GME News
GME is the proud DVD/Blu-ray distributor in North America of the Ernst Lubitsch film THE LOVES OF PHARAOH which screened at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum on February 21st and is screening at the Cleveland Museum of Art on May 4th. Click below for more details from the Cleveland Museum of Art website:
Dagny Servaes as Theonis, the slave girl -
THE LOVES OF PHARAOH
Gartenberg Media Enterprises is pleased to present DVD editions of works by contemporary Asian experimental narrative filmmakers, Hou Hsiao-hsien from Taiwan and Apichatpong Weerasethakul from Thailand. These two filmmakers represent the first Asian artists to be added to the GME distribution library, highlighting significant moving image works beyond the American and European regions of film production.
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The most dynamic filmmaker of the Taiwanese New Wave, Hou Hsiao-hsien, has become one of the most important filmmakers in world cinema. His very recognizable, contemplative style has influenced a whole generation, not only in East Asia.
CINEMATEK has gathered three early films on this 3 disc edition: the romantic comedies CUTE GIRL (1980) and THE GREEN, GREEN GRASS OF HOME (1982) which Hou made for the Central Motion Picture Corporation (with its policy of “Healthy Realism") and THE BOYS FROM FENGKUEI (1983), considered to be the turning point both cinematographically and aesthetically in his career.
“It’s clear that the most radical change that took place in Hou’s work after the commercial period is the foregrounding of more modernist forms of storytelling. A picaresque comedy like GREEN, GREEN GRASS was already episodic up to a certain degree, but THE BOYS further loosed causality, added open-endedness and set up a distinctly elliptical approach that would become another Hou trademark. It has been argued that this discontinuous, open approach to storytelling offers further proof of Hou’s Chineseness. But there are few aspects to this narrative style that Hou doesn’t share with Fellini, Antonioni, Godard, Fassbinder, or Wenders.”
– Tom Paulus, “All the Youthful Days: Hou at the Beginning”.
All three films have been restored by CINEMATEK under supervision of Hou Hsiao-Hsien and in collaboration with the Film Foundation (World Cinema Project). Every film is accompanied by an audiovisual essay by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin. In the accompanying booklet Tom Paulus (University of Antwerp) comes back comments on the early days of Hou Hsiao-Hsien's career.
“Hou has always been coy about the Ozu influence, and it’s true that the conventional pastoral image of the train delivering urbanites to the country [in THE GREEN, GREEN GRASS OF HOME] is as much John Ford as Ozu. And perhaps Ford is the more apt comparison: both directors have made masterful films about their respective country’s history and myths, with the passage from tradition to modernity marked as a train journey from country to city; both have a particular interest in communities and families and in the mundane details of everyday life, especially eating and drinking; both are obsessed with memory and recollection, especially s conveyed through oral or folk traditions; stylistically, both have an unmatched talent for deep and ensemble staging and favour long shots and low light levels; both are at once sentimental and detached, at home in the world and, as immigrants alien to it.”
– Tom Paulus, “All the Youthful Days: Hou at the Beginning”
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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.
“Shot in fits and starts on a minuscule budget, MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON was modeled on the Exquisite Corpse add-an-element structure famous from French surrealism, in which drawings or texts are passed from person to person to elaborate upon, with the original materials hidden so that each addition does not adhere in any “logical” or predetermined way, resulting in a collective, randomly assembled piece (Hail Duchamp).
The title of Apichatpong’s debut feature was its first gift to critics; his films have been called “mysterious objects” countless times since, in a manner less glib than proleptic. Invoking a work’s enigma at the outset anticipates impenetrability, thereby excusing any critical inability to analyze or describe. That tactic proves most tempting with this compact but omnifarious “whatzit?”, with its source in Thai popular culture and American documentary and experimental cinema, its 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.”
– James Quant, "Mysterious Object at Noon"
This DVD release also includes three of the filmmaker's short works, selected by the director himself: THIRDWORLD (1997), WORLDLY DESIRES (2005) and MONSOON (2011), plus the Austrian Film Museum's now out-of-print 255 page monograph from 2009 on Apichatpong Weerasethakul and his films as an exclusive DVD-ROM feature.
Gartenberg Media Enterprises is proud to announce Warren Sonbert screenings to take place at the 2016 Glasgow International, a biennial festival of contemporary art. HALL OF MIRRORS (1966) will be shown together with his silent film DIVIDED LOYALTIES (1978) that will be accompanied by a live score, performed by Luke Fowler and Richard McMaster. The event will take place April 23.
Warren Sonbert with his Bolex camera.
"In a special 16mm screening Luke Fowler and Richard McMaster will be performing a live mix in quadrophonic sound to score Warren Sonbert’s silent film Divided Loyalties. This performance of an original sound composition to accompany Sonbert’s silent film is made possible with the special permission of The Estate of Warren Sonbert. The performance will be accompanied by a screening of the Sonbert short Hall of Mirrors with its original sound.
Sonbert built upon his early experiments in camera movement, lighting, and framing to create brilliantly edited masterworks that encompass not only his New York milieu, but also the larger sphere of human activity. In these films he commented upon such contemporary issues as art and industry, news reportage and its effect on our lives, and the interrelationship between the creative arts. His late works culminated in symphonic montages (both silent and sound) that unite universal human gestures into singular works of moving image artistry."
DIVIDED LOYALTIES (1978)
For further inquiries about Warren Sonbert’s films, please see:
GME Programming & Curating: Warren Sonbert Retrospective
All Photographs, © The Estate of Warren Sonbert
The brand new Metrograph theater in New York City will be playing Jackie Raynal's DEUX FOIS and Apichatpong Weerasethakul's MYSTERIOUS OBJECT AT NOON. Both of these films are offered as DVD publications by GME for North American institutional usage.
Related GME Titles:
TCM's current programing features the documentary FROM CALIGARI TO HITLER: GERMAN CINEMA IN THE AGE OF THE MASSES (2014) which focuses on the films and directors of the Weimer Era, many of which are distributed by GME on DVD. These titles and directors include THE JOYLESS STREET (Georg Willhelm Pabst), NERVEN (Robert Reinert), THE PEOPLE AMONG US (MENSCHEN UNTEREINANDER), UNDER THE LANTERN (UNTER DER LATERNE), SLUMS OF BERLIN (DIE VERRUFENEN (DER FÜNFTE STAND)), CHILDREN OF NO IMPORTANCE (DIE UNEHELICHEN) (Gerhard Lamprecht), BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY (Walther Ruttmann) and PHANTOM (F.W. Murnau).
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Related Titles Available from GME
Gartenberg Media Enterprises has been hired on an exclusive basis by the Estate of Raimondo Borea to manage the collection of Borea’s photographs and to further the artist’s legacy. We are therefore proud to announce that two signed photographs from the Borea Estate that were taken by esteemed fine art photographer André Kertész will be featured in the upcoming AIPAD show in New York City. Charles A. Hartman Fine Art has been commissioned to represent the sale of these vintage Kertész photographs – two of them (“Martinique” and “Sheep, May 1, 1931”) have been sold, and the remaining two (see below) will be on display at the upcoming AIPAD show in New York City.
Untitled October 22, 1959 (Face In Wood).
Photograph by André Kertész.
Untitled (Two Figurines In Window), New York
Photograph by André Kertész.
Self-portrait
Over a 40-year career of active photography, Raimondo Borea (1926 – 1982) amassed an impressive body of photographs that are virtually unknown today. And yet, his creative output permeated all areas of fine art photography, television, music, book publishing, and advertising. He created photographic essays on The Boys’ Towns of Italy (Rome), Washington Market and the dismantling of the Third Avenue El (New York City), and other human interest stories. He also had exclusive access to the television broadcasts Firing Line, The Today Show, and The Tonight Show, where he captured candid portraits of the show’s hosts, guests, and behind-the-scenes activities.
André Kertész through driftwood.
Over the course of his career, Borea was an active member in numerous photographic associations. In addition to the Village Camera Club and The Circle of Confusion, he was also a member of the American Society of Magazine Photographers (ASMP) and the American Society of Picture Professionals (ASPP), where he served as President from 1974 to 1975. He developed both close personal and professional relationships with well-known photographers, including André Kertész, Ruth Orkin, Esmond Edwards, Barbara Morgan, and John Albok. A number of vintage, signed photographs by and/or of these artists are also part of the Raimondo Borea Photography Collection.
Borea maintained both a professional and personal relationship with André Kertész. In addition to the vintage photographs that Kertész gave to Borea, the collection also contains numerous photographs shot by Borea at Kertész’s studio on Fifth Avenue. The Borea archive also contains audio recordings of their conversations; an excerpt is included below.
André Kertész in conversation with Raimondo Borea
Raimondo Borea Biography and News Page
For more information about the Raimondo Borea archive and his photographs,
please contact: info@gartenbergmedia.com
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All Photographs (Other than "Untitled" above), © The Estate of Raimondo Borea
Gartenberg Media Enterprises is pleased to present 2 DVD editions (published by Re:Voir) of films by Philippe Garrel and Adolpho Arrietta, both key figures of the independent filmmaking movement that emerged in France and Spain in the 1960s.
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Philippe Garrel was influenced by the New Wave films of Truffaut and Godard, and made his first film in 1964 at age 16. During the past half century, his talents have extended to all aspects of the filmmaking practice, including director, cinematographer, screenwriter, editor, producer and actor. Garrel has created cutting-edge films through combining distinctive visual strategies with the actors’ compelling, stylized performances.
“For all their superficial similarities, Garrel’s underground films are the opposite of Warhol’s in several key ways. Most evidently, 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 centre of drama. Warhol prophetically worked towards a system of casually disposable imagery and celebrity."
– Maximilian Le Cain, “Cinema Reborn”
In addition to GME’s previous release of Garrel’s LE REVELATEUR (1968) and LE LIT DE LA VIERGE (1969), we now offer his 1974 experimental narrative silent-film meditation on the image of the fallen 40-year old star of Godard’s BREATHLESS, Jean Seberg.
“The idea was to make a film out of the outtakes of a film that never existed in the first place. So I conceived LES HAUTES SOLITUDES as outtakes, a very raw texture on her face. Her agent, her friends, everybody thought I wasn’t serious in my endeavour. I arrived every day at Seberg’s apartment with my camera and filmed her on the balcony, close to the window, for hours, with no role and no script. No-one thought that it was a real film, but she was very independent and didn’t care about this. I consider LES HAUTES SOLITUDES as much a Seberg film as mine.”
– Philippe Garrel
Cinema Ritrovato 2015 DVD Awards
Best Rediscovery of a Foreign Film
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No. 25 on the list of the 100 most beautiful French films of all time.
– Les InRocks Magazine
“A young Spaniard outside of every system, of every clique, of every influence, records on 16mm (since cinema for him cannot be just a profession) the quiet heartbreaking delusions that express, better than if he had prepared indictments, the state of mind of a generation for whom poetry today is the only refuge and the only feasible fight...”
– Jean-André Fieschi, Cahiers du Cinéma (1967)
Adolpho Arrietta grew up in Spain during the Franco regime, where his childhood interests in drawing and painting soon turned to amateur filmmaking. He bought a 16mm camera in a flea market and began making diary films. He later both organized screenings and attended Ciné-Clubs (clandestine activities under the Franco regime), where he saw films of Cocteau, Vigo, Genet, and others.
His first three films, made while Arrietta 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 from the oppression of Franco’s Spain to the City of Light (just as the filmmaker did in real life).
Once in France, Arrietta (and Grandès) encountered 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.”
Additional Titles of Related Interest From GME:
The official unveiling of the Sarah Vaughan USPS Forever Stamp took place at Newark Symphony Hall on Tuesday, March 29th. Special guests and speakers at the event included performances by the New Mount Zion Baptist Church Choir, Melba Moore, Carrie Jackson and speeches by Diane Reeves and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. Below are pictures from the event.
The photo that the stamp is based on was taken by photographer Hugh Bell whose collection is represented by Gartenberg Media Enterprises.
Special Guests of the event applaud at the unveiling of the Sarah Vaughan USPS Forever Stamp.
Melba Moore
April Bell-Martha (daughter of Hugh Bell) and Jon Gartenberg (representing the Bell Estate)
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:
In 2014, Gartenberg Media Enterprises was engaged on an exclusive basis by the Estate of Hugh Bell to manage the collection of Hugh Bell’s photographs and to further the artist’s legacy. We are therefore proud to announce the featuring of one of Hugh Bell's iconic photographs of Sarah Vaughan on a USPS Commemorative Forever Stamp. The United States Postal Service is hosting a First-Day-of-Issue Stamp Ceremony for the release of the Sarah Vaughan Commemorative Forever Stamp at the Sarah Vaughan Concert Hall at Newark Symphony Hall in Newark, New Jersey on March 29th, 11am.
Above: Sarah Vaughan (Hugh Bell, 1955) and the Sarah Vaughan 2016 USPS Commemorative Forever Stamp
"Sarah Vaughan was one of America’s greatest singers, successful in both jazz and pop, with a talent for improvisation and skillful phrasing and a voice that ranged over several octaves.
The stamp art is an oil painting of Vaughan in performance based on a 1955 photograph by Hugh Bell. A few lines of selvage text explain her importance as a Music Icon. The cover side of the pane features a larger version of the stamp art, a list of some of Vaughan’s popular songs, and the Music Icons logo. Bart Forbes was the artist and Ethel Kessler was the art director. The 11 a.m. First-Day-of-Issue dedication ceremony will take place March 29 in Newark, NJ, at the Sarah Vaughan Concert Hall."
Hugh Cecil Bell was born in 1927 in Harlem, New York City to parents from the Caribbean island of St. Lucia. As a young man he first attended City College, and then graduated in 1952 with a degree in Journalism and Cinematic Art from NYU. After NYU, Bell put his Film Degree to use and found work as a cameraman for television commercials.
Early in his career, Bell was befriended by the cinema verité pioneer, Richard Leacock, who was interested in helping minorities find a professional footing. Bell assisted Leacock on the shooting of several documentaries, including “Jazz Dance” (1952). He also accompanied Leacock on several trips to Spain, where Bell met and photographed the world-famous Spanish bullfighter, Dominguin, as well as Lauren Bacall and Ernest Hemingway. Bell’s friendship with Leacock continued to deepen, and over the ensuing decades, he photographed the Leacock family in an extended series of candid portraits at their family home.
In 1952, Bell shot his first of many legendary photographs of jazz greats,“Hot Jazz”. In 1955, Edward Steichen selected “Hot Jazz” for the groundbreaking exhibition “The Family of Man” at The Museum of Modern Art. Over 2 million photos were submitted and only 503 were selected. The exhibit showcased work from 273 photographers including Dorothea Lange, Edward Weston and Irving Penn. This was the first instance of Hugh Bell’s photographic work being shown alongside these towering figures of modern photography.
During the 1950’s, Hugh Bell frequented all the top Jazz clubs in New York City such as the Village Gate, the Open Door Café and Circle in the Square. He encountered and photographed many legendary musicians, including Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Sarah Vaughan. Bell’s lifelong passion for taking Jazz photographs, often referred to as his “Jazz Giants” series, has been published in books and magazines. His jazz photographs have also graced the covers of innumerable vinyl jazz records.
In addition to jazz clubs, Bell went to and photographed local boxing matches, dance performances and legitimate plays, including Jean Genet’s “The Blacks,” a seminal theatrical production starring James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Brown, Cicely Tyson, Maya Angelou, and Godfrey Cambridge, that was mounted at the St. Mark’s Playhouse in 1961.
Bell opened his own studio in Manhattan in the 1960’s. Over the course of the ensuing decades, he worked as a commercial photographer. He produced photographs for print advertisements; many of which were targeted specifically to the Black community.
Interspersed with his commercial work, Bell also focused on portraiture. During this period, he is most known for his images of the female figure. In 1970, a series of these portraits were published in Avant Garde magazine in a feature entitled, “Bell’s Belles”. Throughout this period, he also traveled to the West Indies, focusing on the region of his geographical heritage. He photographed carnivals in Trinidad and Haiti, and daily life in Antigua. He also traveled to Brazil, where he took photographs of the local citizenry.
Hugh Bell passed away on October 31, 2012. He left behind an extensive and wide-ranging photographic legacy that is now ready for rediscovery.
For more information about the Hugh Bell archive and his photographs, please contact:
info@gartenbergmedia.com
