GME DVD Distribution – Alexander Kluge and Werner Schroeter Films – Now Available on DVD for North American Institutional Sales

Gartenberg Media Enterprises is pleased to present DVD publications by Alexander Kluge and Werner Schroeter, both seminal figures of the New German Cinema that emerged in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

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These two films by Alexander Kluge both star his sister Alexandra Kluge in the leading role. YESTERDAY GIRL (1966) is about Anita G., a young East German woman who travels to West Germany in search of a better life. Encountering troubles with the law, she is ultimately unable to deal either with a Communist regime or a free-market economy. In PART-TIME WORK OF A DOMESTIC SLAVE (1973), Roswitha Bronski is a married mother of three at the center of the protest movement. She finds her plans for social change are easier to realize outside family life. The 2-disc DVD also offers five short films by Alexander Kluge related to the two feature films.

“Though often acknowledged as one of the most important avant-gardists of his generation in Europe, Alexander Kluge does not think of himself as such. He considers himself a partisan of an “arriere-garde” whose project is not to push into new aesthetic territory or be the vanguard of a new kind of film art, but to “bring everything forward”—to bring forward all the lost utopian aspirations of past political and aesthetic projects, all the wishes and hopes that history has left unrealized. His is a project of redeeming past failures. This might seem an odd claim by Kluge, who was a pioneer of the German New Wave as it emerged in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, and a signatory and moving force behind the famous OBERHAUSEN MANIFESTO of 1962 which declared “The old film is dead.” But like his intellectual precursor Walter Benjamin, Kluge has always thought any project for authentic renewal must consciously detour through the past in order to avoid creating what another of his great intellectual mentors, Bertolt Brecht, called the “bad new”— essentially the recreation of existing oppressive social relations and tired aesthetic forms in the guise of a glossy, marketable and illusory “New.” For Brecht, Fascism was the exemplary “bad new”; for Kluge, the “bad new” consisted of the dreary products of the “culture industry” and the tedious social conditions prevailing in Germany—about which he once said that they were bad enough that no one was really happy, but not bad enough to make anyone do anything about them.”

– Christopher Pavsek, Cinema Scope

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This 2-disc DVD set presents new restored versions of two rare classics by Werner Schroeter, and compliments GME's prior release of two separate DVD editions comprising other key films by this unconventional artist, EIKA KATAPPA & DER TOD DER MARIA MALIBRAN and DER BOMBERPILOT & NEL REGNO DI NAPOLI. WILLOW SPRINGS (1973) was shot in a village in the Mojave desert and describes a house run by three man-eaters. TAG DER IDIOTEN (1981) was shot in the USSR. A woman experiences psychic disintegration and ends up in a mental institution. Rare short films by and about Werner Schroeter as well as stills from the shooting of TAG DER IDIOTEN are added as bonus features.

"WILLOW SPRINGS (1973) is the only film which Werner Schroeter has shot in the United States. The scene is a lonely, dilapidated house with a bar on the edge of the Mojave desert; the house, like the place in which it is located, is called "Willow Springs". The three Amazons sit in their lair, waiting for men to rob, love, and kill. But in this "feminist" counter-world, "male" power structures continue to function: the "master thinker" and priestess Magdalena (Montezuma) dominates the ethereal Christine (Kaufmann), who, in love with herself, is the sterile embodiment of an art grown unsensual. At the very bottom of the hierarchy is Ila (von Hasberg), the maid who says next to nothing. She not only finds sexual contact with the stranger Michael (O'Daniels), but also love. The two contrive to flee, but the murderous Magdalena kills them. "Art" also kills herself, before she goes out into the desert as the Black Angel, the title of Schroeter's next film, which was made in Mexico in 1973/74…Eroticism and force, introversion and exaltation, sensual happiness and destructive power – all these things come forth in the “Kammerspiel” intimacy of the allegorical drama WILLOW SPRINGS."

– Wolfram Schütte

"DAY OF THE IDIOTS (1981) opens with a frenetic overture. A beautiful, young woman (Carole Bousquet) puts on an eccentric act in an attempt to attract the attention of the world around her and that of her boyfriend – she smears her face with lipstick, orders three cups of coffee at once in a café, and occasionally switches from men’s to women’s clothing. Her conformist, considerate boyfriend, whom she “wishes she could see into to find out if he really loves her”, is crazy about his records, which she then tramples on. When the public is called upon by the media to assist in the search for “terrorists and their accomplices”, the line linking the insanity of Carol’s puberty and that of the public at large hums with life. She randomly denounces innocent women to the police until she is caught one day and sent to an asylum…DAY OF THE IDIOTS (1981), a fantasy on the torment and joy of yearning, on insanity and reality, transgression and identity of the self ranks among the most mysterious, the most perplexing of Werner Schroeter’s narrative films."

– Wolfram Schütte

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Additional Titles Of Related Interest From GME:

GME DVD Distribution – Maya Deren Experimental and Dance Films Now Available on DVD for North American Institutional Sales

Gartenberg Media Enterprises is pleased to present DVD publications of Maya Deren's EXPERIMENTAL FILMS and DANCE FILMS.

"She is the mother of us all"

 – Stan Brakhage

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Maya Deren was one of the most pre-eminent avant-garde filmmakers of the 20th century; her first film MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943), is the most renown experimental film throughout all of film history. She became known as a major proponent of the “trance” film, and her movies are a transitional link between the European avant-garde films of the 1920’s (see, for example, CINÉMA DADA and SURREALISM AND EXPERIMENTS IN BELGIUM CINEMA), and the American avant-garde films of Kenneth Anger, Gregory Markopoulos, Stan Brakhage and others. Deren was also a poet and developed an interested in modern dance (see also MAYA DEREN: DANCE FILMS). In her experimental films, she also collaborated with other artists, who appeared in her films, including poet Anaïs Nin, musician John Cage, dancer Frank Westbrook, and her filmmaker-husband, Alexander Hammid.

"The cinema of Maya Deren delivers us from the studios: it presents our eyes with physical facts which contain profound psychological meaning; it beats out within our hearts or upon our hearts a time which alternates, continues, revolves, pounds, or flies away.... One escapes from the stupidity of make-believe. One is in the reality of the cinematic fact, captured by Maya Deren at that point where the lens cooperates as a prodigious discoverer."

- Le Corbusier, 1945

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Maya Deren (1917-1961) developed an interest in dance during her first years living in New York City. According to scholar P. Adams Sitney, “In the early forties she conceived the idea of writings a theoretical book on modern dance and looked for a professional dancer to work with her. She interested Katherine Dunham in her project and traveled with her on her tour of 1940-1941. The book never materialized…” Several years thereafter, Deren integrated her interest in modern dance into her filmmaking practice, and in the 1950’s did fieldwork in Haiti on rituals, dances, and voodoo. She also collaborated with choreographer Anthony Tudor and students of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet School in the making of THE VERY EYE OF NIGHT (1952-55).

Deren’s first dance film, A STUDY IN CHOREOGRAPHY FOR THE CAMERA (1945) was subtitled “Pas de Deux”, referring to the co-equal role of the camera and the on-screen dancer in terms of the interplay between movement, space, and time.

"In this film, I have attempted to place a dancer in a limitless, cinematographic space. Moreover, he shares, with the camera, a collaborative responsibility for the movements themselves. This is, in other words, a dance which can exist only on films The movement of the dancer creates a geography that never was. With a turn of the foot, he makes neighbors of distant places. Being a film ritual, it is achieved not in spatial terms alone, but in terms of a time created by the camera."

– Maya Deren on A STUDY IN CHOREOGRAPHY FOR THE CAMERA (1945)

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Additional Titles of Related Interest From GME:

GME DVD Distribution – The Man With The Movie Camera & L'Inhumaine, Now Available on Blu-ray for North American Institutional Sales

Gartenberg Media Enterprises is pleased to present Blu-ray publications of Marcel L’Herbier’s L’INHUMAINE (1924), a film that showcased the most cutting-edge modern arts in France and Dziga Vertov’s THE MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA (1929), Soviet cinema’s crowning achievement produced at the apotheosis of the silent film era.

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"I am an eye. A mechanical eye. I am the machine that reveals the world to you as only the machine can see it. I am now free of human immobility. I am in perpetual motion. I approach things, I move away from them. I slip under them, into them. I move toward the muzzle of a race horse. I move quickly through crowds, I advance ahead of the soldiers in an assault, I take off with airplanes, I fall on my back ad get up at the same time that the body falls and gets up. This is what I am, a machine that runs in chaotic maneuvers, recording movements one after the other, assembling them in a patchwork. Freed from the constraints of time and space, I organize each point of the universe as I wish. My route is that of a new conception of the world. I can make you discover the world you did not know existed.”

– Dziga Vertov, Kino-Eye Manifesto (1923)

These words, written in 1923 (only a year after Robert Flaherty’s NANOOK OF THE NORTH was released) reflect the Soviet pioneer’s developing approach to cinema as an art form that shuns traditional or Western narrative in favor of images from real life. They lay the foundation for what would become the crux of Vertov’s revolutionary, anti-bourgeois aesthetic wherein the camera is an extension of the human eye, capturing “the chaos of visual phenomena filling the universe.” Over the next decade-and-a-half, Vertov would devote his life to the construction and organization of these raw images, his apotheosis being the landmark 1929 film THE MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA. In it, he comes closest to realizing his theory of ‘Kino-Eye,’ creating a new, more ambitious and more significant picture than what the eye initially perceives. This Blu-ray edition brings together four key films from the oeuvre of Dziga Vertov.

Dziga Vertov (née David Abelevich Kaufman) studied medicine before turning to the arts. He was inspired by the Futurist movement as well as the French avant-garde. Just after the Russian revolution, in 1918 he became editor-in-chief of the first regular newsreel, CINEMA WEEK. In 1922, he was put in charge of a new newsreel, KINO-PRAVDA; one issue of which, KINO-PRAVDA NEWSREEL 21: LENINIST FILM TRUTH, is included in this Blu-ray edition.

In 1923, Vertov wrote a manifesto on “Kino-Eye”, in which he laid out the foundation of a new, independent anti-bourgeois aesthetic movement. For Vertov, the camera lens was an extension of the human eye. The film KINO-EYE 1924) applies these principles through his cinematic practice. The film reveals the joie de vivre of Soviet youth in a small village taking hold of their destiny, and building the future of the Soviet revolution.

In 1926, Vertov made STRIDE, SOVIET! (SHAGAI, SOVET!) and ONE-SIXTH OF THE WORLD, and in 1928, THE ELEVENTH YEAR. Following this, Vertov created his most famous film, THE MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA, one of the great city symphony films in the tradition of MANHATTA (1921) and BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY (Walter Ruttman, 1927), as well as one of the most important movies about the filmmaking process.

Vertov’s next film, ENTHUSIASM: SYMPHONY OF THE DONBASS (1930) was a radical experiment in early sound filmmaking. Accustomed to experimenting with aural material, Vertov composed a particularly sophisticated sound track for his first sound film – focusing on the success of miners in achieving targets set by the central authorities – using the noises of machines and factory atmosphere.

Following this, Vertov produced THREE SONGS OF LENIN (1934), an ode to the founder of the Soviet Union. This film was released in both silent and sound versions, so that it could be shown in the Soviet Union in theaters that were not yet equipped for sound. The film was made during the rise of Stalin, and thus, suffered re-edits in the cause of Soviet Realism.

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In 1922, after several years of directing successful films for the Gaumont studios, Marcel l'Herbier created his own production company, Cinégraphic. In addition to producing films by Claude Autant-Lara, Louis Delluc, Jean Dréville and others, L’Herbier put together an extremely ambitious project, L’INHUMAINE, a film intended to showcase the most cutting-edge modern arts in France (plastic arts, decorative arts, architecture, high fashion, music and cinema). The film stars the opera singer Georgette Leblanc; the melodramatic story concerns a femme fatale who is courted by a series of lovers, including a young engineer (played by Jaque Catelain), who symbolizes the future and the miracle of science.

The screenplay was written with an operatic structure. L’Herbier wrote that he “built chords, plastic harmonies; what is important is not the stream of events, it is what is vertical, it’s plastic harmony.” For the production of the film, L’Herbier brought together some of the greatest artists from the time period, including painter Fernand Léger, architect Robert Mallet-Stevens, glassmaker René Lalique, fashion designer Paul Poiret, sculptor Joseph Csaky, tapestry-maker Jean Lurçat, and directors Alberto Cavalcanti and Claude Autant-Lara, all of whom contributed to the striking visual design of this noteworthy film.

Following L’INHUMAINE, L’Herbier directed FEU MATHIAS PASCAL (1925), a dramatic film starring Ivan Mouzjoukine with stylized sets by Lazare Meerson and Alberto Cavalcanti. Over the course of his career, L’Herbier wrote several articles and pamphlets opining about the deep nature of the “Seventh Art.” From the beginning, L'Herbier fought for the recognition of the status of the filmmaker as artist, and of film craftsman as creative forces in the visual design of the motion picture.

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Additional Titles of Related Interest From GME:

GME DVD Distribution – Spring 2016 Releases

With the spring academic season now underway, Gartenberg Media Enterprises is pleased to present a new slate of DVD and Blu-ray publications for distribution to the North American academic community. These digital editions, selected from film archives and boutique publishers worldwide, represent the entire breadth and depth of moving image history, ranging from Marcel L’Herbier’s L’INHUMAINE (1924), a film that showcased the most cutting-edge modern arts in France and Dziga Vertov’s THE MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA (1929), Soviet cinema’s crowning achievement produced at the apotheosis of the silent film era, through to Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON (2000), the Thai director’s groundbreaking film that expertly blends cinematic fact and fiction in a manner that continues to defy both easy categorization and comparison.

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Dziga Vertov’s THE MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA comes closest to realizing Vertov’s theory of the “Kino-Eye”. It is one of the great city symphony films in the tradition of MANHATTA (1921) and BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY (Walter Ruttmann, 1927), as well as one of the most important movies about the filmmaking process. This Blu-ray edition also includes other films in the Vertov canon, including KINO-EYE (1924), KINO-PRAVDA NEWSREEL #21: LENINIST FILM TRUTH, ENTHUSIASM (1931), and THREE SONGS OF LENIN (1934).

L’INHUMAINE stars the opera singer Georgette Leblanc; the melodramatic story concerns a femme fatale who is courted by a series of lovers, including a young engineer (played by Jaque Catelain), who symbolizes the future and the miracle of science. For the production of the film, L’Herbier brought together some of the greatest artists from the time period, including painter Fernand Léger, architect Robert Mallet-Stevens, glassmaker René Lalique, fashion designer Paul Poiret, sculptor Joseph Csaky, tapestry-maker Jean Lurçat, and directors Alberto Cavalcanti and Claude Autant-Lara, all of whom contributed to the striking visual design of this noteworthy film. This Blu-ray edition also includes as a bonus feature a short on the making of this stylized film.

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"She is the mother of us all"
– Stan Brakhage

Maya Deren was one of the most pre-eminent avant-garde filmmakers of the 20th century, now represented by two DVD editions of her work: MAYA DEREN: EXPERIMENTAL FILMS and MAYA DEREN: DANCE FILMS. Her first film MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON (1943), is the most renown experimental film throughout all of film history.  She became known as a major proponent of the “trance” film, and her movies are a transitional link between the European avant-garde films of the 1920’s (see, for example, CINÉMA DADA and SURREALISM AND EXPERIMENT IN BELGIAN CINEMA) and the American avant-garde films of Kenneth Anger, Gregory Markopoulos, Stan Brakhage and others. Deren was also a poet and developed an interested in modern dance. She collaborated with other artists, who also appeared in her films, including poet Anaïs Nin, musician John Cage, dancer Frank Westbrook, and her filmmaker-husband, Alexander Hammid.

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GME is pleased to present two DVD publications representing work by major proponents of the New German Cinema movement of the 1960’s, 1970’s, and 1980’s.

The DVD of YESTERDAY GIRL and PART-TIME WORK OF A DOMESTIC SLAVE comprises two films by Alexander Kluge that star his sister Alexandra Kluge in the leading role. YESTERDAY GIRL (1966) is about Anita G., a young East German woman who travels to West Germany in search of a better life. Encountering troubles with the law, she is ultimately unable to deal either with a Communist regime or a free-market economy. In PART-TIME WORK OF A DOMESTIC SLAVE (1973), Roswitha Bronski is a married mother of three at the center of the protest movement. She finds her plans for social change are easier to realize outside family life. The 2-disc DVD also offers five short films by Alexander Kluge related to the two feature films.

Following up on our previous DVD release of Werner Schroeter’s EIKA KATAPPA and DER TOD DER MARIA MALIBRAN, this current DVD set presents new restored versions of two rare classics by Werner Schroeter. WILLOW SPRINGS (1973) was shot in a village in the Mojave desert and describes a house run by three man-eaters. TAG DER IDIOTEN (1981) was shot in the USSR. A woman experiences psychic disintegration and ends up in a mental institution. Rare short films by and about Werner Schroeter as well as stills from the shooting of TAG DER IDIOTEN are added as bonus features.

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In order to further academic interest in genre studies, we are introducing two Blu-ray/DVD Combo pack editions of film noir movies, TOO LATE FOR TEARS (1949) and WOMAN ON THE RUN (1950). Both films were restored under the auspices of the Film Noir Foundation.  

WOMAN ON THE RUN spotlights Ann Sheridan as an acerbic wise-cracking wife in search of her estranged husband who suddenly disappears after witnessing a gangland assassination. The films accomplished cinematography by Hal Mohr highlights the working class landscapes of mid-century San Francisco, adding atmospheric realism to the production that studio-bound efforts of the era could not hope to match. The film was directed by Norman Foster, noted for his capable handling of a series of the CHARLIE CHAN and MR. MOTO murder-mystery genre films of the 1930’s and 1940’s.

TOO LATE FOR TEARS was producer Hunt Stromberg’s last independent production, following a successful career in charge of THE THIN MAN comedic murder-mystery series for MGM in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Director Byron Haskin helmed a few noir titles in the late 1940’s, including I WALK ALONE (1948), staring Lizabeth Scott.

TOO LATE FOR TEARS provides Lizabeth Scott with the meaty role of frustrated housewife Jane Palmer, whose married life careens out of control with murderous greed when a suitcase filled with $60,000 is accidentally “tossed” to her and husband Alan (played by Arthur Kennedy). Beyond the fantastically theatrical turn by Scott, the production highlights an exceedingly devious performance by another noir icon, Dan Duryea.

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With his debut feature, MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON, acclaimed Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul expertly blended cinematic fact and fiction in a manner that fifteen years later continues to defy both easy categorization and comparison. A low-fi "genre bender," independently produced on a shoestring budget and subsequently endangered by neglect,  MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON, has now been painstakingly restored by the Austrian Film Museum and the Film Foundation from the best surviving elements.

The film blends Thai popular culture with American documentary and experimental cinema, and contains, according to programmer and critic James Quant, “perplexing, and exhilarating conflation of genre (fairy tale, road movie, documentary, horror, science fiction, folk anthropology, musical) and tone (by turn sad, surreal, exuberant, teasing, harsh). Its style manages to be both ramshackle and concatenated: the film’s structure is linear and convoluted at the same time, its title a telling convergence of the unknowable (mysterious object) and the temporally exact (noon). If the precision of the latter turns out to be misleading – time in the film is largely unfixed, in flux, employing historical anachronism and refusing to mark either diurnal specifics or the three-year span it took to make the film – Object’s modus, as is often the case in Apichatpong’s subsequent work, depends on surprise and unreliability, a knowing errancy not only of narrative progression and coherency but also of such formal constituents as sound source and signature, succession of shots, and identification of setting and performer.”

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LES HAUTES SOLITUDES (1974) is the fourth DVD release we offer of the oeuvre of Philppe Garrel, following upon DÉTRIUSEZ-VOUS (1968), LE RÉVÉLATEUR (1968), and LE LIT DE LA VIERGE (1969). This silent black and white film focuses on the visage of 40-year-old star Jean Seberg, fifteen years after BREATHLESS, struggling with alcohol, fear, loneliness chemical dependence and dementia. In an hour and fifteen minutes consisting almost exclusively of close-ups, an entire lifetime rises to the surface of a face. For all their superficial similarities, Garrel’s underground films are the opposite of Warhol’s in several key ways. Warhol worked towards a system of casually disposable imagery and celebrity. Warhol’s cool distance and authorial strategy of absence couldn’t be more different from Garrel’s anguished involvement in his films, especially the essentially non-narrative works of the ‘70s where the director’s gaze and its relationship with its subject often becomes the center of drama.

Spanish avant-garde filmmaker Adolfo Arietta’s first three films, made while he was in his twenties, are presented together in this DVD edition entitled “The Angel Trilogy,” with an accompanying booklet that provides incisive background about the filmmaker and these films – EL CRIMEN DE LA PIRINDOLA (1965), LA IMITACION DEL ANGEL (1966), and JOUET CRIMINEL (1969). Filmed with a grainy black-and-white texture, they star youthful Javier Grandès, Arrietta’s alter-ego. Each film alternates between the terrestrial world and an oneiric vision (replete with the main protagonist wearing angel’s wings); he inhabits a world of waking dreams.  

The first two films, EL CRIMEN DE LA PIRINDOLA and LA IMITACION DEL ANGEL take place on the streets and in Madrid’s apartment buildings. At the end of the latter film, the protagonist departs for Paris by train, escaping the oppression of Franco’s Spain with the City of Light (just as the filmmaker did in real life).

Once in France, Arrietta (and Grandès) encounter Cocteau’s favorite protagonist-hero, Jean Marais, who stars in JOUET CRIMINEL along with Florence Delay (the star of Bresson’s LE PROCÈS DE JEANNE D’ARC, 1962). Lotte Eisner, the esteemed critic, historian, and grande dame of the Cinémathéque Française wrote about JOUET CRIMINEL that “this film was made with the stuff of dreams.”

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Jurgen Reble, was a founding member of the German filmmaking group "Schmelzdahin" (1979–1989). This collaborative primarily focused on exploring the film material through bacterial processes and weathering. The filmmakers submitted both the film’s plastic base and its crystalline emulsion to multiple natural and mechanical alterations, sometimes exposing film to the sun (hung from the branches of a tree) or burying it. The films were then printed and sometimes mechanically altered on the optical printer.

They progressively abandoned experiments with bacterial decomposition, environmental effects, and mechanical alterations in favor of chemical intervention. PASSION is a personal film-journey in which Reble accompanies his unborn child through a ritual, following the seasons until his birth. Although similar in subject to Stan Brakhage’s WINDOW WATER BABY MOVING (1959), Reble’s film is a conceptual and stylistic departure from that film. Disruptions are caused by cosmic and natural phenomena (eclipses and volcanic eruptions), and human figures often disintegrate into vibrating chemical particles. Reble unites the molecular with the cosmic and birth with death, ultimately affirming the fragility of life, images of which are embedded on the substance of the organic celluloid film strip.

Dziga Vertov Films at Anthology Film Archives and The Jewish Museum

Dziga Vertov films are playing at Anthology Film Archives (January 29-February 7th) and at The Jewish Museum as part of the exhibition "The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film" (ends February 7th). GME carries several DVD publications of Vertov films for the North American university market (ENTUZIAZM; A SIXTH PART OF THE WORLD; THE ELEVENTH YEAR; THREE SONGS OF LENIN; STRIDE, SOVIET!). 

Film Classic Loves of Pharaoh To Screen at Historic Niles Theater February 21st – Showing Of Restored Silent Costume Epic To Benefit Egyptology Outreach

GME is the proud DVD/Blu-ray distributor in North America of the Ernst Lubitsch film THE LOVES OF PHARAOH which is screening at the Historic Niles Theater, Fremont, CA, sponsored by the American Research Center in Egypt, Northern California (ARCE/NC). Click below for more details from the ARCE/NC:

https://www.facebook.com/events/1708117779419962

GME DVD Distribution – Collection Highlights: Compilations

During the past decade, Gartenberg Media has been actively engaged in seeking out and representing high quality DVD & Blu-ray publications of films and videos that encompass important works from the breadth and depth of the history of the moving image. We currently offer more than 150 publications that are noted here. These works range from pioneers of the silent narrative cinema to cutting edge filmmakers of the contemporary avant-garde.

"Archival practices are undergoing reinvention, too, both enabled and blocked by opportunistic technologies. On the one hand, 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

In order to encourage academic interest in these DVD and Blu-ray editions, we are pleased to issue periodic newsletters comprising highlights from our collection. The first of these is Compilations, that brings together related films from specific countries, historical periods, genres and subjects. These 14 unique, separate publications are noted below:

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Avant-garde and Experimental Films
From 7 Different Countries

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VISIONARY: CONTEMPORARY SHORT DOCUMENTARIES AND EXPERIMENTAL FILMS FROM AUSTRIA

Various Directors (Austria)

“VISIONary sees itself as a communicator for innovative examples of contemporary Austrian audiovisual art, specifically short, experimental and documentary films and music videos. While these works represent some of the most interesting examples of contemporary Austrian art at present, they are rarely seen except at festivals and…

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AVANT-GARDE 1927-1937: SURREALISM AND EXPERIMENT IN BELGIAN CINEMA

Various Directors (Belgium)

The debut films of Charles Dekeukeleire and Henri Storck, who would later become famous as documentary filmmakers, consisted of experiments, at the end of the 1920s, in search of a ‘pure cinema’. Collected together: Dekeukeleire’s COMBAT DE BOXE (1927), IMPATIENCE (1928), HISTOIRE DE DÉTECTIVE (1929), and VISIONS DE LOURDES (1932)...

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CINÉMA DADA

Various Directors (France)

This DVD is published to coincide with the Pompidou Centre's major Dada exhibition which travelled to the National Gallery, Washington D.C. and The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2006. The disc presents the eight films cited by Hans Richter in his famous text Dada und Film (1961). In his portrait of Dadaist cinema Richter saw these films as unified by...

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THE OBERHAUSEN MANFESTO (DIE "OBERHAUSENER")

Various Directors (Germany)

In 1962, the proclamation of the Oberhausen Manfesto marked the beginning of the New German Film. This 2-disc DVD set presents 19 short films from 1958-1964 produced, directed, photographed or edited by one or more of the filmmakers who signed the manifesto. It also includes a booklet and ROM features with essays and documents…

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FROM ECSTASY TO RAPTURE (DEL ÉXTASIS AL ARREBATO): A Journey Through Spanish Experimental Cinema

Various Directors (Spain)

This 2-DVD collection was designed to accompany the international traveling film exhibition, DEL ÉXTASIS AL ARREBATO (FROM ECSTASY TO RAPTURE): 50 Years of the Other Spanish Cinema. Curators Andrés Hispano and Antoni Pinent bring together 31 key films, showcasing works "with an obvious experimental drive — that is films that display a...

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SHOOT, SHOOT, SHOOT: BRITISH AVANT-GARDE FILM OF THE 1960S & 1970S

Various Directors (UK)

The 1960s and 1970s were groundbreaking decades in which independent filmmakers challenged cinematic convention. In England, much of the innovation took place at the London Film-Makers’ Cooperative, an artist-led organization that incorporated a distribution agency, cinema space and film workshop…

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FLUXFILM ANTHOLOGY

Various Directors (US)

"Fluxus is a community of individuals scattered throughout many countries, grouping together a vast quantity of behaviors and attitudes. All are singular in their personalities and their work, but their position regarding the Art world is appreciably the same: as stated by Fluxus artist George Brecht, to fight against 'the immense stupidity, sadness and lack of meaning…

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MASTERWORKS OF AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE EXPERIMENTAL FILM 1920-1970

Various Directors (US)

Commencing in 1920 with Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s creative collaboration on MANHATTA, successive generations of experimental filmmakers and artists have worked in collaboration or alone to create a cinema capable of expressing dynamic unspoken concepts in totally abstract…

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Silent Narrative Classics From France & The Soviet Union

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FRENCH MASTERWORKS: RUSSIAN ÉMIGRÉS IN PARIS (1923-1929)

Ivan Mosjoukine, Alexandre Volkoff, Marcel L’Herbier, Jacques Feyder (France)

The collection of Russian filmmakers who made up the core of what came to be known as Films Albatros arrived from Moscow after the October 1917 revolution by way of Yalta, Constantinople and Marseilles, establishing their base of operations in an old Pathé greenhouse-style studio in the Paris suburb of Montreuil. From it flowed some of the finest...

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LANDMARKS OF EARLY SOVIET FILM

Various Directors (USSR)

During the 1920s, Soviet documentary and fiction films were financed by the State, and their fledgling directors, some barely out of their teens, converted their lives from theater, engineering, painting and journalism to the practice and theory of a revolutionary cinema devoted to showing the achievements and aspirations of the new...

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Historical Overviews by Subject

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THE FIRST FILM ARCHIVE

(Denmark)

In celebration of the 60th Anniversary of The Danish Film Institute / Archive & Cinematheque the first seventy films donated to the Danish State are published on this DVD.

THE FIRST FILM ARCHIVE contains a total of seventy films showing Danish events and people of the period...

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UNDER FULL SAIL: SILENT CINEMA OF THE HIGH SEAS

Various Directors (US)

UNDER FULL SAIL: SILENT CINEMA ON THE HIGH SEAS collects five breathtaking films that preserve the romance, grandeur and allure of windjammers sailing open waters, exquisitely photographed in the style of the time.

THE YANKEE CLIPPER (1927), produced by Cecil B. DeMille and directed by Rupert Julian, restored...

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DISCOVERING CINEMA

Various Directors

Presented by Flicker Alley and Blackhawk Films, DISCOVERING CINEMA is a two-disc DVD set comprised of LEARNING TO TALK (2003) and MOVIES DREAM IN COLOR (2004), both produced by Lobster Films/Histoire. Film historians Eric Lange and Serge Bromberg compiled materials from their own Lobster Films collection and material from archives…

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SAVED FROM THE FLAMES

Various Directors

SAVED FROM THE FLAMES presents a unique and wonderful collection of 54 rare and restored short films from the inflammable years of cinema.  Movies were once made on nitrate film stock, which has a chemical composition similar to gunpowder and is highly vulnerable to fire and decay. This remarkable seven-hour anthology, organized in eight thematic…

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Watch for our upcoming Spring releases!

GME DVD Distribution – Fall 2015 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 fall academic season nearing a close, Gartenberg Media Enterprises (GME) is pleased to provide a recap of our slate of DVD and Blu-ray publications that we’ve offered for distribution to the North American academic community over the course of this semester. These publications, selected from film archives and boutique presses worldwide, represent an entire century of cinematic history, ranging from silent classics to contemporary experimental narrative films. This semester of offerings have included: silent narrative films from the mid-teens, including films by Charlie Chaplin, together with German classics from the 1920s by G.W. Pabst and Walter Ruttmann. In the avant-garde vein, we presented a panoramic survey of American experimental films dating from 1920 to 1970, new German films from 1958-1964 that were affiliated with the Oberhausen manifesto, and British structural and materialist films from the 1960s and 1970s. And, for the first time on DVD, we offered the films of Peter Emmanuel Goldman, a pioneering American independent filmmaker from the 1960’s, as well as an international range of contemporary hybrid documentary/fiction films from Boris Lehman (Belgium) and Nicolas Pereda (Mexico).

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GME continues to mine DVD editions from the silent American film era, especially the teens. We present here two publications representing work from the then-thriving Essanay Film Manufacturing Company – CHAPLIN’S ESSANAY COMEDIES and SHERLOCK HOLMES. Both editions are published by Flicker Alley. 

In late 1914, Charlie Chaplin was paid the then-unprecedented salary of $1,250 per week (with a bonus of $10,000) in exchange for signing a one-year contract with the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company. The resulting 14 films he created for Essanay find Chaplin continuing to add complexities and pathos into his celebrated Little Tramp character. With the release of DVD editions of CHAPLIN’S ESSANAY COMEDIES (together with CHAPLIN AT KEYSTONE and CHAPLIN’S MUTUAL COMEDIES) it is now feasible for the first time, from an academic perspective, to study in depth the first four years (1914 – 1917) of Chaplin’s rise to international fame. 

Long considered lost until a complete dupe negative was identified in the vaults of the Cinémathèque Française last year, this William Gillette film is a vital missing link in the history of Sherlock Holmes on screen. By the time SHERLOCK HOLMES was produced at Essanay Studios in 1916, Gillette had been established as the world’s foremost interpreter of Holmes on stage—having played him approximately 1300 times since his 1899 debut.

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Expanding GME’s extensive focus on silent German cinema (especially of the 1920’s), GME features two seminal productions, Walter Ruttmann’s BERLIN, DIE SINFONIE DER GROßSTADT and G.W. Pabst’s THE JOYLESS STREET. Both of these DVD editions are published by Edition Filmmuseum, Munich. 

The symphonic documentary BERLIN, DIE SINFONIE DER GROßSTADT is one of the most famous City Symphony films; the travelogue MELODIE DER WELT became the first German sound feature film. The 2-disc DVD set of BERLIN, DIE SINFONIE DER GROßSTAD & MELODIE DER WELT combines for the first time all surviving works by Walther Ruttmann from 1920-1931 in newly restored and reconstructed versions, often with original scores. 

Contemporary film critics, as well as film historians have always recognized THE JOYLESS STREET as a seminal film on the border between German Expressionism and Neue Sachlichkeit (new realism). It is also the only silent film that brings together two of the movies’ greatest luminaries: Asta Nielsen, the European icon of the the teens, and Greta Garbo, who at the end of the 1920s would become the undisputed reigning star of the American cinema. It is also one of the most spectacular censorship cases of the era. While the film made its director famous, the state institutions of control guaranteed that no one would ever see the film in its original form. This DVD edition represents the most recent restoration effort. 

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MASTERWORKS OF AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE EXPERIMENTAL FILM 1920-1970 is a DVD compilation (published by Flicker Alley), which provides a panoramic overview of the diversity of avant-garde filmmaking in the United States. A wide range of genres are represented – including city symphonies and diary films, as well as abstract studies and animation. Featuring 3 dozen films that date from 1920 to 1970, these avant-garde masterworks include works by artists Charles Sheeler & Paul Strand, Dudley Murphy & Fernand Léger, Robert Florey & Slavko Vorkapich, J.S. Watson, Jr. & Melville Webber, Mary Ellen Bute & Ted Nameth, Maya Deren & Alexander Hammid, Ian Hugo & Anaïs Nin, Ralph Steiner & Jay Leyda, Joseph Cornell & Rudy Burckhardt, Helen Levitt & Marie Menken, James Broughton & Kenneth Anger, and many others. 

In 1962, the proclamation of the Oberhausen Manfesto marked the beginning of the New German Film, paralleling a larger transformation occurring in French, Italian, Polish and Czech filmmaking of the time. Providing renewal during the period of decline of West German cinema, a younger generation of filmmakers – including Bernhard Dörries, Ferdinand Khitti, Peter Schamoni, Alexander Kluge & Edgar Reitz – presented an acute social conscience about postwar Germany, coupled with experiments in form. This 2-disc DVD set of THE OBERHAUSEN MANIFESTO presents 19 short films from 1958-1964 produced, directed, photographed or edited by one or more of the filmmakers who signed the manifesto. 

The 1960s and 1970s were groundbreaking decades in which independent filmmakers challenged cinematic convention. In England, much of the innovation took place at the London Film-Makers’ Cooperative, an artist-led organization that incorporated a distribution agency, cinema space and film workshop. SHOOT, SHOOT, SHOOT takes its name from a telegram addressed to Jonas Mekas and the New York Coop, announcing the formation of the London Film-Maker's Cooperative in 1966. Within this unique laboratory, filmmakers were able to control every aspect of the creative process, and the physical production of a film – the printing and processing – became vital to its form and content. Many of the films made at the LFMC explored the physical nature of the film material, using production processes that shaped the form and content of the final works. British filmmakers also made significant innovations in the field of ‘expanded cinema’, creating multi-screen projections, film environments and live performance pieces. SHOOT, SHOOT, SHOOT: BRITISH AVANT-GARDE FILM OF THE 1960S & 1970S (published by Re:Voir and Lux) contains key works by artists Guy Sherwin, Malcolm LeGrice, Peter Gidal, Stephen Dwoskin, William Raban, Chris Welsby, Liz Rhodes, and others.

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Peter Emmanuel Goldman is one of the unheralded pioneers of the American independent film movement of the 1960’s, whose work stands in favorable comparison to his contemporaries Shirley Clarke and John Cassavettes. GME is proud to present two of Goldman's seminal works, ECHOES OF SILENCE (1964) and WHEEL OF ASHES (1968), now released for the first time in DVD editions by Re:Voir. ECHOES OF SILENCE captures the wandering existence of youthful protagonists in Greenwich Village; WHEEL OF ASHES portrays the young generation around the period of the 1968 student revolts in Paris, and features Pierre Clementi in the title role.

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In order to keep current with recent developments in independent narrative cinema, GME also introduces separate DVD editions of works by two contemporary international filmmakers, Boris Lehman (Belgium) and Nicholas Pareda (Mexico). In STORY OF MY HAIR: ON THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE (also published by Re:Voir), filmmaker Boris Lehman examines his own head of hair as a journey in space and time, delving into meditations on science, history, and geography.

NICOLÁS PEREDA: 6 FILMS presents a DVD edition (published by INTERIOR XIII) of award-winning filmmaker Nicholas Pereda. With an observational camera and a minimum of dialogue, Pereda provides a close-up view of Mexican working class society, especially concerning the travails of youth, the bonds of family structures, and tension between the social classes. Most of the films star Gabino Rodríguez, who functions in the narratives as Pereda’s alter ego. More formally, via fractured and elliptical narratives, Pereda exploits the dividing line in cinema between fiction and documentary.

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Watch for our upcoming Spring releases!

GME DVD Distribution – Boris Lehman and Nicholás Pereda, Now Available on DVD for North American Institutional Sales

In order to keep current with developments in contemporary independent narrative cinema (comprising fiction, documentary, and hybrid forms), GME is proud to introduce DVD editions of key works by two contemporary international filmmakers, Boris Lehman (Belgium) and Nicolás Pereda (Mexico). With their distinct filmmaking styles, both filmmakers explore, in poetic fashion, the nature of the human condition. 

STORY OF MY HAIR: ON THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE

“The story of my hair can be told in two lines.
My hair was long and black.
It has turned white.”

– Boris Lehman

Born in 1944 in Switzerland, Boris Lehman has lived and worked for many years in Brussels. He is a film critic, photographer and filmmaker. Over the course of his prolific career, he has also collaborated with a myriad of other filmmakers, including Chantal Akermark, André Delvaux, and Henri Storck. In STORY OF MY HAIR: ON THE SHORTNESS OF LIFE (published by Re:Voir), Lehman examines his own head of hair as a journey in space and time, delving into meditations on science, history, and geography. He weaves together his diary film format with found footage material (scientific films, historical movies, and travelogues) as well as documents, quotations, and shots of archival repositories. These variegated references are woven together throughout passages of the film, like branches of a tree (or his own head of hair). This film thus functions on several levels simultaneously: as a scientific film about hair, a travel diary, and a story about the search for love. As critic Léopold Blum writes in the booklet accompanying this DVD:

“Boris Lehman’s work is close to metaphysics and philosophy. He wonders at the meaning and fragility of life, shows us the road from birth to death, and speaks to us about the passage of time and what remains of our life.”

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NICHOLÁS PEREDA: 6 FILMS

“Pereda’s work intertwines elements of narrative and documentary cinema to radically confuse and reinvigorate the traditional categories of fiction and nonfiction”.

– Haden Guest (Director, Harvard Film Archive)

NICHOLÁS PEREDA: 6 FILMS (published by INTERIOR XIII) comprises a boxed set of moving image works, produced between 2007 and 2012, by filmmaker Nicolás Pereda (born in 1982 in Mexico, and now living in Canada). Pereda’s films have been compared favorably with internationally renown directors Lisandro Alonso (Argentina), Raya Martin (Philippines), Pedro Costa (Portugal), and Tsai Ming-Liang (Taiwan), and have been exhibited as numerous festivals and cinémathèques worldwide.

All throughout his cinematic oeuvre, Pereda provides a close-up view of Mexican working class society, especially concerning the travails of youth, the bonds of family structures, and tension between the social classes. Most of the films star Gabino Rodríguez, who functions in the narratives as Pereda’s alter ego and Teresa Sánchez, who plays his mother. More formally, Pereda’s films are characterized by a minimum of dialogue wherein the performers’ gestures convey deep emotional resonance. This economy of expression is complemented by extended shot sequences. In also dispensing with expository back stories, Pereda effectively creates fractured, elliptical narratives in which the filmmaker exploits the dividing line in cinema between fiction and documentary. As critic Robert Koehler writes in the booklet accompanying this DVD set: 

“A picture is developing of a young filmmaker creating a total world onscreen, set to the rhythm of his own internal music and seen through a continually inquisitive camera, with humility and boundless curiosity for the human condition."

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Additional Contemporary Narrative Titles of Related Interest

PETER VON BAGH: FINNISH SUITE
Peter von Bagh (Finland, 2008-2013)

FRAGMENTS OF KUBELKA
Martina Kudláček (Austria, 2012)

NATURAL HISTORY / RUHR

James Benning (Austria/Germany, 2009-2014)

JONAS MEKAS: THE MAJOR WORKS
Jonas Mekas (US, 1964-2000)

GME DVD Distribution – Two Films by Peter Emanuel Goldman, Now Available on DVD for North American Institutional Sales

The 1960’s was a fecund period for the production of independent narrative films, including works by John Cassavetes, Shirley Clark, and Jonas Mekas. Peter Emanuel Goldman is one of the unheralded pioneers of this movement. GME is proud to present two of Goldman's seminal works, ECHOES OF SILENCE (1964) and WHEEL OF ASHES (1968), now released for the first time in DVD editions by Re:Voir. Both films express the alienation of youth during this era, as seen through the eyes of each of the film’s respective protagonists. 

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ECHOES OF SILENCE

“Echoes of Silence came out of my experience living in Greenwich Village, a place that crystallizes the avid desires, expectations, and disenchantment of free young people.”

– Peter Emanuel Goldman

ECHOES OF SILENCE follows the aimless wandering of a young man (played by Miguel Chacou, an Argentinian sculptor) in and around New York’s Greenwich Village. The tension and drama is created by the actors’ gestures, coupled with the filmmaker’s use of low-wattage lighting, higher contrast reversal film, and camera movement. Goldman’s own still photographs introduce each scene to add continuity to the story, and create a counterpoint to the ensuing live-action scenes. Shot with a 16mm hand-wound Bolex camera, and mostly comprised of in-camera edits, Goldman cut the sequences of the film together in his friends’ editing room and sound studio at night (incorporating an audio track comprised of Charles Mingus’s music).  

ECHOES OF SILENCE was first shown in New York at the Filmmakers Cinematheque and then at the Museum of Modern Art. This film was also invited to the Pesaro Film Festival, where the jury, that included Jean-Luc Godard, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Joris Ivens, awarded it a prize. After subsequently screening at the New York Film Festival, the film was blown up to 35mm and released commercially.  Rarely shown since that time, this DVD release of ECHOES OF SILENCE should serve to integrate this key expressive work within the canonical history of American independent filmmaking.

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WHEEL OF ASHES

“Wheel of Ashes is akin to the darkly romantic incandescent free-falls of the Zanzibar films, first and foremost those of Garrel, from whom Goldman borrowed Pierre Clementi.”

– Emeric de Lastens

WHEEL OF ASHES was made with more professional resources, but still retains a strongly underground look. Funded in the amount of $40,000, the production had a 7-week shooting schedule, in marked contrast to the 2 years it took for Goldman to shoot and complete ECHOES OF SILENCE. This film was shot on 16mm negative stock with a motorized Arriflex. Nestor Almendrois contributed to the cinematography; Judith Malina from the Living Theater plays a small role in the film, and Juliet Berto plays a cameo in a cafe. Significantly, WHEEL OF ASHES features Pierre Clementi (the star of numerous Zanzibar films, also released by GME) in the title role as Pierre. Goldman clashed with Clementi during the filming – whereas Goldman wanted Clementi “to be” and let the camera do the work, Clementi wanted to act. Clementi’s character wanders aimlessly around the Latin Quarter and other parts of Paris, until his inner conflicts bring him to the verge of insanity; a voiceover sound track expresses the protagonist’s interior voice. In the film, Clementi functions as an alter-ego to Goldman, who himself acutely felt deep ambivalences (about religion, sex, and family) raging within himself.
  
Interrupted by the student riots in Paris in 1968, Goldman rushed the film to completion for showing at the Venice Film Festival. It was subsequently cut to its current length for the London Film Festival, and subsequently released commercially. 

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As bonus features, the DVD of ECHOES OF SILENCE includes Goldman’s short PESTILENT CITY, a City Symphony street portrait contrasting images of the dispossessed denizens of New York with the bourgeois business world, and the DVD of WHEEL OF ASHES includes 8MM REELS comprising candid avant-garde montage portraits of the filmmaker’s friends. 

Taken together, these two DVD editions represent the heretofore unseen cinematic oeuvre of Peter Emanuel Goldman. Historically, these DVD editions clearly provide a missing link between the New York Underground and the Parisian New Wave.

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Additoinal Titles of Related Interest:

GUNS OF THE TREES
Jonas Mekas (US, 1962)

HALLELUJAH THE HILLS
Adolfas Mekas (US, 1963)

DÉTRUISEZ-VOUS
Serge Bard (France, 1968)

LE LIT DE LA VIERGE
Philippe Garrel (France, 1969)

ACÉPHALE
Patrick Deval (France, 1968)