GME DVD Distribution – Fall 2020 Recap
/"The superb dedication of such entities as the Criterion Collection, Milestone Films, and Gartenberg Media Enterprises, to name key players, are making possible access to a wealth of cinematic history, ephemera, and value-added materials."
- B. Ruby Rich, Film Quarterly Winter 2013
With the current academic semester underway, GME would like to remind you of the robust selection of DVD and Blu-ray publications from the breadth and depth of a century of film history (the 1920’s to 2020) that we presented this past season. From Germany in the silent era, THE CITY WITHOUT JEWS (1924) is a prescient and arresting film about the persecution and deportation of the Jews, presaging the horrors of the Nazi era. THE BOLSHEVIK TRILOGY adds the works of Vsevolod Pudovkin to GME’s representation of significant Soviet filmmakers for academic study and appreciation. This digital publication comprises this filmmaker’s cinematic trilogy MOTHER (1926), THE END OF ST. PETERSBURG (1927) and STORM OVER ASIA (1928), which collectively depict the tumultuous history of the Russian Revolution; CHESS FEVER (1925) is a bonus title.
Expanding GME’s highlighting of the importance of American film noir for genre studies, TRAPPED (1949) centers on the clash between counterfeiters and Treasury agents. The semi-documentary style emerged as a common subgenre of film noir, that was made most famous by Anthony Mann’s T-MEN (1947). In the early 1950s in France, Maurice Lemaître emerged as the major proponent of lettrist cinema; his debut, seminal feature film (LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ, 1951) heralded the rebirth of Dada (CINÉMA DADA). Within this movie, he created a collage of images, scratched on the film emulsion, and incorporated voiceover narration, all to encourage a performative environment, i.e., the engagement of the spectator with the screen over the course of the film’s projection. A companion digital publication comprises his later short film works, FILMS IMAGINAIRES (1965-1991). The greatly underrated, yet talented auteur Marcel Hanoun worked in a variety of idioms. UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE (1959), the simple story of a mother and her daughter looking for lodging and work in Paris, combines Robert Bresson’s ascetic technique with Italian neorealism. OCTOBRE À MADRID (1964) a film about filmmaking, blurs the boundaries between work and life. Continuing our in-depth assembly of works by another recently-rediscovered auteur – the filmmaker Philippe Garrel-- we present two films of note from the 1970s (LA CICATRICE INTÉRIEURE and L’ENFANT SECRET), the former an ode to his muse Nico, and the latter, externalizing his inner pain following the breakup with the love of his life.
Shifting to Austria, the found footage works of filmmakers Alfred Kaiser from the 1970s (DECOMPOSING NAZI PHRASEOLOGY) and the later films of Virgil Widrich (VIRGIL WIDRICH – SHORT FILMS [1998-2019]) are lesser known than those of Gustav Deutsch and Peter Tscherkassky, but equally significant in their own right. Kaiser’s films illustrate and demolish the world of Nazi thought and imagery, while, Widrich’s films explore time and space (especially the illusion of 3-dimensionality in cinema).
Adding to our roster of city symphony films and filmmakers (MANHATTA; BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY; LISBOA, CRÓNICA ANEDÓTICA; and THE MAN WIH THE MOVIE CAMERA), we are pleased to present Dominic Angerame’s CITYSCAPES, an amalgam of his short films dating from 1982 to 2010. These experimental works show urban deconstruction and cinematic construction as two sides of the same coin, in which individual films are often replete with layered, multiple exposures and dynamic editing. In contrast, independent filmmaker Joseph Anderson’s little-known SPRING NIGHT, SUMMER NIGHT (1967), is a slow paced and spare, rural family-centered drama shot in black-and-white. It’s loss of stature was undoubtedly due to its being bumped from a slot at the 1968 New York Film Festival by John Cassavettes’ FACES; this digital edition encourages an historic reconsideration of this movie and the filmmaker, which includes 3 of his short films as well as numerous other contextual extras.
In the experimental animation vein, Suzan Pitt (1943-2019) vividly expresses on film her female psyche in wild and surreal fashion. Her most famous movie, ASPARAGUS (1979), achieved wide commercial success when it ran for years at midnight screenings together with David Lynch’s ERASERHEAD (1977). In the arena of the marriage of experimental film and music that emerged from live performance, we feature the single channel, abstract films of contemporary artists Paul Clipson (LANDSCAPE DISSOLVES, 2009-2016) and Joost Rekveld (11 FILMS, 1991-2017).
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Many of the new titles GME is offering from it's fall releases, in addition to back catalog disks, can also be acquired as a digital site license via a Disk/DSL combo option that we are currently offering on GME Streamline, a new web platform we've developed to meet the increased needs for online digital distribution through institutional networks. Please also feel free to contact us directly regarding any needs you may have for DSL versions of the disks we offer.
THE CITY WITHOUT JEWS (DIE STADT OHNE JUDEN)
H.K. Breslauer (Austria)
Based on the controversial and best-selling novel by Hugo Bettauer, H.K. Breslauer’s 1924 film adaptation of THE CITY WITHOUT JEWS (DIE STADT OHNE JUDEN) was produced two years after the publication of the book, only a decade before events depicted in the fictional story became an all-too-horrific reality. The film was produced in the context of the mass migration of Eastern European Jews during and after the First World War, primarily to Vienna and Berlin.
THE BOLSHEVIK TRILOGY - THREE FILMS BY VSEVOLOD PUDOVKIN
Vsevolod Pudovkin (USSR)
Pudovkin embarked on his narrative feature debut in 1926 with MOTHER, regarded by many as a masterpiece of the Russian silent era, and a showcase for Pudovkin’s emotive approach to editing. Pudovkin followed MOTHER’s tale of proletariat uprising with the Bolshevik-themed THE END OF ST. PETERSBURG and the Mongolia-set STORM OVER ASIA in 1927 and 1928 respectively, dazzling the world with a trio of masterful films centered around this tumultuous and revolutionary period in Russian history.
TRAPPED
Richard Fleischer (US)
Before making Hollywood epics such as 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA (1954) and BARABBAS (1961) director Richard Fleischer started his career in the mid 1940’s with a series of low-budget B-features, often taking crime stories and transforming them into taut noir dramas. TRAPPED is the story of an uneasy alliance of a convicted counterfeiter (played by a young Lloyd Bridges) with Federal T-Men in the search to track down the forger of treasury bills.
LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ ? (HAS THE FEATURE STARTED YET?)
Maurice Lemaître (France)
One of the founding works of letterist cinema, LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ ? (HAS THE FEATURE STARTED YET?) became a major event during its first screenings in Paris in 1951. Despite the critics’ lack of consideration, this film’s undeniable influence — direct or hidden — on the New Wave as much as on today’s cinema makes it a landmark in film history.
FILMS IMAGINAIRES (IMAGINARY FILMS)
Maurice Lemaître (France)
“A major figure in the lettrist movement, Maurice Lemaître revolutionized cinema in 1951 with LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ ? ( HAS THE FEATURE STARTED YET?) and invented a new form of performance: “Syncinema.” His many cinematic works, made between the 1960s and the present day, confirm his position as one of the most important avant-garde filmmakers of his generation."
- Christian Lebrat
Marcel Hanoun (France)
"UNE SIMPLE HISTOIRE comes across as a document, as a clinical statement on reality. And I insist on the word "clinical". Marcel Hanoun presents a film where the suspense does not come from the social aspect of the heroine's mIsadventures, but rather from their pathological aspect. Marcel Hanoun's originality is to have been able to not only describe a dramatic situation, but also to elaborate a woman's character. That's why I like this film."
- Jean-Luc Godard
Marcel Hanoun (France)
“An ambitious film, disarming in its simplicity, Octobre à Madrid (October in Madrid) is the prototypical 'film about film' that every filmmaker dreams of. That’s what Hanoun has filmed here: the life of the filmmaker as a film in the making; the blurring and reversing of the boundaries between desire and work, film and life."
- Jean-Louis Comolli
LA CICATRICE INTÉRIEURE
(France, 1972)
"In 1972, Nico sang and screamed in the desert of New Mexico, the snowy plains of Iceland and the calcified landscapes of Egypt. Philippe Garrel shot the ultimate film-trip, LA CICATRICE INTÉRIEURE, in the most desolate landscapes of the world. This is a reexamination of a crucial work of art and of the mythical love affair between a gifted filmmaker and his phantasmagorical idol."
- Les Inrockuptibles
Philippe Garrel (France)
"A man and a woman with biblical names (Elie and Jean-Baptiste) played by two Bressonian actors (Anne Wiazemsky and Thierry de Maublanc). Shock treatment meets overdose under the rooftops of Paris. And between them, Swan, the child, a badly kept secret. The Swan, a sign of life and mutual survival: the child of children, a fragment of trembling celluloid."
- Serge Daney
ALFRED KAISER: DECOMPOSING NAZI PHRASEOLOGY
Alfred Kaiser (Austria)
In the second half of the 1970s Alfred Kaiser was entirely unknown to the film world when he went public with two films, namely A THIRD REICH (1975) and A THIRD REICH FROM ITS REFUSE (1977). Both compilation films bridge the threshold between avant-garde and documentary cinema and were enthusiastically received by audiences and film critics alike upon their release
Virgil Widrich (Austria)
“Probably the single most startling new discovery was 12-minutes short [Copy Shop] by young Austrian director Virgil Widrich. The film consists of 18.000 photocopied frames, making it neither strictly live action nor animation, and the blurry black-and-white makes it look like a lost Murnau film.”
-The Guardian
Dominic Angerame (US)
Angerame’s city films show urban deconstruction and cinematic construction as two sides of the same coin, as de-construction, even. The filmmaker’s work searches for unfamiliar views of seemingly familiar things: cities, landscapes, faces, bodies. The filmmaker’s desire is to make everyday images unfamiliar, to learn to see them fresh and to estrange them from our senses. Angerame stylizes his urban landscapes into half-abstract, extremely painterly compositions; his films are often layered as collages through double and triple exposures.
Joseph L. Anderson (US)
Italian neorealism meets the coal-mining country of southeast Ohio in this little-seen film emerging from the 1960s American independent cinema movement. Director Joseph L. Anderson, a film professor at the University of Ohio, utilized non-professional actors, on-location photography, a shoestring budget, and a passionate knowledge of international film to create what Richard Brody of The New Yorker calls a “tense, myth-drenched drama of liberation and retribution.”
Suzan Pitt (US)
“Pitt’s work is like a dream. Things exist out of proportion, shapes shift, characters emerge and then disappear. But like any dream, they also exist with a backbone of reality, and in every way celebrate the things that make life such a mixed bag of joy and sorrow. They are amazing works of art, and for any fan of animation or unique cinematic experiences, they are not to be missed.”
-Steven Snyder - TimeOut
PAUL CLIPSON - LANDSCAPE DISSOLVES
Paul Clipson (UK)
Paul Clipson (1965-2018) was a San Francisco-based filmmaker and experimental film artist whose work involves projected installation and live collaborative performances with sound artists and musicians. Many of his films were the result of collaborations with sound artists or groups, such as Tarentel, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Joshua Churchill, all of whose methods of experimenting with sound and instrumentation, incorporating improvisation, mistakes and accidents into live performances and recordings, greatly influenced his work. Over time, shorter film pieces were carefully created from this work, utilizing the accidental, unexpected juxtapositions of sound and image that have been discovered live.
JOOST REKVELD – 11 FILMS
Joost Rekveld (Netherlands)
“Joost Rekveld's films combine a remarkable ingenuity and facility with the image-making capabilities of various machines (many of his own design) with his radically inventive theories and approaches to form, motion, and perception. The result has been a startlingly diverse, ever-expanding body of work marked by formal rigor, breathtaking imagery, and a rich, expressive audiovisual poetry.”
- LA Film Forum