3 JOURNEYS TO LITHUANIA

Jonas Mekas, Adolfas Mekas, Pola Chapelle (US)

Adolfas and Jonas Mekas arrived in New York in 1949, leaving their native land, Lithuania, behind, caught between Nazi and Soviet occupation. Little by little the camera became their means of expression and cinema invaded their lives. 27 years passed before they could finally return to Lithuania. This is the odyssey the three films intertwiningly recall: Adolfas and Jonas Mekas and Pola Chapelle (Adolfas'ʼwife) are at once actor and filmer. The Mekas brothers rediscover their country and family with their changes, while Pola Chapelle is the external gaze embracing this reunion. Neither Lithuanian nor New Yorkers, where is their home now? As Jonas likes to say “My Country is Cinema.”

11X14 | ONE WAY BOOGIE WOOGIE/27 YEARS LATER

James Benning (US)

The mid-1970s saw James Benning's first feature films attract the attention of critics, establishing him as a representative of the "New Narrative Movement." In films like 11x14 and One Way Boogie Woogie, he combines the structural analysis of image, sound and narrative with auto-biographical traces, as well as with an almost "classical" interest in composition, color, light and landscape.  

ACÉPHALE

Patrick Deval (France)

“An ascetic prince wanders aimlessly, lectures at a university, wanders again, meets other underfed individuals, plunges into the maze of the city, wanders again, discovers virgin forest and builds a community, feels trapped, returns by himself, wanders in desperation, arrives at a crossroads at night-time, insults a woman passing by and apologizes…

ADOLPHO ARRIETTA: THE ANGEL TRILOGY

Adolpho Arrietta (Spain / France)

“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...”

AMERICAN DREAMS (LOST & FOUND) / LANDSCAPE SUICIDE

James Benning (US)

This publication by Edition Filmmuseum presents two major works by James Benning: each recently restored by the Austrian Film Museum in Vienna, and; inaugurating an extensive publication effort by the institution, on DVD and in print, to celebrate an artist whose unique personal vision of America has established him as one of the most significant...

ANTICIPATION OF THE NIGHT

Stan Brakhage (US)

The daylight shadow of a man in its movement evokes lights in the night. A rose bowl held in hand reflects both sun and moon like illumination. The opening of a doorway onto trees anticipates the twilight into the night. A child is born on the lawn, born of water with its promissory rainbow, and the wild rose. It becomes the moon and the source of all light. Lights of the night become young children playing a circular game. ...

APOLOGÍA ANTOLOGÍA: VIDEO ITINERARIES THROUGH THE SPANISH CONTEXT

Various Directors (Spain)

These 5 DVDs and the book which accompanies them are one of the two pillars (the website apologiantologia.net is the other) which sustain the first retrospective review which brings together 50 years of audiovisual creation in the Spanish context. Promoted by Hamaca, the project was based on their original archive and materials and unpublished pieces, which…

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

Various Directors (Belgium)

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

BOUQUET D'IMAGES

Rose Lowder (France)

For many years Rose Lowder has been developing an exceptional technique of weaving together images gathered frame- by-frame to form meticulous patterns of light. By oscillating the focal plane of photographs shot in the same place over time, her layered tapestries produce a new relationship between filmed reality and filmic image. From the movement of a...

BULLETS FOR BREAKFAST

Holly Fisher (US)

“The films of Holly Fisher seem to reveal some magical qualities about cinema too often relegated to the shadows: an optical toy that creates motion out of stillness, space out of flatness, time out of flicker, cinema is built on its paradoxical condition as an illusion. In addition to her sensibilities about memory and perception, Holly seems especially in tune with this nature of film as a medium.“

CALIFORNIA TRILOGY

James Benning (US)

Produced at the junction of two millennia, the CALIFORNIA TRILOGY is James Benning's three-part topographical study of America's "Golden State". Looking to the past while investigating the present, the mathematician-turned-filmmaker condenses three distinct Californian landscapes into a total of 105 shots, each exactly 2½ minutes long. Formal…

CASTING A GLANCE / RR

James Benning (US)

In CASTING A GLANCE one artist pays tribute to another as James Benning offers his filmic paean to Robert Smithson's legendary "earthwork" sculpture, the Spiral Jetty. With RR, his homage to the American railroad, the filmmaker brings an era to its close by going back to cinema's roots. Shot back-to-back over a period of two years, these works marked James… 

CHRIS WELSBY: BRITISH ARTISTS' FILMS

Chris Welsby (UK)

The BFI’s British Artists’ Films series produced in partnership with arts documentary producers Illuminations and Arts Council England features a wide selection of important film and video work by British artists from the last thirty years. The second release focuses on the work of Chris Welsby, landscape artist and pioneer of the moving-image installation in Britain, whose…

CHRISTIAN LEBRAT: VIBRATIONS

Christian Lebrat (France)

Christian Lebrat, born in 1952 in Paris, is an internationally acclaimed artist with a career spanning four decades. He is a filmmaker, video artist, performance artist and photographer, as well as a publisher, curator and writer. In 1985 he founded Paris Expérimental (http://paris-experimental.asso.fr), a publishing company entirely devoted to publishing theoretical and historical texts on avant-garde and experimental cinema.

LA CICATRICE INTÉRIEURE

Philippe Garrel (France)

"In 1972, Nico sang and screamed in the desert of New Mexico, the snowy plains of Iceland and the calcified landscapes of Egypt. Philippe Garrel shot the ultimate film-trip, LA CICATRICE INTÉRIEURE, in the most desolate landscapes of the world. This is a reexamination of a crucial work of art and of the mythical love affair between a gifted filmmaker and his phantasmagorical idol." - Les Inrockuptibles

CINE A CONTRACORRIENTE: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE OTHER LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA

Various Directors

This DVD contains a selection of films that comprise the traveling cinema program "Cinema Against the Grain: Latin America and Spain. Dialogue, Convergence, Divergence… Over the Past 80 Years." The contents will take you on a journey along the paths of avant-garde, documentary, animation and experimental cinema. These are fundamental works…

CINÉMA DADA

Various Directors (France)

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

CONDITION OF ILLUSION

Peter Gidal (UK)

The DVD brings together 11 films by Peter Gidal made between 1967 to 2013. It is accompanied by a unique 40 page booklet of texts about the filmmaker’s work by Patricia L. Boyd, Stephen Heath and Chris Kennedy. The booklet is composed of transparent pages and was designed by Diana Vidrascu at RE:VOIR. "It’s upside down, inside out, negative,…

THE CURTIS HARRINGTON SHORT FILM COLLECTION

Curtis Harrington (US)

Curtis Harrington, widely regarded as one of the important avant-garde directors of the 1940’s, as well as an early influential figure in what would come to be known as ‘New Queer Cinema,’ was born in Los Angeles in 1926. He began making films as a teenager, often deeply surreal, intuitive, and owing much to the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. After...

DEPARTURES

Gunvor Nelson (US)

Gunvor Nelson was born in Sweden, but left her native country in the mid-1950s to study in the United States. Later, she and her husband, filmmaker Bob Nelson settled in the San Francisco Bay Area and raised their daughter, Oona. Gunvor Nelson's first film work was with her husband, then with her neighbor Dorothy Wiley, and finally on her own. In 1965...

DESERET / FOUR CORNERS

James Benning (US)

In the 1990s, James Benning's films were characterized primarily 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. In DESERET Benning (by way of the "The New…

DÉTRUISEZ-VOUS

Serge Bard (France)

“The phrase ‘Aidez-nous, detruisez-vous’ (‘Help us, destroy yourselves’) was a rabble-rousing graffito that marked the walls of University of Paris’s Nanterre campus in May 1968. It was in this place and at this volatile time in world politics that a generation of French artists and thinkers defined themselves around youth and workers’ movements (recently chronicled...

DEUX FOIS

Jackie Raynal (France)

Jackie Raynal is perhaps best known as the former programmer of two of New York’s premiere art cinemas – the Carnegie Hall and the Bleecker Street – who began her career in the 1960s as the film editor for New Wave directors such as Eric Rohmer, Jean-Daniel Pollet and Jean Eustache.  Challenged by Zanzibar patroness Sylvina Boissonnas to stop...

DIARY

David Perlov (Israel)

"May 1973, I buy a camera. I want to start filming, by myself and for myself. Professional cinema does no longer attract me. To look for something else. I want to approach the everyday. Above all in anonymity. It takes time to learn how to do it.”

DOMINIC ANGERAME - CITYSCAPES

Dominic Angerame (US)

Angerame’s city films show urban deconstruction and cinematic construction as two sides of the same coin, as de-construction, even. The filmmaker’s work searches for unfamiliar views of seemingly familiar things: cities, landscapes, faces, bodies. The filmmaker’s desire is to make everyday images unfamiliar, to learn to see them fresh and to estrange them from our senses. Angerame stylizes his urban landscapes into half-abstract, extremely painterly compositions; his films are often layered as collages through double and triple exposures.

DORE 0. - FIGURES OF ABSENCE

Dore O. (Germany)

O.’s work is often noted by contemporary critics to resemble the American avant-garde film of the period. And this is precisely the point. Her films are not simply derivative of Maya Deren or Stan Brakhage. Instead, by recalling these works, they cause an inner disturbance, at once evoking connotations of a cultural past, the present of the films’ making, as well as our own era – a positioning that reveals as much as it hides.

DREAMINIMALIST

Tony Conrad & Marie Losier (US / France)

"THE FLICKER sweeps away reality, transports us into another environment and acts as a sort of instrument of perceptual experimentation. The filmmaker himself considers it as a kind of science fiction film which, instead of entering us into strange worlds – which have everything to do with this world and the development of conventional narrative structures...

DYN AMO

Stephen Dwoskin (UK)

“Free and intimist, sensual and cerebral, experimental and political. Dwoskin’s cinema is heir to the surrealists and Georges Bataille, to Andy Warhol and Jack Smith”

—Isabelle Régnier

“Each Dwoskin film could be described thus: a man watches a woman who returns his gaze. This...

ECHOES OF SILENCE

Peter Emanuel Goldman (US)

Peter Emmanuel Goldman's rarely screened debut, an under appreciated landmark of the New American Cinema, chronicles the lives of twenty-somethings adrift in New York City, finding tremendous pathos in the smallest moments: a furtive glance across a museum gallery, girls putting on makeup, a stroll…

2019 - PERSONAL CHOICE (Miguel Marias, Juror)

L'ENFANT SECRET

Philippe Garrel (France)

"A man and a woman with biblical names (Elie and Jean-Baptiste) played by two Bressonian actors (Anne Wiazemsky and Thierry de Maublanc). Shock treatment meets overdose under the rooftops of Paris. And between them, Swan, the child, a badly kept secret. The Swan, a sign of life and mutual survival: the child of children, a fragment of trembling celluloid."

- Serge Daney

2006 - Best DVD

ENTUZIAZM (SIMFONIJA DONBASSA)

Dziga Vertov (USSR)

Dziga Vertov's ENTUZIAZM is considered a masterpiece of early sound film and of Soviet avant-garde cinema. Dealing with the Five Year Plan of the late 1920s, it was praised by artists like Charlie Chaplin, was subsequently forgotten, and rediscovered by the avant-garde movement of the 1960s.

LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ ? (HAS THE FEATURE STARTED YET?)

Maurice Lemaître (France)

One of the founding works of letterist cinema, LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ ? (HAS THE FEATURE STARTED YET?) became a major event during its first screenings in Paris in 1951. Despite the critics’ lack of consideration, this film’s undeniable influence — direct or hidden — on the New Wave as much as on today’s cinema makes it a landmark in film history.

FILMS IMAGINAIRES (IMAGINARY FILMS) 

Maurice Lemaître (France)

“A major figure in the lettrist movement, Maurice Lemaître revolutionized cinema in 1951 with LE FILM EST DÉJÀ COMMENCÉ ? ( HAS THE FEATURE STARTED YET?) and invented a new form of performance: “Syncinema.” His many cinematic works, made between the 1960s and the present day, confirm his position as one of the most important avant-garde filmmakers of his generation." 

- Christian Lebrat

THE FILMS OF JAY ROSENBLATT - VOLUME 1

Jay Rosenblatt (US)

“Jay Rosenblatt makes short, pointed, poetic films, and to see a collection of his work is to know he's a major artist. His specialness has no single source. He's a master at matching music and image, and the nature of his work, which usually involves discovering and using found footage, requires profound patience. Yet mostly, I suspect, what makes almost every Jay Rosenblatt film a full emotional experience is his empathy, his deep, unfeigned and unmistakable respect for life in its many forms.”

- Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

THE FILMS OF JAY ROSENBLATT - VOLUME 2

Jay Rosenblatt (US)

Jay Rosenblatt is an internationally recognized artist who has been working as an independent filmmaker since 1980 and has completed over thirty films. His work explores our emotional and psychological cores. They are personal in their content yet universal in their appeal.

FLUXFILM ANTHOLOGY

Various Directors (US)

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

FROM DOODLES TO PIXELS: A JOURNEY THROUGH SPANISH ANIMATION (DEL TRAZO AL PIXEL: UN RECORRIDO POR LA NIMACIÓN ESPAÑOLA)

Various Directors (Spain)

"From Doodles To Pixels" is an extraordinary compilation of the best of Spanish animated film. It tours a century of talent through around fifty short films, a selection of animated commercials and the first Spanish animated feature film for adults, HISTORIAS DE AMOR Y MASACRE, carefully restored for this edition…

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

Various Directors (Spain)

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

FROM THE JOURNALS OF JEAN SEBERG

Mark Rappaport (US)

This deconstruction of the life and career of this Midwestern girl, Hollywood star at 19, New Wave icon at 21, and suicide at 40, is undertaken by Seberg herself, as embodied by Mary Beth Hurt. The spirit and inventiveness of Rappaport's script, combined with the endless flow of disillusioned observations and carefully chosen and nervously edited film extracts, make this film a remarkably stimulating piece.

FUN AND GAMES FOR EVERYONE

Serge Bard (France)

“One of the major revelations to emerge from the resurgence of the Zanzibar films is Bard's FUN AND GAMES FOR EVERYONE, a velveteen, chiaroscuro boogie-woogie chess match of a film, which documents a vernissage for an Olivier Mosset exhibition. The new print practically drips inky blacks and blinding whites as art circle dandies dissolve...

GRAND OPERA/O PANAMA

James Benning (US)

In James Benning's GRAND OPERA. AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE (1979) the static landscapes and cityscapes that made his name by the late 1970s are augmented with a number of experiments with established forms and conventions and a brief homage to four icons of the avant-garde: Hollis Frampton, George Landow, Yvonne Rainer, and Michael Snow. O PANAMA's elegant montage denotes a subject that is always on the verge of collapse. This episodic narrative opens spaces in the film where the audience can enter into the story with its own experiences.

GUNS OF THE TREES

Jonas Mekas (US)

"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...

HALLELUJAH THE HILLS

Adolfas Mekas (US)

Born in Lithuania, Adolfas Mekas and his brother Jonas arrived in the United States in 1949. Together they studied with Hans Richter and, in 1954, founded Film Culture, the magazine of independent cinema. In 1970, Jonas Mekas co-founded Anthology Film Archives in New York city.

HALLELUJAH THE HILLS, Adolfas Mekas's debut...

HANS RICHTER: EARLY WORKS

Hans Richter (Germany)

During the period in the 1920's that Gerhard Lamprecht was directing narrative films based on working class life in postwar Berlin (see SLUMS OF BERLIN (DIE VERRUFENEN) & CHILDREN OF NO IMPORTANCE (DIE UNEHELICHEN) and THE PEOPLE AMONG US (MENSCHEN UNTEREINANDER) & UNDER THE LANTERN…

2015 - BEST REDISCOVERY OF A FORGOTTEN FILM

LES HAUTES SOLITUDES

Philppe Garrel (France)

“In silence and black and white, the focus is on a sole visage, that of a fallen 40-year-old star, Jean Seberg fifteen years after BREATHLESS, struggling with alcohol, fear, loneliness chemical dependence and dementia. In an hour and fifteen minutes consisting almost exclusively of close-ups, an entire lifetime rises to the surface of a face.”

HE STANDS IN A DESERT COUNTING THE SECONDS OF HIS LIFE

Jonas Mekas (US)

"The film consists of 124 brief sketches, each half-a-minute to about two minutes long. Portraits of people I have spent time with, places, seasons of the year, weather (storms, snow, blizzards etc...) many of my film-maker friends- streets and parks of New-York- brief escape in nature, out of town- nothing spectacular, unimportant celebrations…

HEAVEN AND EARTH (HIMMEL UND ERDE)

Michael Pilz (Austria)

Michael Pilz's HEAVEN AND EARTH (HIMMEL UND ERDE) is an epic documentary, in two parts, about life in the Styrian mountain village of St. Anna. The film is a documentary in the best sense of the word - a meditation on time, on nature and the struggles of man, as well as a record of a lifestyle ceasing to exist.

“The inhabitants of St. Anna, a mountain village...

HEINZ EMIGHOLZ: THE FORMATIVE YEARS (VOL. 1 & 2)

Heinz Emigholz (Germany)

These two volumes publish, in DVD form, the seven Emigholz films presented in installation versions as part of the FORUM EXPANDED at the Berlin Film Festival in 2010. More recently, the films of Heinz Emigholz have been the subject of a career retrospective at the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 2014.

HELLO HAPPINESS! - MARIE LOSIER

Marie Losier (U.S., France)

French-born New York filmmaker Marie Losier learned the 16mm Bolex camera from George and Mike Kuchar and made a series of “Dream Portraits” of New York filmmakers, theatre, music and performance artists.

HOTEL NEW YORK / NEW YORK STORY

Jackie Raynal (U.S.)

“Raynal shows a New York... that usually never gets on the screen, and the storytelling is so swift, so pared down, and economical that Raynal can pack more into one hour than many filmmakers can into two.” -Filmex, LA Weekly