GME Announces JONAS MEKAS: THE MAJOR WORKS on DVD for Institutional Sales in North America

Gartenberg Media Announces JONAS MEKAS: THE MAJOR WORKS  on DVD Available for North American Institutional Sales Gartenberg Media Enterprises is very proud to announce the addition of JONAS MEKAS: THE MAJOR WORKS to our catalog of DVD titles available for institutional sales in North America.  This 7-Disc DVD Box Set, co-published by Re:Voir Video, Agnès B DVD and Potemkine, brings together, for the very first time, the key films created by Jonas Mekas.  These collected works, that span a filming career of more than 60 years, re-affirm his stature as one of the most prolific avant-garde filmmakers and pre-eminent cinema poets. Jonas Mekas was born in Lithuania in 1922.  In 1944, Jonas and his brother Adolfas (HALLELUJAH THE HILLS - also available from GME) were taken by the Nazis to a forced labor camp in Germany. After WWII he studied philosophy at the University of Mainz.  At the end of 1949, the UN Refugee Organization brought both brothers to New York, where they settled in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  Immediately acquiring a 16mm Bolex camera, Jonas began filming his surrounding environment and friends, that he later assembled into films primarily centered on the dual themes of exile and assimilation. Jonas developed his diary style of filmmaking while simultaneously becoming immersed as a magazine editor and publisher (Film Culture), film critic (The Village Voice), distributor (the New York Film-Makers Cooperative), programmer (the Film-Makers' Cinematheque), and archivist (Anthology Film Archives).  In short, Mekas soon became, in singular fashion, the most significant force behind the evolution and promotion of the American Avant-Garde film movement.   "Mekas's enthusiasm for his contemporaries and his modesty and reticence about his own achievements as a film-maker contributed to an underestimation of his stature in the sixties and seventies...Congruent with the magnitude of his recording of the pulse of the New York art world for forty years is his slow revelation of the reflective self. By the nineties it was apparent that Mekas was one of the central filmmakers of the American avant-garde." - P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film    "Since 1950, I have been keeping a film diary.  I have been walking around with my Bolex and reacting to the immediate reality:  situations, friends, New York, seasons of the year.   On some days I shot ten frames, on others ten seconds, still on others ten minutes.  Or I shoot nothing.  When one writes diaries, its' a retrospective process:  you sit down, you look back at your day, and you write it all down.  To keep a film (camera) diary, is to react (with your camera) immediately, now, this instant:  either you get it now or you don't get it at all.  To go back and shoot it later, it would mean restating, be it events or feelings.  To get it now, as it happens, demands the total mastery of one's tools (in this case, Bolex): it has to register my state of feeling (and the memories) as I react.  Which also means that I had to do all the structuring (editing) right there, during the shooting, in the camera." - Jonas Mekas     JONAS MEKAS: THE MAJOR WORKS This DVD boxed set comprises the following 16 films: THE BRIG (1964)  65 minutes. WALDEN: DIARIES, NOTES AND SKETCHES (1969)  180 minutes. REMINISCENCES OF A JOURNEY TO LITHUANIA (1972)  82 minutes. LOST LOST LOST (1976)  65 minutes. AS I WAS MOVING AHEAD I SAW BRIEF GLIMPSES OF BEAUTY (2000)  285 minutes / 2-Disc Set SHORT FILM WORKS Cassis (1966)  4 minutes. Notes on the Circus (1966)  12 minutes. Hare Krishna (1966)  4 minutes. Report from Millbrook (1965-66)  12 minutes. Time and Fortune Vietnam Newsreel (1968)  4 minutes. Travel Songs (1967-81)  25 minutes. Quartet Number One (1991)  8 minutes. Imperfect Three-Image Films (1995)  6 minutes. Song of Avignon (1998)  5 minutes. Mozart, Wien & Elvis (2000)  3 minutes. Williamsburg (1949-2002)  15 minutes.   7-Disc DVD Collection DVD-PAL Region 0 / No Regional Code.  With English, French & Lithuanian subtitles.   Institutional Sale Price: $ 800.00 plus shipping & handling.     Watch for our Next DVD Release Newsletter Coming Soon!     These DVDs are currently being made available to universities, libraries, museums, and other educational organizations in North America (US and Canada), and include public performance rights. Public performance rights extend to use in classrooms and in other non-commercial settings where no admission is charged. Please Note: Many of our DVDs are published in PAL format Region 0.   PAL DVDs require a PAL or Multi-system DVD player for playback. Order by Phone @ 212.280.8654 or by Fax @ 212.280.8656 For inquiries and to order by e-mail, contact: sales@gartenbergmedia.com For our entire DVD catalogue, please visit: www.gartenbergmedia.com/dvd/

GME Announces THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME on Blu-ray for Institutional Sales in North America

Gartenberg Media Announces Lon Chaney in THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME  on Blu-ray Available for North American Institutional Sales Gartenberg Media Enterprises is proud to announce the classic silent motion picture THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, starring the legendary Lon Chaney and published on Blu-ray disc by Flicker Alley, as the latest addition to our catalog of titles available for institutional sales in North America. Adapted from the classic novel Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) by Victor Hugo (Les Misérables, 1862) THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME is a massive production; the sets depicting 15th-century Paris covered nineteen acres of the Universal Pictures back-lot and included the façade of Notre-Dame Cathedral.  Filming took six months. and the climactic sequence employed two thousand extras.  But, it is the performance of Lon Chaney as Quasimodo, the hunchbacked bell-ringer, that makes the film so unforgettable.  THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME premiered at New York's Astor Theatre on September 2, 1923.  The success of the film was immediate: it made a fortune for Carl Laemmle and the then fledgling Universal Pictures; and it turned Lon Chaney into one of the most popular stars of the silent era and the screen legend known as The Man of A Thousand Faces! This edition is mastered from a multi-tinted 16mm print struck in 1926 from the original camera negative.  The film is not known to have survived in 35mm.  Visible wear in the source material has been diminished with a moderate amount of digital restoration.  It is pictorially much better than earlier video editions and represents the best condition in which this landmark film survives today.  A new symphonic score arranged by Donald Hunsberger was recorded in the Czech Republic by full orchestra conducted by Robert Israel.   Running Time: 110 minutes.   THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME Wallace Worsley  -  USA (1923) Blu-ray Edition Region Free / No Regional Code. Institutional Sale Price: $ 200.00 plus shipping & handling.     Watch for our Next DVD Release Newsletter Coming Soon!     These DVDs are currently being made available to universities, libraries, museums, and other educational organizations in North America (US and Canada), and include public performance rights. Public performance rights extend to use in classrooms and in other non-commercial settings where no admission is charged. Please Note: Many of our DVDs are published in PAL format Region 0.   PAL DVDs require a PAL or Multi-system DVD player for playback. Order by Phone @ 212.280.8654 or by Fax @ 212.280.8656 For inquiries and to order by e-mail, contact: sales@gartenbergmedia.com For our entire DVD catalogue, please visit: www.gartenbergmedia.com/dvd/

GME Announces HEINZ EMIGHOLZ: THE FORMATIVE YEARS [I] & [II] Now Available on DVD for Institutional Sales

Gartenberg Media Announces   HEINZ EMIGHOLZ: THE FORMATIVE YEARS [I] & [II] Gartenberg Media Enterprises is proud to announce the release of a pair of DVD publications presenting the early works of experimental filmmaker Heinz Emigholz, entitled HEINZ EMIGHOLZ: THE FORMATIVE YEARS [I] and HEINZ EMIGHOLZ: THE FORMATIVE YEARS [II], published jointly by Edition Arsenal Experimental and Filmgalerie 451.  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. Stefanie Schulte Strathaus, of Arsenal Experimental and curator for the Berlinale Forum, writes that Heinz Emigholz's "early films provided a crucial impetus for the international experimental film movement of the 1970s and 80s.  They are counted among the few experimental works from Germany which have attained enduring international acclaim. The project THE FORMATIVE YEARS makes visible and accessible a segment of film history, which, in light of upheavals in the analog world and departures toward a digital one, enables discussion of highly contemporary developments."   In addition to the seven early films contained in THE FORMATIVE YEARS [I] & [II], the two DVDs also provide numerous bonus extras, including two extensive interviews with Emigholz, both filmed in 2009: one by Viennese film publicist Stefan Grissemann; the other by filmmaker Klaus Wyborny specifically about the films in the project THE FORMATIVE YEARS and the context of their production in the 1970's.           "From the beginning to the middle of the seventies, I produced a series of films containing a complicated interplay between abstract temporal compositions - that is, film movements - and selected urban and rural landscapes.  The films ... consist of thousands of photographs, taken frame-by-frame with a Bolex camera on 16mm film according to a previously established score."   - Heinz Emigholz   HEINZ EMIGHOLZ: THE FORMATIVE YEARS [I]   Schenec-tady I (1972/73) Schenec-tady II (1973) Arrowplane (1973/74) Tide (1974) Schenec-tady III (1972/75) DVD-PAL Region 0/No Regional Code. Institutional Sale Price: $ 200.00 plus shipping & handling. HEINZ EMIGHOLZ: THE FORMATIVE YEARS [II]   Hotel (1975/76) Demon (1976/77) DVD-PAL Region 0/No Regional Code. Institutional Sale Price: $ 200.00 plus shipping & handling.   Watch for our Next DVD Release Newsletter Coming Soon!     These DVDs are currently being made available to universities, libraries, museums, and other educational organizations in North America (US and Canada), and include public performance rights. Public performance rights extend to use in classrooms and in other non-commercial settings where no admission is charged. Please Note: Many of our DVDs are published in PAL format Region 0.   PAL DVDs require a PAL or Multi-system DVD player for playback. Order by Phone @ 212.280.8654 or by Fax @ 212.280.8656 For inquiries and to order by e-mail, contact: sales@gartenbergmedia.com For our entire DVD catalogue, please visit: www.gartenbergmedia.com/dvd/