J. Hoberman's review of the DVD release of Michael Snow's "Rameau's Nephew"

Here's J. Hoberman's review of the DVD release of Michael Snow's RAMEAU'S NEPHEW, now available from GME for North American institutional sale (for which Hoberman points to GME as the institutional distributor!)

GME Celebrates Jonas Mekas's Birthday with the Release of Two New Publications of His Films Now Available on DVD for Institutional Sales

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GME Celebrates Jonas Mekas's Birthday


 

 With the Release of 2 New Publications of His Films

Now Available on DVD for Institutional Sales


 

On the occasion of Jonas Mekas's 92nd birthday (on XMAS eve of this year), Gartenberg Media Enterprises (GME) is pleased to announce the release of two new DVD publications by this monumental and consequential artist.  Published on DVD by Re:Voir Vidéo -- GUNS OF THE TREES and THE SIXTIES QUARTET -- are now available for institutional sales in North America.  

 

Jonas Mekas is the most significant force behind the evolution and promotion of the American Avant-Garde film movement, as well as one of its most prolific independent filmmakers and pre-eminent cinema poets. Following up on our release last semester of JONAS MEKAS: THE MAJOR WORKS, we now offer both his rarely seen first feature length film, GUNS OF THE TREES, a fictional narrative of the Beat Generation, as well as, in a more poetic vein, THE SIXTIES QUARTET, that features portraits of Andy Warhol, George Maciunas, John Lennon, and the Kennedy family at Warhol's compound in Montauk, just several years after the assassination of President Kennedy.

 

 

 

     

 

 

 


"Four young people are trying to understand why their friend, a young woman, committed a suicide. A film made up of disconnected scenes weaving between past and present. The title of the film comes from a poem by Stuart Perkoff which tells that some young people felt (around 1960) that everything is against them, so much that even the trees in the parks and streets seemed to them like guns pointing at their very existence."
- Jonas Mekas

Grand Prize / Grand prix (Najade d'oro) 
Mostra Internazionale del Cinema Libero di Porretta Terme, 1962

 


 
 GUNS OF THE TREES

Jonas Mekas   USA (1961)

DVD-PAL   Region 0
No Regional Code

 

Institutional Sale Price: $ 200.00 plus shipping & handling.


 


 

 
THE SIXTIES QUARTET


Scenes From The Life Of Andy Warhol: Friendships And Intersections (1990)
"This film is made up of my film diaries relating to Andy Warhol from the years 1965-1982."                                                                       - Jonas Mekas

Zefiro Torna Or Scenes From The Life Of George Maciunas (1992)
"Bits of Fluxus events and performances, and picnics with friends (Almus, Andy Warhol, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, etc.), George's wedding and footage I took of him in Boston hospital three days before he died."          - Jonas Mekas

Happy Birthday To John (1995)
"On October 9th, 1972, half of the music world gathered in Syracuse, N.Y., to celebrate the opening of John Lennon/Yoko Ono Fluxus show, designed by George Maciunas.  Same day, a smaller group gathered in a local hotel room to celebrate John's birthday."                                                     - Jonas Mekas

This Side Of Paradise (1999)
with Jackie, Caroline and John Kennedy Jr.
"Unpredictably, as most of my life's key events have been, for a period of several years in the late 60s and early 70s, I had the fortune to spend some time, mostly during the summers, with Jackie Kennedy's and her sister Lee Radziwill's families and children. Cinema was an integral, inseparable, as a matter of fact, a key part of our friendship. The time was still very close to the untimely, tragic, death of John F. Kennedy. Jackie wanted to give something to her children to do, to help to ease the transition of life without a father. One of her thoughts was that movie camera would be fun for the children. Peter Beard, who was at that time tutoring John Jr. and Caroline in art history, suggested to Jackie that I was the man to introduce the children to cinema. Jackie said yes. And that's how it all began. I bought them a very easily operable 16mm movie camera, and even wrote a "mini-textbook" suggesting some simple movie exercises...

 

The images in the exposition, with a few exceptions, they all come from the summers Caroline and John Jr. spent in Montauk, with their cousins Anthony and Tina Radziwill, in an old house Lee rented from Andy Warhol, for a few summers. Andy himself spent many of his weekends there, in one of the cottages, as did Peter Beard, whom the children had adopted almost like their older brother or a father they missed. There were summers of happiness, joy and continuous celebrations of life and friendships. These are 'Little Fragments of Paradise.' "                                                   -Jonas Mekas
 


Jonas Mekas   USA (1990-1999)

DVD-PAL   Region 0
No Regional Code

 

Institutional Sale Price: $ 200.00 plus shipping & handling. 

 

 

 

 

Works of Related Interest from GME:



Adolfas Mekas    USA (1963)

Jonas Mekas    USA (1964-2002)
7-Disc DVD Collection


For a complete list of DVD and Blu-ray publications from our entire library of distribution titles, as a printable PDF, click here.


 
These DVDs are currently being made available to universities, libraries, museums, and other educational organizations in North America (US and Canada), and include public performance rights. Public performance rights extend to use in classrooms and in other non-commercial settings where no admission is charged.

 

Please Note:

Many of our DVDs are published in PAL format Region 0.  

PAL DVDs require a PAL or Multi-system DVD player for playback.

 

Order by Phone @ 212.280.8654 or by Fax @ 212.280.8656

 

For inquiries and to order by e-mail, contact: sales@gartenbergmedia.com

 

For our entire DVD catalogue, please visit: www.gartenbergmedia.com/dvd/

 

GME Announces 3 New Releases of Avant-Garde Films Now Available on DVD for Institutional Sales

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Gartenberg Media Announces
3 New Releases
of

Avant-Garde Films

Now Available on DVD for Institutional Sales


 

Gartenberg Media Enterprises (GME) is pleased to announce the release of three new DVD publications spanning a century of avant-garde filmmaking practice (1921-2012).  These DVD publications -- HANS RICHTER: EARLY WORKS, DREAMINIMALIST: TONY CONRAD AND MARIE LOSIER, and NORBERT PFAFFENBICHLER: NOTES ON NOTES ON FILM -- are now available for institutional sales in North America.  

 

 

HANS RICHTER EARLY WORKS   DREAMINIMALIST   NOTES ON NOTES ON FILM

 

 

During the period in the 1920's that Gerhard Lamprecht was directing narrative films based on working class life in postwar Berlin (see DIE VERRUFENEN (DER FÜNFTE STAND) & DIE UNEHELICHEN and MENSCHEN UNTEREINANDER & UNTER DER LATERNE), also available from GME), his German compatriot Hans Richter was creating movies in the abstract and Dadaist vein, while also increasingly turning to social critique in his later films.  Here, for the first time, we offer HANS RICHTER: EARLY WORKS (1921-1929), published by Re:Voir Vidéo.

 

About his filmmaking practice, Richter himself wrote in 1924 that "By film I mean visual rhythm... to see movement, organized movement, wakes us up, wakes up resistance, wakes up the reflexes, and perhaps wakes up our sense of enjoyment as well."

 

Richter emigrated to the United States in 1940 and taught in the Institute of Film Techniques at City College in New York City; his teachings would influence many of the "New American Cinema" filmmakers.


 
HANS RICHTER: EARLY WORKS

Hans Richter   Germany

Rhythmus 21 (1921)
Rhythmus 23 (1923)
Filmstudie (1926)
Ghosts Before Breakfast (Vormittagsspuk) (1927-28)
Race Symphony (1928-29)
Two Pence Magic (Zweigroschenzauber) (1928-29)
Inflation (1927)
Everything Turns Everything Revolves (1929) 

 

DVD-PAL   Region 0
No Regional Code

 

Institutional Sale Price: $ 200.00 plus shipping & handling.


 


 

The Re:Voir DVD publication, DREAMINIMALIST couples Tony Conrad's film The Flicker (1966) with Marie Losier's contemporary cinematic portrait of the artist,  entitled Tony Conrad: DreaMinimalist (2008).

 

Tony Conrad was born in 1940, the year that Hans Richter emigrated to the United States.  His groundbreaking minimalist and structural film, The Flicker (1966), comprising alternating black and white frames, can be seen, on one level, as an outgrowth of Richter's Rhythmus films, and, from another perspective, as distinctly different from that filmmaker's approach.

 

"in The Flicker, Tony Conrad uses cinematographic devices to develop relationships between impossible harmonic frequencies using an ordinary stroboscope. At the root of this film are a musical, a visual and a psychological interest."                                                           - Victor Gresard

 

Marie Losier has, over the course of her career, made cinematic portraits of noteworthy underground figures, including Richard Foreman, the Kuchar Brothers, Guy Maddin, Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye.  In Tony Conrad: DreaMinimalist, she turns her gaze on Tony Conrad, and foregrounds a contemporary, performative representation of his creative universe.

Tony Conrad & Marie Losier    USA

The Flicker (1966) Tony Conrad
DreaMinimalist (2008) Tony Conrad & Marie Losier
  
DVD-PAL   Region 0
No Regional Code

 

Institutional Sale Price: $ 200.00 plus shipping & handling. 

 

 

 

 

Also in the vein of contemporary experimental cinema, GME is proud to present the DVD publication (published by Sixpack Films/Index DVD) entitled NORBERT PFAFFENBICHLER: NOTES ON NOTES ON FILM.  Comprising recent work produced by the artist between 2002 and 2012, his found footage films manipulate images ranging from Charlie Chaplin to Lon Chaney, and from Fräulein Else to Adolph Hitler.

 

As film historian Chrisoph Huber has written in the booklet accompanying this DVD publication, "Pfaffenbichler's unique sensibility finds expression in a growing emphasis upon the comic and the uncanny, whereby his avant-garde and often structuralist approach is coupled with an ever-increasing pleasure in playful experimentation. The source material is simultaneously de- and re-constructed, ... It is impossible to come away from a Pfaffenbichler film without an altered and enriched sense of cinema, its history and possibilities." 

 

Norbert Pfaffenbichler   Austria

Notes On Film 01 Else (2002)
Conference (Notes On Film 05) (2011)
Intermezzo (Notes On Film 04) (2012)
A Messenger From The Shadows (Notes On Film 06A/Monologue 01) (2012)
36 (2001) Norbert Pfaffenbichler & Lotte Schreiber 
   
DVD-PAL   Region 0
No Regional Code

 

Institutional Sale Price: $ 200.00 plus shipping & handling. 

 

 

 

 

Additional Abstract, Dada & Surrealist, Structural, and Found Footage Films

of Related Interest from GME

Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Man Ray, René Clair & Francis Picabia, 
Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy    Germany & France (1921-1927)

Gustav Deutsch    Austria (2004)

George Maciunas, John Cale, Yoko Ono, Nam June PaikPaul Sharits, 
Benjamin Vautier, 
Robert Watts, and
 more    USA (1962-1970)

Paul Sharit   USA (1966-1968)

Germaine Dulac    France (1927)

PETER TSCHERKASSKY: ATTRACTIONS, INSTRUCTIONS & OTHER ROMANCES

Peter Tscherkassky    Austria (1982-2010)

 

PETER TSCHERKASSKY: FILMS FROM A DARK ROOM

Peter Tscherkassky   Austria (1983-2002)



For a complete list of DVD and Blu-ray publications from our entire library of distribution titles, as a printable PDF, click here.

 
These DVDs are currently being made available to universities, libraries, museums, and other educational organizations in North America (US and Canada), and include public performance rights. Public performance rights extend to use in classrooms and in other non-commercial settings where no admission is charged.

 

Please Note:

Many of our DVDs are published in PAL format Region 0.  

PAL DVDs require a PAL or Multi-system DVD player for playback.

 

Order by Phone @ 212.280.8654 or by Fax @ 212.280.8656

 

For inquiries and to order by e-mail, contact: sales@gartenbergmedia.com

 

For our entire DVD catalogue, please visit: www.gartenbergmedia.com/dvd/

 

"Constructing American Experimental Narratives" – Round Table Discussion at The 8th Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival, Greece

Nov. 21st, 4pm. In conjunction with Jon Gartenberg's program "A Panorama Of American Experimental Narratives In The New Millennium" at the 8th Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival in Greece is a roundtable discussion "Constructing American Experimental Narratives" with filmmakers featured in the program, Abigail Child and Julie Talen along with Jon. Free admission.

http://8aagff.tainiothiki.gr/en/parallel-events/constructing-american-experimental-narratives/

Film And Audiovisual Archives Round Table Discussion at The 8th Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival, Greece

Jon Gartenberg will be part of a round table discussion with film theorist Laura Mulvey, artist Jenny Marketou, director of the Cinemateca Portuguesa Jose Manuel Costa & director of the festival Maria Komninos on the subject of film and audiovisual archives. Part of the 8th Athens Avant-Garde Film Festival, Greece. November 20th at 4pm, free admission.

http://8aagff.tainiothiki.gr/en/parallel-events/film-and-audiovisual

The 8th Athens (Greece) Avant-garde Film Festival: "A Panorama of American Experimental Narratives in the New Millennium" A Retrospective Film Program Curated by Jon Gartenberg

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A Retrospective Film Program Curated by Jon Gartenberg

at the 8th Athens (Greece) Avant-garde Film Festival:


 

"A Panorama of American Experimental Narratives

in the New Millennium" 

   8th Athens Avant-garde Film Festival logo

Athens Avant-garde Film Festival, Greece

Wednesday, November 12 - Sunday, November 23

 

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION:

 

This program provides a panorama of American experimental films made in the 21st century and focuses primarily on feature length narratives (both fiction and documentary), together with a complement of shorts.  Because these filmmakers lack the funding provided by Hollywood and "off-Hollywood" producers, they often struggle for long periods to complete their films.  At the same time, the creative independence that they have been afforded provides the individual filmmakers with great freedom of expression.  This talented group of artists, toiling mostly in solitude, created inspiring works that challenge, in thematic, structural, technical, and perceptual fashion, the manner in which we, as spectators, perceive the world at large.

 

Stylistically, the films in this retrospective series encompass found footage works, diverse hand-crafted animation techniques, live action movies that experiment with formal structure, as well as hybrid documentary and fiction forms.  The contemporary artists in this program (while versed in the history of the avant-garde), are more consciously engaged with narrative cinema traditions, if only to then subvert them through their diverse storytelling strategies.  They most frequently represent time and space in a manner that tends to disrupt the illusion of spatial and temporal continuity, and to foreground the experience of memory.  Thematically, the films in this program incorporate reflections upon individual identity, the family structure, the fabric of the community, and the larger political culture, that are presented most often in critical and/or self-critical fashion.  They directly address significant social issues, including the tragic events of 9/11, presidential politics and political resistance, the earth's ecology, human diaspora and race relations, and the myth of the post World War II nuclear American family. 


Please see pages 34-45 of the Festival Catalog, viewable and downloadable as a PDF Document here:

 



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GME Announces Four Films by Gerhard Lamprecht Now Available on DVD for Institutional Sales

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Gartenberg Media Announces
Four Films by Gerhard Lamprecht

Now Available on DVD for Institutional Sales


 

Gartenberg Media Enterprises (GME) is proud to announce the release of four films by Gerhard Lamprecht on DVD, now available for institutional sales in North America.  Gerhard Lamprecht is most well known in film history circles for his multi-volume compilation of German film productions, Deutsche Stummfilme, dating from 1903-1931.  In 1963, he founded the Deutsche Kinemathek (Berlin).   During the intervening period (1920-1958), he directed more than 60 films, and is best remembered today for his 1931 film version of Emil and the Detectives, scripted by Billy Wilder.  Now, the film archive which Lamprecht founded, together with Edition Filmuseum, has published four of his silent features from the years 1925-1928, paired in two separate DVD editions: DIE VERRUFENEN (SLUMS OF BERLIN(1925), together with DIE UNEHELICHEN (CHILDREN OF NO IMPORTANCE) (1926); and MENSCHEN UNTEREINANDER (THE PEOPLE AMONG US) (1926), with UNTER DER LATERNE (UNDER THE LANTERN) (1928).  All four films highlight both the desperation and resolve of the working class in Berlin during the tumultuous decade following World War I.  Following recent revival showings of a number of these films at the Pordenone and San Francisco silent film festivals and Telluride Film Festival, the release of these DVD editions should further herald a rediscovery in academic circles of this oft-overlooked German film director.

 

 

 

DIE VERRUFENEN & DIE UNEHELICHEN     MENSCHEN UNTEREINANDER & UNTER DER LATERNE

 

 

DIE VERRUFENEN (DER FÜNFTE STAND) & DIE UNEHELICHEN is a double-DVD set presenting two feature films by Gerhard Lamprecht which reproduce German illustrator Heinrich Zille's  view of the Berlin milieu ("Milljöh"). In DIE VERRUFENEN (1925) the engineer Robert Kramer, released from prison, cannot find his way back to civilian life. He wants to end his life, but is held back by the streetwalker Emma. In DIE UNEHELICHEN (1926) three working-class children suffer under their violent foster parents, till a dramatic incident changes their lives.

 


 
DIE VERRUFENEN (DER FÜNFTE STAND) & DIE UNEHELICHEN

Gerhard Lamprecht   Germany

Die Verrufenen (Der fünfte Stand) (1925)
Die Unehelichen (1926) 


2-Disc DVD Edition

DVD-PAL   Region 0
No Regional Code

Features include:

 - New scores by Donald Sosin.

 - Trilingual (German, English, French) booklet with an essay
 by Rolf Aurich and Wolfgang Jacobsen.

 

 

Institutional Sale Price: $ 300.00 plus shipping & handling.


 


 

The second double-DVD set, MENSCHEN UNTEREINANDER & UNTER DER LATERNE, presents two films by Gerhard Lamprecht, sketching social panoramas of late 1920s Berlin. MENSCHEN UNTEREINANDER delineates the social microcosm of a tenement building; the tenants represent a cross-section of poverty, corruption and compassion. In UNTER DER LATERNE, the girl Else begins to follow the wrong path after an altercation with her father. The high life turns out to be the first step in a downward spiral.

 


Gerhard Lamprecht    Germany

Menschen untereinander (1926)
Unter der Laterne(1928)
  

2-Disc DVD Edition

DVD-PAL   Region 0
No Regional Code

 

Features include:

 - New scores by Donald Sosin.

 - Alternative scores by ensemble mosaik and shortfilmlivemusic.

 - Trilingual (German, English, French) booklet with essays

by Rolf Aurich, Wolfgang Jacobsen and Jörg Becker.


 

Institutional Sale Price: $ 300.00 plus shipping & handling. 

 

 


Additional German Silent Classics
of Related Interest from GME

Asta Nielsen    Germany (1913-1916)
Die Suffragette    Urban Gad
Das Liebes-ABC    Magnus Stifter
Das Eskimobaby    Heinz Schall
Die Börsenkönigin   Edmund Edel

Ernst Lubitsch   Germany (1922)

Manfred Noa   Germany (1922)

 NERVEN

Robert Reinert   Germany (1919)

 

PHANTOM

F.W. Murnau   Germany (1922)


Karlheinz Martin   Germany (1921)


For a complete list of DVD and Blu-ray publications from our entire library of distribution titles, as a printable PDF, click here.

 
These DVDs are currently being made available to universities, libraries, museums, and other educational organizations in North America (US and Canada), and include public performance rights. Public performance rights extend to use in classrooms and in other non-commercial settings where no admission is charged.

 

Please Note:

Many of our DVDs are published in PAL format Region 0.  

PAL DVDs require a PAL or Multi-system DVD player for playback.

 

Order by Phone @ 212.280.8654 or by Fax @ 212.280.8656

 

For inquiries and to order by e-mail, contact: sales@gartenbergmedia.com

 

For our entire DVD catalogue, please visit: www.gartenbergmedia.com/dvd/

 



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Gartenberg Media Announces Michael Snow's RAMEAU'S NEPHEW Now Available on DVD for Institutional Sales

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Gartenberg Media Announces
Michael Snow's RAMEAU'S NEPHEW

Now Available on DVD for Institutional Sales


 

Gartenberg Media Enterprises (GME) is proud to announce the release of the DVD edition of Michael Snow's 4 1/2 hour epic film, RAMEAU'S NEPHEWnow available for institutional sales in North America.  Michael Snow, a native of Canada, is one of the pre-eminent avant-garde artists of the 20th (and now 21st) century.  Each of his works, spanning across painting, sculpture, video, film, photography, holography, drawing, publishing and music, invites us to experience, question and contemplate representation, its process and material.

 

            "For me, [RAMEAU'S NEPHEW] is an authentic 'talking picture,' built from  the true units of the syllable and the frame."

- Michael Snow

 

 

RAMEAU'S NEPHEW

 

 

Structured in serial form, RAMEAU'S NEPHEW is composed of twenty-five sequences, varying in duration from 27 seconds to 47 minutes, each one separated by abstract color compositions.  The complexly-structured narrative features performances by prominent figures of avant-garde cinema at the time, including Jonas Mekas, Barry Gerson, Babette Mangolte, Amy Taubin, Helen Kaplan, Ping Chong, Steve Anker, Joyce Wieland, P. Adams Sitney, and Snow himself.

 

In his introduction to the 184 page, elegantly-produced bilingual study guide accompanying this DVD edition, Pip Chodorov has written:

 

"The film is very much an epic, Joycean project, perhaps the longest, most worked-on and most complex piece ever produced within the avant-garde film, as much enjoyable entertainment as intellectual exercise.  Each chapter, like a fragment of a broken hologram, holds part of the mystery, and though some sections seem arduous paths to travel, working to unlock their secrets reveals the keys to Snows' overall project; indeed even elements that we find in Snow's other works, including those made using other media than film.  The relationship between sound and picture is just one example of the may relationships between the elements of form and content that Snow interrogates in his lifework." 

 


Michael Snow  *  Canada
(1970-1974)


2-Disc DVD Edition

DVD-PAL  *  Region 0
No Regional Code

 

This boxed set contains:

* the 4-1/2-hour film on two DVDs;

* a 184-page bilingual book.

 

The accompanying book publication is written by Ivora Cusack and Stéfani de Loppinot, with a preface by Michael Snow and translation by Pip Chodorov. This study guide analyzes the 25 sequences of the film and makes available for the first time reproductions of Snow's original preparatory scripts and notes archived at the Art Gallery of Ontario, in Toronto (Canada). 

 

Published with support by the Ministère de la culture et de la communication, Délégation aux arts plastiques, CNAP (FIACRE).

 

Institutional Sale Price: $ 300.00 plus shipping & handling.


 

  

Additional International Experimental Feature Length Narratives 
of Related Interest from GME

Patrick Deval  *  France (1968)

James Benning  *  USA (1984/1986)

Serge Bard  *  France (1970/1978)

Jackie Raynal  *  France (1969)

Stephen Dwoskin  *  UK (1972)

EIKA KATAPPA & DER TOD DER MARIA MALIBRAN

Werner Schroeter  *  West Germany (1969/1972)

 

HALLELUJAH THE HILLS

Adolfas Mekas  *  USA (1963)


Michael Pilz  *  Austria (1982)

JONAS MEKAS: THE MAJOR WORKS

Jonas Mekas  *  USA (1964-2000)

The Brig

Walden:  Diaries, Notes And Sketches

Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania

Lost Lost Lost

As I Was Moving Ahead I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty

Philippe Garrel  *  France (1969)

John Cook  *  Austria (1976/1978)

Isidore Isou  *  France (1951)


For a complete list of DVD and Blu-ray publications from our entire library of distribution titles, as a printable PDF, click here.

 
These DVDs are currently being made available to universities, libraries, museums, and other educational organizations in North America (US and Canada), and include public performance rights. Public performance rights extend to use in classrooms and in other non-commercial settings where no admission is charged.

 

Please Note:

Many of our DVDs are published in PAL format Region 0.  

PAL DVDs require a PAL or Multi-system DVD player for playback.

 

Order by Phone @ 212.280.8654 or by Fax @ 212.280.8656

 

For inquiries and to order by e-mail, contact: sales@gartenbergmedia.com

 

For our entire DVD catalogue, please visit: www.gartenbergmedia.com/dvd/

 



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