December 17, 2020

INTRODUCING STREAMLINE, A NEW GME FEATURE FOR DIGITAL SITE LICENSING, CURRENTLY INCLUDING FREE STREAMING OF THE EARLY FILMS OF WARREN SONBERT

December 17, 2020/ Jon Gartenberg

GME Streamline is a new section on Gartenberg Media's website for the distribution of films and videos that we are making available as Digital Site Licenses (DSL) to the North American academic community, in addition to the occasional presentation of viewable streams on Streamline's title pages, including free streaming of Warren Sonbert’s first 3 films for a limited time.

December 08, 2020

GME Licenses Footage From Jonas Mekas Films For The New Errol Morris Documentary MY PSYCHEDELIC LOVE STORY

December 08, 2020/ Jon Gartenberg

MY PSYCHEDELIC LOVE STORY is the newest documentary from Academy Award-winning filmmaker Errol Morris. This film is structured as a psychedelic head trip, crossed with the story of a possible CIA conspiracy, and wrapped in a fascinating love story told by the late Joanna Harcourt-Smith about her time with Timothy Leary. Among the archival clips included in this movie are scenes shot by experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas from his own film REPORT FROM MILLBROOK (shots of which were also re-incorporated in his magnum opus WALDEN).

December 03, 2020

GME Licenses Hugh Bell’s Photographs of Billie Holiday for James Erskine Documentary

December 03, 2020/ Jon Gartenberg

Available in the U.S. as of December 4th, BILLIE (2020) is a documentary about the singer who changed the face of American music, and the journalist who died trying to tell her story. Directed by award-winning filmmaker James Erskine, the documentary is based on 200 hours of interviews conducted from 1970 to 1978 by journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl. Kuehl had intended to write a definitive biography of Holiday, and her research comprised interviews—taking up 125 audio cassette tapes—with Count Basie, Tony Bennett, Charles Mingus, and Sylvia Syms, among many other colleagues in the jazz world. She also spoke to Holiday’s cousin and childhood friends, as well as to her attorneys and the FBI agents who kept her under surveillance, due to both her drug use and her outspoken antiracism.

November 18, 2020

4K Restoration from the 35mm original negative of Hou Hsiao-hsien’s FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI Streaming in Film Forum's Virtual Cinema: Repertory Program Starting November 20th

November 18, 2020/ Jon Gartenberg

Bathed in the golden glow of oil lamps and wreathed in an opium haze, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI (1998, 113 minutes) traces the romantic intrigues, jealousies, and tensions swirling around a 19th century Shanghai brothel, where the courtesans are ensconced in opulent splendor, yet forced to work to buy back their freedom. Among the regular clients is Tony Leung Chiu-wai's taciturn Master Wang, whose relationship with longtime mistress Michiko Hada is agitated by a perceived act of betrayal. Composed in a procession of long takes, FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI evokes a vanished world of decadence and cruelty, an insular universe where much of the action remains tantalizingly offscreen.

November 17, 2020

GME DVD Distribution – Fall 2020 Recap

November 17, 2020/ Jon Gartenberg

With the fall academic semester nearing completion, GME is pleased to present a robust selection of DVD and Blu-ray publications from the breadth and depth of a century of film history (the 1920’s to 2020).

November 12, 2020

GME Presents The Psychological Worlds of Animation and Film Noir

November 12, 2020/ Jon Gartenberg

Film Noir’s stylistic devices result in claustrophobic spaces that lead to the psychological and physical demise of the Noir protagonist; for experimental animators, the cinematic canvas is one that provides liberation of the character’s psyche. These two contrasting paradigms are represented by the new digital restoration of the Noir drama TRAPPED (1949) and the compilation DVD of animation films by Suzan Pitt.

November 10, 2020

GME Presents the Marriage of Experimental Film snd Music: the Films of Paul Clipson and Joost Rekveld

November 10, 2020/ Jon Gartenberg

In the arena of the marriage of experimental film and music that emerged from live performance, we feature the single channel, abstract films of contemporary artists Paul Clipson (LANDSCAPE DISSOLVES, 2009-2016) and Joost Rekveld (11 FILMS, 1991-2017).

November 08, 2020

GME Presents Silent Classic Films from Germany and the Soviet Union

November 08, 2020/ Jon Gartenberg

Two new digital publications expand GME’s offerings for academic use and study of classic silent films from abroad. THE CITY WITHOUT JEWS (1924) is a prescient and arresting German silent film about the persecution and deportation of the Jews, presaging the horrors of the Nazi era. Half a dozen other feature films made between 1919 and 1924 in Germany and Austria also focused on their plight: DER GOLEM (1919), LOVE ONE ANOTHER, 1922), and THE ANCIENT LAW (1923). Separately, this Blu-ray edition of THE BOLSHEVIK TRILOGY adds the works of Vsevolod Pudovkin to GME’s distribution of films by significant Soviet filmmakers for academic study and appreciation. This digital publication comprises this filmmaker’s cinematic trilogy MOTHER (1926), THE END OF ST. PETERSBURG (1927) and STORM OVER ASIA (1928), which collectively depict the tumultuous history of the Russian Revolution; CHESS FEVER (1925), Pudovkin’s short film about the Moscow chess craze, is presented as a bonus title on the Blu-ray edition.

November 03, 2020

GME Presents Urban America, Rural America: The Films of Dominic Angerame and J.L. Anderson

November 03, 2020/ Jon Gartenberg

Adding to our roster of city symphony films and filmmakers (MANHATTA; BERLIN: SYMPHONY OF A GREAT CITY; LISBOA, CRÓNICA ANEDÓTICA; and THE MAN WITH THE MOVIE CAMERA), we are pleased to present Dominic Angerame’s CITYSCAPES, an amalgam of his short films dating from 1982 to 2010. Mostly shot in San Francisco, these experimental works show urban deconstruction and cinematic construction as two sides of the same coin, as deconstruction even -- in which individual films are often replete with layered, multiple exposures and dynamic editing. In contrast, independent filmmaker Joseph Anderson’s little-known SPRING NIGHT SUMMER NIGHT (1967), is slow paced and spare, a rural family-centered drama shot in black-and-white.

October 29, 2020

GME Presents 2 Austrian Avant-Garde Filmmakers: Alfred Kaiser and Virgil Widrich

October 29, 2020/ Jon Gartenberg

The found footage works of Austrian filmmakers Alfred Kaiser (1940 – 1994) from the 1970s (DECOMPOSING NAZI PHRASEOLOGY) and the later films of Virgil Widrich (VIRGIL WIDRICH – SHORT FILMS [1998-2019]) are lesser known than those of Gustav Deutsch and Peter Tscherkassky, but are equally significant in their own right. Kaiser’s films illustrate and demolish the world of Nazi thought and imagery, while Widrich’s films explore time and space, especially the illusion of 3-dimensionality in cinema.

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