GME News
"Where Did Our Love Go? Films of Warren Sonbert" program at Media City in Toronto, Ontario that played last week. Program was curated by Jeremy Rossen and the films were introduced by Carla Harryman, one of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets with whom Sonbert interacted in his artistic practice.
Peter von Bagh was an award-winning filmmaker, writer, critic, professor, archive director and programmer. His recent and untimely death at age 71 represents the tragic loss of one of the foremost worldwide authorities on international cinema. His unique body of work comprises a vast array of films, television productions, and radio programs, as well as innumerable books and magazine articles. Over the past decades, he served as artistic director of the Midnight Sun Film Festival in Sodankylä, Finland, as well as Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna, Italy (where this past June tribute was paid to von Bagh in a program selection of his moving image works, entitled, “Peter Forever.”
In homage to this towering figure of cinema culture (yet humblest of human beings), GME is honored to represent the distribution of a package of his films. This boxed DVD set, entitled THE FINNISH SUITE (published by Illume Oy), comprises three poetic films that are key components of von Bagh's oeuvre in the 21st century. Peter von Bagh’s films were primarily concerned with the history of everyday Finns. To further humanize these stories, von Bagh often inserted his own autobiography into the narratives.
HELSINKI, FOREVER (2008) is a portrait and city symphony of the white city of northern Finland; SPLINTERS – A CENTURY OF AN ARTISTIC FAMILY (2011) explores the story of Finnish art through a versatile family of artists, without forgetting wider links to European cultural currents; and REMEMBRANCE – A SMALL MOVIE ABOUT OULU IN THE 1950’S (2013) is the director's most intimate film in which he returns to his youth and his hometown of Oulu. The city is located in northern Finland, and yet it could be anywhere in war-torn but forward-gazing Europe.
All throughout this trilogy, Peter von Bagh demonstrates both a masterful and deft command of found footage material, that is overlaid with his own voiceover narration. The filmmaker seduces the spectator into a visually arresting and engrossing self-contained world of images and sounds. He creates a cinematic reality that encapsulates the human condition in seemingly more vivid and poignant fashion than even the human experience of everyday life can afford us. He constructs both an extraordinarily personal -- yet at the same time universal –- meditation about time, space and memory.
GME is proud to announce the release of cinematic portraits of Marie Menken and Peter Kubelka, now available for institutional sales in North America. Both films were created by noted documentary filmmaker Martina Kudláček.
Marie Menken and Peter Kubelka are two towering figures in the history of avant-garde cinema. Both fiercely independent individuals, they have each created singular and distinct bodies of work. Menken’s films, shot between 1945 and 1967, are noted for her poetic studies of both nature and urban settings, all shot with her handheld Bolex camera and edited in a rapid montage style. Kubleka’s moving image works are constructed in a precisely-calibrated fashion, aligned more with structuralist film concerns. Beginning with his first film made in 1955 (MOSAIK IM VERTRAUEN (MOSAIC IN CONFIDENCE)], Kubelka continues today to produce work in celluloid film formats.
Documentary filmmaker Martina Kudláček has developed a unique cinematic legacy by creating discursive, biographical documentaries on experimental cinema personalities. Over the course of her career, she has developed portraits of Alexander Hammid (AIMLESS WALK, 1997). Maya Deren (IN THE MIRROR OF MAYA DEREN, 2002), Marie Menken (NOTES ON MARIE MENKEN, 2006), and Peter Kubelka (FRAGMENTS OF KUBELKA, 2012). Her two most recent films are now available for study in high quality digital editions published by the Austrian Filmmuseum in conjunction with the Edition Filmmuseum series (FRAGMENTS OF KUBELKA) and through the INDEX DVD series from Sixpack Films, Vienna (NOTES ON MARIE MENKEN).
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“Kudláček's fascinating, filmic diary NOTES ON MARIE MENKEN follows the reminiscences of her friends and colleagues, among them Gerard Malanga (poet, photographer, and filmmaker) and Jonas Mekas (fellow Lithuanian, artist, and public champion of the avant-garde). Various interviewees recount how the public, marital theatrics of Menken and her husband, filmmaker Willard Maas, became the inspiration for the perennial battling older couple in Edward Albee's WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?
Beginning with the excavation of Marie's rusty film cans, old photographs, and papers housed in a storage locker, Kudláček brings Menken vividly back to life. She contrasts her own crisp black-and-white digital cinematography with lush color excerpts from Menken's 16 mm celluloid films. In the film's most compelling sequence, fellow artist Gerard Malanga winds through a rare clip of Marie Menken and Andy Warhol on a New York City rooftop. They seemed to be engaged in an artistic duel, each shooting with their respective 16 mm Bolex cameras. The moviola, through which the film runs, sheds light on an intricately choreographed dance that shines through flickering images of deteriorating film."
- Jon Gartenberg on NOTES ON MARIE MENKEN, Tribeca Film Festival 2006
The bonus feature on this DVD edition comprises four of the poetic, experimental films that Menken created between 1945 and 1966, and which are referenced in Kudláček’s documentary: VISUAL VARIATIONS ON NOGUCHI (1945), GLIMPSE OF THE GARDEN (1957), ARABESQUE FOR KENNETH ANGER (1958-61), and LIGHTS (1964-1966).
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Several years in the making, Kudláček's latest film production runs four times the length of artist Peter Kubelka’s entire cinematic output.
"Kubelka's films play and work with the flow of time, compressing the continuous now and presence. His films digest the manifold things of the universe: the elemental energies of light and dark; movement and stillness; the life of animals and patterns of landscape; gesture and dance. With another mode of time Kudláček shared with us Kubelka's patient pace of conversation and listening, exploring things that mean so much to the artist: memories, souvenirs, his past and childhood, his home. All these things entered into Kubelka's films, but here they are brought to light and made part of his legacy as teacher and as artist. In perhaps the most sensual sequence, Kudláček shows Kubelka as he prepares, cooks and then eats Wiener Schnitzel. Following rather than compressing the flow of time, we watch as ingredients embrace each other: egg, flour, meat and butter. We see the browning and transformation of these things exposed to fire, listen to their ecstatic metamorphosis. As Kubelka says, food is a metaphor that can be eaten, a meal is a work of art that can be consumed and digested. To digest, Kubelka tells us, is to embrace the universe. FRAGMENTS OF KUBELKA allows us to savor, swallow and digest these lessons."
– Tom Gunning
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Additional Titles of Related Interest from GME
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Gartenberg Media Enterprises (GME) is pleased to announce the release of classic Soviet silent films by Sergei Eisenstein (BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN / OCTOBER), Michail Kalatozov (SALT OF SVANETIA / NAIL IN THE BOOT), and Dziga Vertov (THREE SONGS OF LENIN), now available for institutional sales in North America.
Parallel to the foundation of the Albatros Studios in France by Russian émigré filmmakers (see FRENCH MASTERWORKS: RUSSIAN ÉMIGRÉS IN PARIS (1923-1929)), the 1920s saw the apotheosis of Soviet filmmaking in the USSR. GME currently features several new DVD publications under the label Edition Filmmuseum; they are produced by the film archive in Vienna, which is noted for its significant holdings of Soviet-era films. This archive has achieved renown for its meticulous research and presentation of DVD editions of Soviet filmmakers’ works; these presentations often feature comparisons of different versions of the same film. Our current releases comprise works by 3 of the great Soviet filmmakers of the era: Sergei Eisenstein (BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN / OCTOBER) Dziga Vertov (THREE SONGS OF LENIN), and Michail Kalatozov (SALT OF SVANETIA / NAIL IN THE BOOT).
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Kalatozov is perhaps better known for his Soviet films of the 1950’s and 1960’s – THE CRANES ARE FLYING (1959), LETTER NEVER SENT (1959), and I AM CUBA (1964). In contrast, this DVD edition presents two of his early, pioneering silent films – SALT OF SVANETIA an austere depiction of peasant life in the inhospitable terrain of the Caucusas mountains and NAIL IN THE BOOT, a biting parable of negligence in wartime. This publication won the coveted 2014 Il Cinema Ritrovato award for Best DVD.
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Vertov’s THREE SONGS OF LENIN, his “film poem” to the founder of the Soviet Union, is, alongside MAN WITH A MOVIE CAMERA, the most universally acclaimed and enduringly popular of all Dziga Vertov’s films. (GME has previously released a pair of Dziga Vertov’s silent film productions, A SIXTH PART OF THE WORLD / THE ELEVENTH YEAR, as well as his early sound experimental masterwork, ENTUZIAZM). This current DVD edition includes both the silent and sound versions of THREE SONGS OF LENIN, and the DVD extras include 2 editions of Vertov’s Kinopravda newsreel series, together with a documentary about Vertov by Austrian Film Museum co-founder Peter Konlechner.
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Eisenstein’s masterpiece POTEMKIN is presented in painstakingly restored German-language versions (both silent and sound), while the accompanying DVD edition of OCTOBER highlights the original release version of the film, together with fragments from the version distributed in German. They all feature the accompanying scores by Austrian-born composer Edmund Meisel, and the extensive CD Rom extra highlights the creative partnership between the filmmaker and this composer.
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Additional Soviet Films of Related Interest from GME
Dziga Vertov
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USSR, 1930
A SIXTH PART OF THE WORLD / THE ELEVENTH YEAR
Dziga Vertov
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USSR, 1926 / 1928
Lev Kulešov
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USSR, 1926
Fedor Ozep
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USSR, 1927
FRENCH MASTERWORKS: RUSSIAN ÉMIGRÉS IN PARIS (1923-1929)
Ivan Mosjoukine, Alexandre Volkoff, Marcel L'Herbier, Jacques Feyder
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France, 1923–1929
LANDMARKS OF EARLY SOVIET FILM
Various Directors
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USSR, 1924–1930
Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media has just released its latest issue devoted entirely to the writings of avant-garde artist Warren Sonbert. The journal features reproductions of Sonbert's original typed, handwritten and published documents. The issue is guest edited by Jon Gartenberg and is organized into sections related to Sonbert's interests in art, music, poetry, travel and film.
Below is an excerpt from Jon Gartenberg's introduction to the issue entitled A Delicate Balance: Warren Sonbert's Creative Legacy:
"For the very first time, a selection of writings by filmmaker Warren Sonbert is assembled together in this special edition of Framework. Although known primarily as an experimental filmmaker, Sonbert and his career extended deeply into other realms of the creative arts. He was an opera, music, and film critic; a kindred spirit to the Language poets; a screenplay author who adapted Strauss’s 1940–41 opera Capriccio; a collaborator on other filmmaker’s productions (Gerard Malanga’s In Search of the Miraculous [US, 1967] and Charles Henri Ford’s Johnny Minotaur [US, 1971]); an essayist on both the fine and performing arts; and a leading theoretician on cinematic montage. The objective of these collected writings, then, is to expand the narrow categorization of Sonbert as a now- deceased, marginalized experimental filmmaker into a broader reconsideration of his entire creative career. This endeavor should serve to reposition his legacy as a truly Renaissance thinker who articulated, in both profound and coherent fashion, how diverse forms of artistic expression can be so deeply connected to the human condition.
Even for students of film history who are familiar with Sonbert’s cinematic output, the texts assembled in this publication are sure to be a revelation. “Film Syntax,” Sonbert’s most renowned essay, which so lucidly articulates his unique theory of montage, has been printed numerous times in various publications. Aside from this text, however, the other articles authored by Sonbert and reproduced herein are from more obscure publications or now defunct journals, including Shiny, Motion Picture, Tikkun, CinemaNews, Spiral, and the NY Film Bulletin. In addition, numerous unpublished notes, reflections, and essays that were authored by Sonbert—both handwritten and typed—have been gathered together to be published for the first time in this journal…
…We have organized Sonbert’s writings into the following broad classifications: art, travel, music, poetry, and film. These are not designed to be rigid categoriza- tions, but rather as points of departure to demonstrate Sonbert’s facility in his dialogue between all the art forms. Our inclusion of the travel category represents the central role Sonbert’s own journeys across time and space—both physical and creative—played in the development of the artist’s own practice of his craft.9 Only in considering Sonbert’s entire creative output as a coherent entity—filmed, written, and spoken, as well as his lived experiences through travel—can we truly appreciate his genius both as an artist and humanist."
GME is the exclusive representative of the estate of Warren Sonbert. For more information on the Warren Sonbert project see our programming page.
Gartenberg Media Enterprises (GME) is pleased to announce the release of two new titles featuring four films by James Benning, NATURAL HISTORY / RUHR as well as DESERET / FOUR CORNERS, now available for institutional sales in North America. These two DVD editions are published by the Austrian Filmmuseum as part of the Edition Filmmuseum series.
“It is perhaps because James Benning’s work is so resistant to neat categorization that his films have rarely received the recognition they deserve. His work fuses elements of American structuralism, the narrative avant-garde and experimental documentary.”
– Danni Zuvela, “Talking about Seeing: A Conversation with James Benning”
Since the late 1970s, James Benning's films have been a regular fixture at festivals in Germany and Austria, while frequent television broadcasts have helped expose his work to an even larger audience here than perhaps at home. This 2-disc set presents the products of this intercontinental relationship: RUHR, Benning's first foray into digital filmmaking, is a modern-day "city symphony" dedicated to Germany's industrial Ruhr district. His latest work, NATURAL HISTORY, is an audiovisual portrait commissioned by Vienna's Natural History Museum.
Reinhard Wulf's feature-length documentary JAMES BENNING: CIRCLING THE IMAGE, produced for German television, is a DVD extra that significantly illuminates Benning’s working method, that illuminates the manner in which his films are composed of carefully-timed, long takes and precisely selected, fixed camera positions.
“I could not have imagined that Benning’s fiftieth birthday [in 1992] would signal the beginning of the most remarkable era in his creative life…With the exception of Luis Buñuel and Alfred Hitchcock, I can think of no filmmakers who has blossomed so impressively so late in his career.”
– Scott MacDonald
In the 1990s, James Benning's films were primarily characterized by an ongoing investigation of the relationship between the image and the (spoken or written) word. This 2-disc set features the two key works representing the peak of this "text-image film" period. DESERET and FOUR CORNERS are rigorous attempts to address, engage and come to terms with the history and geography of the United States, as seen through the prism of one particular part of the country. The beauty of the shimmering landscapes is contrasted with darker exposés of American history.
In DESERET, Benning retells the history of America's Mormon State of Utah, by fusing more than 90 separate shots (comprising spectacular black & white and color landscape images), with a voiceover narrator quoting articles published in New York Times between 1852 and 1992 that reference the violent struggles between Mormons, Native Americans, and the Federal Government, as well as nuclear/biological weaponry and toxic waste sites.
Benning's following film FOUR CORNERS is both a tribute to the famous region in the USA where four states converge (Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah) and a portrait of four very different artists (impressionist pioneer Claude Monet, African-American folk artist Moses Tolliver, fictional Native-American wall-painter ‘Yukawa’, and Abstract Expressionist Jasper Johns). The voiceover narration deals with natural and man-made forces that have rent destruction upon the Native American population in this region.
Additional Benning Titles of Related Interest from GME
CASTING A GLANCE / RR (2007)
AMERICAN DREAMS (LOST AND FOUND) / LANDSCAPE SUICIDE (1984 / 1986)
CALIFORNIA TRILOGY (1999-2001)
National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Sunday, May 10 – Saturday, June 13
Still from Our Nixon, courtesy Penny Lane
PROGRAM DESCRIPTION:
An eclectic look at independent artist-made cinema of this century, American Experiments in Narrative includes found footage works, hand-crafted animations, hybrids of fiction and documentary, as well as live-action movies that defy classic conventions. Thematically speaking, the program presents reflections on identity, community, family, political culture, and a variety of social issues. The artists represented are well versed in historic avant-garde technique but are also consciously engaged with the film industry canons — often subverting those traditions with novel storytelling strategies. While the majority of filmmakers may lack the sort of financial backing bestowed by Hollywood, this absence of monetary support actually allows greater freedom of expression. Jon Gartenberg, curator for the series, has worked extensively on the preservation, distribution, and programming of experimental cinema. He introduces the first program.
Gartenberg Media Enterprises (GME) is pleased to announce the release of the epic French serial, THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY (LA MAISON DU MYSTÈRE), now available for institutional sales in North America.
Serial films, or ciné romans were well-established in France before World War I, where they are most closely identified with writer-director Louis Feuillade (JUDEX, also distributed by GME). These melodramas for adult audiences were unlike American serials that were targeted primarily at youngsters. At Albatros, Russian émigré producer Joseph Ermolieff produced three serials in 1921, all adapted from roman-feuilletons by the phenomenally successful Jules Mary, a specialist in the genre, who penned many a famous melodrama around the theme of the miscarriage of justice - a theme that must have had special appeal for the unjustly displaced technicians and artists of Ermolieff's Moscow and Yalta studios (see also the Albatros productions FRENCH MASTERWORKS: RUSSIAN ÉMIGRÉS IN PARIS (1923-1929) and THE LATE MATHIAS PASCAL (1926), distributed as well by GME).
THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY was begun in the summer of 1921 and not completed until 1923 by Alexandre Volkoff (together with fellow studio director Viatcheslav Tourjansky who provides some important and uncredited second-unit work). The first two serials have not left a trace in the annals of film archives. Fortunately, THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY has survived and ben restored by the Cinémathèque Française in its original ten-episode format. This DVD version, published by Flicker Alley, contains optional English subtitles by Lenny Borger and a brand-new score by composer Neil Brand.
The involved plot of THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY centers around Julien Villandrit (Ivan Mosjoukine) and his star-crossed courtship to Régine de Bettigny (Hélène Darly), that inspires bitterness and jealousy in Henri Corradin (Charles Vanel), Julien's long-time associate and secret rival in love. For Mosjoukine, who contracted typhoid fever during the course of production, it remains one of the ultimate consecrations to his multifarious talents as actor, writer, and even make-up artist. But the film also opened doors for Vanel (LES MISÉRABLES, THE WAGES OF FEAR, and DIABOLIQUE), who gives the "Curses! Foiled again!" school of melodramatic villainy a new lease on life.
This six and a half hour epic film is replete with stylish elegance and narrative imagination. About THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY, authoritative film scholar Kristen Thompson has written:
“Like so many of the major French films of the 1920s, especially the Impressionist ones, LA MAISON DU MYSTÈRE combines a sentimental, old-fashioned story with unconventional stylistic devices: unusual pictorial motifs, beautiful cinematography and design, and imaginative staging. It is probably this visual interest that led to the film’s original acceptance by reviewers and to its enthusiastic reception by modern historians and silent-film buffs.
One visual motif that begins early on is silhouettes. The opening involves Mosjoukine’s character, Julien, still a bumptious, naive young man, courting Régine, the daughter of a wealthy couple who live near his chateau (the “maison” of the title). Despite his shyness, they manage to become engaged and walk joyfully through the woods together. The entire wedding scene is then compressed into a series of shots done against bright white backgrounds render the actors and settings in near-black silhouettes. The result looks like a live-action version of a Lotte Reiniger cut-out animated film.”
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Ivan Mosjoukine, Alexandre Volkoff, Marcel L’Herbier, Jacques Feyder
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France (1923-1929)
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Louis Feuillade
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France (1917)
Fedor Ozep
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USSR (1927)
Gunvor Nelson’s MY NAME IS OONA and MOONS POOL will be screened in Cornell University’s Sage Chapel on Tuesday April 21 at 8pm, accompanied by the music of Powerdove. The artist’s films are distributed by Cornell Alum Jon Gartenberg’s company, GME.
http://cinema.cornell.edu/series_Spring2015/Cornell%20Alums%20Make%20Movies.html
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