Autocross Blogs - Ying Ying

In a new anthology released by Image last year, Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film, the NFPF has managed a stunning feat, bringing together twenty-six films of which the majority are masterpieces. The contents include Stan Brakhage's radiant The Riddle of Lumen (1972), Andy Warhol's campy Mario Banana I (1964), Chick Strand's colorful Fake Fruit Factory (1986), Shirley Clarke's balletic Bridges-Go-Round (1958), Wallace Berman's mysterious Aleph (1956-66?), Hollis Frampton's philosophical (nostalgia) (1971), Standish Lawder's rigorous and funny Necropolis (1969-70), Christopher Maclaine's anarchic The End (1953), Ron Rice's psychedelic Chumlum (1964), and Ken Jacobs's Little Stabs at Happiness (1959-63), his greatest collaboration with Jack Smith, performance artist extraordinaire. The other selections were made by the all-star lineup of Jonas Mekas, Marie Menken, Pat O'Neill, Paul Sharits, Harry Smith, Bruce Baillie, Lawrence Jordan, Robert Breer, George Kuchar, Owen Land, Joseph Cornell, tiffany bangles sale Storm De Hirsch, Saul Levine, Larry Gottheim, Jane Conger Belson Shimane, and the marvelous Funk filmmakers Robert Nelson and William T. Wiley. With this remarkable collection, DVD distribution of avant-garde cinema has genuinely come of age.

Of similar tiffany bracelets sale historical and artistic value, although more uneven in quality, are three Kino International sets collectively called Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema (2005, 2007, 2009). Together they comprise six discs covering 1922 to 1954, presenting films gathered over several decades by Raymond Rohauer, a cinephile and collector, and the George Eastman House, the distinguished museum and archive. [For more detailed commentary, see Michael Sicinski's review of the latter two volumes, now posted on the Cineaste Website, and Paul Arthur's "Unseen No More: The Avant-Garde on DVD," Cineaste, Vol. XXXII, No. 1, Winter 2006].

Kino's Avant-Garde discs have also been mildly contentious, reviving a controversy that started when Rohauer reissued a number of Buster Keaton comedies in the early 1970s and took control of the rights to them. Some observers criticized him for being less concerned with serving the cause of cinema than with "re-copyrighting his acquisitions in his own name," to quote DVD Talk critic Glenn Erickson, and suspicions have arisen that he altered the content of some films he acquired to justify his claim to the rights. (His dealings in the Keaton affair are "infamous," curator Adrian Danks wrote in Senses of Cinema.) If any of the Avant-Garde movies have suffered minor meddling, however, this will be visible only to the most scrupulous silent-film specialists; and while I tiffany Pendants sale wouldn't condone the tampering if it were proven, I wouldn't raise much hue and cry either. The selections I've seen before on beat-up 16mm prints look the same to me as they did before, only they're incomparably fresher and clearer.