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)

GME DVD Distribution – Chaplin's Essanay Comedies and Sherlock Holmes Now Available on DVD / Blu-ray for Institutional Sales

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 FILMS 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 FILMS (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 Essanay production 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, the film's star, William Gillette, had been established as the world’s foremost interpreter of Holmes on stage—having played him approximately 1300 times since his 1899 debut.

Related Silent-Era Comedies & Detective Genre Titles of Interest

NY, NY: A Century of City Symphony Films, Curated by Jon Gartenberg at NYU Tisch

Michelson Theater, 721 Broadway, 6th Floor
Wednesday, October 28, 6:15 P.M.

Still from Empire II (Amos Poe, 2007)

DESCRIPTION:
 
Archivist and curator Jon Gartenberg (MA, Cinema Studies) provides an overview of the genre of City Symphony Films produced in New York City, extending from the period of early cinema at the dawn of the 20th century through to the digital works of the first decade of 21st Century, as seen through the lens of independent and experimental filmmakers.

This presentation is based on his article "NY NY: A Century of City Symphony Films” that was recently published in Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media.

PROGRAM:

Interiors, N.Y. Subway, 14th Street to 42nd Street (1905, G. W. Bitzer). 5 min.
Empire of Steel: A Story of a Supreme Achievement in Steel Construction (1931, Otis Elevator Co.). 6 min.
The City (1939, Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke). [Sequence: City Life]. 13 min.
New York: A Documentary Film (2001, Ric Burns). [Sequence: Introduction to Episode 7]. 3 min.
The D Train (2011, Jay Rosenblatt). 5 min.
N.Y., N.Y. (1957, Francis Thompson). 15 min.
Block Print (1976, George Griffin). 16 min.
Empire II (2007, Amos Poe),. [Sequence: Main Title Opening]. 5 min.
Native New Yorker (2005, Steve Bilich). 13 min.
NYC Weights and Measures (2006, Jem Cohen). 6 min.

TRT: 87 min.

This event is free and open to the public. Click here for the NYU Tisch Cinema Studies announcement for this event.

GME Presents Three International Collections of Avant-Garde Films, Now Available on DVD for Institutional Sales

For the fall academic season, GME offers surveys of experimental narratives and avant-garde shorts from three countries – the United States (MASTERWORKS OF AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE EXPERIMENTAL FILM 1920-1970), Great Britain (SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT: BRITISH AVANT-GARDE FILM OF THE 1960S & 1970S), and Germany (THE OBERHAUSEN MANIFESTO), now available for North American institutional sales.

MASTERWORKS OF AMERICAN AVANT-GARDE EXPERIMENTAL FILM 1920-1970 is a DVD / Blu-ray 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, Oskar Fischinger, Joseph Cornell, Rudy Burckhardt, Francis Lee, Helen Levitt, James Broughton, Kenneth Anger, Jim Davis, Hy Hirsh, Marie Menken, Francis Thompson, Hilary Harris, Bruce Baillie, Owen Land, Jonas Mekas, and Larry Jordan, and others.
 
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 itself. 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.
 
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 cinema 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.  

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Additional Experimental Surveys of Related Interest from GME

Jon Gartenberg With Nicola Mazzanti on First Night of Warren Sonbert at The L'Age d'Or Film Festival

Jon Gartenberg presenting with Nicola Mazzanti (director of the Royal Belgian Film Archive) on the first night of the Warren Sonbert retrospective as part of the L'Age d'Or Film Festival in Brussels. Below is also an image of Warren Sonbert's film WHIPLASH on the monitor of the festival theater's lobby.

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Jon Gartenberg & Nicola Mazzanti

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Shot of WHIPLASH on TV monitor.

Warren Sonbert Retrospective at the L'Age d'Or festival in Brussels October 4th to 9th, 2015

Gartenberg Media Enterprises is proud to announce the program lineup for the Warren Sonbert Retrospective taking place at the L'Age d'Or Film Festival in Brussels, Belgium from October 4th to 9th. Each program in this series will be introduced by Jon Gartenberg, a noted authority on Sonbert's oeuvre.

Warren Sonbert with his Bolex camera.

From the Festival Catalogue:

"Warren Sonbert was one of the most original and influential figures in American experimental cinema. He began making films in 1966 while studying at the University of New York. Sonbert himself has taught filmmaking at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Art Institute of Chicago and Bard College. He also wrote critical reviews on opera and film for San Francisco weeklies. His first films, in which he captured the spirit of his generation, were first inspired by academia, later by the figures of the Warhol scene.

THE BAD AND THE BEAUTIFUL (1967)

In the late 1960s, when Sonbert began to take his Bolex camera with him on travels, his cinematic strategy changes and he begins to weave his travel images together with sequences of previous films. It’s a period during which his work shows the filmmaker’s capacity to turn his first experiences into more accomplished works, using his characteristic ‘polyvalent cutting’, a technique where each sequence ‘can be combined with ambient sequences with, potentially, many dimensions.’ Sonbert drew on his early experiences on camera movement, light and design to create brilliantly cut masterpieces that not only zoom in on his New York environment but also, more generally, on the sphere of human activity. These are films in which he comments on art and industry, news reporting and its effects on our lives, or the interaction between artistic disciplines. His last works culminate in symphonic (silent or sound) arrangements that unite the universal gestures of Men into unique combinations. Over the course of his career, Sonbert made 18 films. Before his death in 1995, he worked on WHIPLASH. This last film was completed by filmmaker Jeff Scher, following Sonberts precise instructions."

WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO (1966)

HONOR AND OBEY (1988)

Copies of "Warren Sonbert: Selected Writings" (published by Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media and guest edited by Jon Gartenberg) will be available for sale at the festival. For more information on the special issue of Framwork click here.

For further inquiries about Warren Sonbert’s films, please see:
GME Programming & Curating: Warren Sonbert Retrospective

The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film: Now on View at The Jewish Museum

"The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film" now on view at The Jewish Museum featuring weekly screenings of Soviet films. These titles available in DVD editions through GME for North American institutional sales.

http://www.gartenbergmedia.com/news/2015/5/27/gme-announces-new-silent-soviet-films-now-available-on-dvd-for-institutional-sales

GME Announces Classic Silent German Films, Now Available on DVD for Institutional Sales

Expanding GME’s extensive focus on silent German cinema (especially of the 1920s), we are proud to release two seminal productions from this era – 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.

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Contemporary critics, as well as film historians, have always recognized G.W. Pabst’s THE JOYLESS STREET as a seminal moving image work produced during the Weimar Republic. Creatively, this film spans 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 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. The story is set in the inflationary period in Vienna in the years immediately after World War I, contrasting the decadent rich with the struggling poor, and replete with scenes of sexual orgies, bordellos, and murders. 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. The film was cut in every country in which it was shown for either political or moral reasons (or both). This 2-disc DVD edition represents the most recent restoration effort – albeit still with missing footage – to return the film to its original form. Also included in this DVD set are companion documentaries that contextualize this now-famous film and the process of its meticulous restoration.

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The poetic documentary BERLIN, DIE SINFONIE DER GROßSTADT by Walther Ruttmann is perhaps the most famous of the “City Symphony” films that flourished worldwide in the 1920s (that also included MANHATTA from the United States and RIEN QUE LES HEURES in France).  About his own production, German filmmaker Walther Ruttmann wrote that:

            "Once I decided on the City as the main subject of a film, the sole
            eligible candidate for casting in this role was Berlin. Berlin is
            young, full of unlimited possibilities, the most rewarding motif
            imaginable for film seen as ‘the art of motion’. During this shooting,
            however, this modern Hydra of stone proved as capricious as any
            human diva.  It took longer than a year to capture the many facets
            of her character in thousands of takes and miniscule snippets.  With
            no studio, no standing sets, and under imponderable circumstances
            I had to lie in wait with my tiny detective camera, always ready to
            pounce, submerged in the life of the city, under constant cover lest
            my subjects become aware of my activities and, knowing they were
            being ‘filmed’, start ‘acting.'"

MELODIE DER WELT was the first German sound feature film. The Hamburg-America Line sponsored this production, Ruttmann shaped the film into a travelogue, in which he juxtaposes and contrasts iconic buildings, modes of transportation, and cultural traditions from countries all around the world. The film was pioneering in its exploration of the artistic possibilities in joining the motion picture with recorded sound – i.e., an orchestral score, intermittent dialogue, and synchronized sound effects. 

This 2-disc DVD set BERLIN, DIE SINFONIE DER GROßSTADT & MELODIE DER WELT also combines for the first time all surviving short film works by Walther Ruttmann from 1920-1931 (comprising his abstract films OPUS I-IV, sponsored commercials, a mood piece entitled IN DER NACHT, and a radio play, WEEKEND). All are presented in newly restored versions, often with original scores. 

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Additional Silent German Films of Related Interest from GME

2nd Annual American Photography Archives Group (APAG) 2015 Seminar at the ICP Photography Center.

Jon Gartenberg attended the 2015 American Photography Archives Group (APAG) conference from Friday 9/18 to Saturday 9/19 at the International Center of Photography (ICP). GME represents the estates of photographers Raimondo Borea and Hugh Bell.

Group photo from the 2nd Annual American Photography Archives Group (APAG) 2015 Seminar at the ICP Photography Center.