GME News
Dziga Vertov films are playing at Anthology Film Archives (January 29-February 7th) and at The Jewish Museum as part of the exhibition "The Power of Pictures: Early Soviet Photography, Early Soviet Film" (ends February 7th). GME carries several DVD publications of Vertov films for the North American university market (ENTUZIAZM; A SIXTH PART OF THE WORLD; THE ELEVENTH YEAR; THREE SONGS OF LENIN; STRIDE, SOVIET!).
GME is the proud DVD/Blu-ray distributor in North America of the Ernst Lubitsch film THE LOVES OF PHARAOH which is screening at the Historic Niles Theater, Fremont, CA, sponsored by the American Research Center in Egypt, Northern California (ARCE/NC). Click below for more details from the ARCE/NC:
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 photographs by Hugh Bell as part of "Art of Jazz: Form/Performance/Notes" exhibition to be held at The Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art. Held in collaboration with the Harvard Art Museums, the exhibition explores the interaction between jazz music and the visual arts.
Billie Holiday (1957)
“Art of Jazz” consists of three exhibits at two venues. “Form,” a collection of work drawn from the Harvard Art Museum’s permanent collection, is presented in the Teaching Galleries at the Harvard Art Museums. “Performance” is a collection of books, album covers, photos and other ephemera in the Cooper Gallery’s lobby and front galleries. Scholars Suzanne Blier and David Bindman curated both of these installations. “Performance” at the Cooper includes modernist painter Beauford Delaney; photographers Hugh Bell and Carl Van Vechten; along with a sound installation accompanying the series of artist created album cover installations."
Self-portrait
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
All Photographs, © The Estate of Hugh Bell
Jon Gartenberg and Alex Westhelle of GME attending a private tour courtesy of APAG (American Photography Archives Group) at the International Center of Photography archive and Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, January 22.
Photo courtesy of APAG.
Photo courtesy of APAG.
Photo courtesy of APAG.
During the past decade, Gartenberg Media has been actively engaged in seeking out and representing high quality DVD & Blu-ray publications of films and videos that encompass important works from the breadth and depth of the history of the moving image. We currently offer more than 150 publications that are noted here. These works range from pioneers of the silent narrative cinema to cutting edge filmmakers of the contemporary avant-garde.
"Archival practices are undergoing reinvention, too, both enabled and blocked by opportunistic technologies. On the one hand, the superb dedication of such entities as the Criterion Collection, Milestone Films, and Gartenberg Media Enterprises, to name key players, are making possible access to a wealth of cinematic history, ephemera, and value-added materials."
– B. Ruby Rich, Film Quarterly
In order to encourage academic interest in these DVD and Blu-ray editions, we are pleased to issue periodic newsletters comprising highlights from our collection. The first of these is Compilations, that brings together related films from specific countries, historical periods, genres and subjects. These 14 unique, separate publications are noted below:
Various Directors (Austria)
“VISIONary sees itself as a communicator for innovative examples of contemporary Austrian audiovisual art, specifically short, experimental and documentary films and music videos. While these works represent some of the most interesting examples of contemporary Austrian art at present, they are rarely seen except at festivals and…
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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)...
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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...
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Various Directors (Germany)
In 1962, the proclamation of the Oberhausen Manfesto marked the beginning of the New German Film. This 2-disc DVD set presents 19 short films from 1958-1964 produced, directed, photographed or edited by one or more of the filmmakers who signed the manifesto. It also includes a booklet and ROM features with essays and documents…
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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...
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Various Directors (UK)
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…
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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…
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Various Directors (US)
Commencing in 1920 with Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s creative collaboration on MANHATTA, successive generations of experimental filmmakers and artists have worked in collaboration or alone to create a cinema capable of expressing dynamic unspoken concepts in totally abstract…
Ivan Mosjoukine, Alexandre Volkoff, Marcel L’Herbier, Jacques Feyder (France)
The collection of Russian filmmakers who made up the core of what came to be known as Films Albatros arrived from Moscow after the October 1917 revolution by way of Yalta, Constantinople and Marseilles, establishing their base of operations in an old Pathé greenhouse-style studio in the Paris suburb of Montreuil. From it flowed some of the finest...
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Various Directors (USSR)
During the 1920s, Soviet documentary and fiction films were financed by the State, and their fledgling directors, some barely out of their teens, converted their lives from theater, engineering, painting and journalism to the practice and theory of a revolutionary cinema devoted to showing the achievements and aspirations of the new...
(Denmark)
In celebration of the 60th Anniversary of The Danish Film Institute / Archive & Cinematheque the first seventy films donated to the Danish State are published on this DVD.
THE FIRST FILM ARCHIVE contains a total of seventy films showing Danish events and people of the period...
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Various Directors (US)
UNDER FULL SAIL: SILENT CINEMA ON THE HIGH SEAS collects five breathtaking films that preserve the romance, grandeur and allure of windjammers sailing open waters, exquisitely photographed in the style of the time.
THE YANKEE CLIPPER (1927), produced by Cecil B. DeMille and directed by Rupert Julian, restored...
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Various Directors
Presented by Flicker Alley and Blackhawk Films, DISCOVERING CINEMA is a two-disc DVD set comprised of LEARNING TO TALK (2003) and MOVIES DREAM IN COLOR (2004), both produced by Lobster Films/Histoire. Film historians Eric Lange and Serge Bromberg compiled materials from their own Lobster Films collection and material from archives…
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Various Directors
SAVED FROM THE FLAMES presents a unique and wonderful collection of 54 rare and restored short films from the inflammable years of cinema. Movies were once made on nitrate film stock, which has a chemical composition similar to gunpowder and is highly vulnerable to fire and decay. This remarkable seven-hour anthology, organized in eight thematic…
Watch for our upcoming Spring releases!
Gartenberg Media Enterprises is proud to announce the program lineup for the Warren Sonbert Retrospective taking place at The Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio on January 20th & 27th.
Warren Sonbert with his Bolex camera.
From The Wexner Center Website:
"One of the most original and influential figures in American experimental cinema, Warren Sonbert began making films in 1966 as a precocious NYU student who found himself in the midst of Andy Warhol’s Factory. After graduating, he took his Bolex camera on his travels as he perfected a complex style of filming and editing that lyrically transforms mundane-yet-beautiful details into larger emotions, concepts, and visual splendors. Sonbert’s influences ranged from rock-and-roll to opera, from Douglas Sirk to Stan Brakhage. This vital retrospective featuring all newly restored prints cements his reputation as one of the most innovative and notable experimental filmmakers of the last half of the 20th century.
As a testament to his ongoing vitality, the spring 2015 issue of Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media is devoted to Sonbert’s writing. Pick up your copy at the Wexner Center Store."
WHERE DID OUR LOVE GO (1966)
"Following the filmmaker’s death in 1995 of AIDS, Sonbert’s partner, Ascension Serrano, tasked Jon Gartenberg, through the Estate Project for Artists with AIDS, with the preservation of Sonbert’s work. Gartenberg first became associated with Sonbert’s films while Gartenberg was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art, during which time he acquired several of Sonbert’s films.
'[Sonbert's] idea was to engage the viewer in an accumulation of different shots that were not specifically narrative, but that were linear and poetic,' Gartenberg said. 'But more than any experimental filmmaker, his work was less about image abstraction and more about an experimental approach to narrative structure, through how he built a montage of images and scenes.'"
For further inquiries about Warren Sonbert’s films, please see:
GME Programming & Curating: Warren Sonbert Retrospective
All Photographs, © The Estate of Warren Sonbert
Framework issue 56.1 devoted entirely to Warren Sonbert was featured in Canyon Cinema's latest newsletter. Canyon Cinema has 16mm prints of Sonbert's work, available for rental.
