the most rigorous explorations of film form ever to grace the silver screen. But while they are rigorous, they are also incredibly playful tours de force, each a virtuoso exploration of sound-to-image, image-to-image, and sound-to-sound relationships. Berliner was himself a sound effects librarian at ABC Sports in the period when he began working on the first of these films, and that sensibility (as well as that amazing archive of sounds) is more than apparent in this work. Everywhere at Once, which in some ways plays as a culmination of this whole period of Berliner's formal experimentation, is a virtual lexicon of such relationships, the kind of film that one wants to slow down to take full note of each new discovery. Using both Eisensteinian montage, most notably on the sound track, where collision seems to be the driving force, and Pudovkinian linkage, with the images connected forward and backward in a tightly linked chain for the duration of the ten-minute short, the film almost seems like a primer on all that cinema can (or could) do—in other words, experimental short cinema at its best.

The presentation of these films on these DVDs is superb. Especially notable is the way that the transfers faithfully reproduce the swimming film grain, a critical marker of the 16mm medium that was Berliner's primary production format. Also remarkable here, especially for these found-footage shorts, is the way that these transfers also reproduce the slight imperfections in the source materials—the flecks of dirt, the occasional scratches—that hint at the histories behind the film prints that Berliner used in making these films. For those of us who have been watching and teaching these films from soft (and increasingly glitchy) VHS copies, these additional subtleties in the versions included in this box set are a welcome further nuance.

These films' place in history is not due exclusively to their stunning formal virtues, however; rather, they have assumed a central place in one of the standard narratives of experimental film, thanks to an infamous attack on them (and the work of three of Berliner's contemporaries) by critic Fred Camper in the pages of Millennium Film Journal in 1986-87.¹ In decrying the "end of the avant-garde," Camper singled out Berliner's films for lacking the "incantatory force"² of his preferred makers of earlier decades (e.g., Gregory Markopoulos or...