GME News
This Saturday, September 23rd, 2023, at 7:30pm, our friends at Light Industry are showing three films starring the legendary Donna Kerness, including Mike Kuchar’s SINS OF THE FLESHAPOIDS. GME distributes this title to the North American University market on DVD. GME also distributes several films by Marie Losier, who was directly inspired by the work of Mike Kuchar and his brother, George.
Read MoreFrom September 8th to September 10th, 2023, films by Karel Doing and Sigfried Fruhauf played at the Crossroads Film Festival at the San Francisco Cinematheque! GME distributes two of Doing’s early works, 1993’s LICHTAJAREN and 1999’s ENERGY ENERGY, in the collection STUDIO EEN: EXPERIMENTAL FILMS FROM THE LOWLANDS. GME also distributes Fruhauf’s NIGHT SWEAT in the collection VISIONARY: CONTEMPORARY SHORT DOCUMENTARIES AND EXPERIMENTAL FILMS FROM AUSTRIA, as well as the artist’s 9-minute short film from 2001, EXPOSED.
Read MoreThis month, films by Rose Lowder and Jean-Luc Godard are playing at the Toronto International Film Festival! GME distributes, to the North American university market, five films by Lowder (spanning 1978 to 1995) in a collection titled BOUQUET D’IMAGES. GME also distributes, on Blu-Ray, DVD, and DSL, Godard’s 1965 wonder ALPHAVILLE.
Read MoreSince the success of our Warren Sonbert retrospective at MoMA earlier this year, there has been renewed international interest in the artist’s extraordinary life and body of work, as evidenced by the forthcoming exhibition Billy Bultheel & James Richards: Workers in Song at WIELS in Brussels. Gartenberg Media Enterprises has granted permission for Richards to include Sonbert’s 1966 masterpiece AMPHETAMINE in this program — with a brand new score — which plays on Saturday, September 9th, and Sunday, September 10th, 2023.
Read MoreSince March of this year, the Museum of the Moving Image has shown the work of prolific multimedia artist José Val del Omar in an exciting, ongoing exhibition titled Cinema of Sensations: The Never-Ending Screen of Val del Omar. Gartenberg Media Enterprises is proud to distribute, to the North American university market, 14 stunning Val del Omar films in a 5-disc boxset titled VAL DEL OMAR: ELEMENTAL DE ESPAÑA.
Read MoreToday, Labor Day, The Brooklyn Rail and the Film-Makers’ Cooperative have made five essential films by the Mother of American Avant-Garde Cinema, the only and only Maya Deren, available to view online, for free, for 24 hours! GME is proud to distribute these five Deren titles — 1943’s MESHES OF THE AFTERNOON, 1944’s AT LAND, 1945’s A STUDY IN CHOREOGRAPHY FOR THE CAMERA, 1946’s RITUAL IN TRANSFIGURED TIME, and 1948’s MEDITATION ON VIOLENCE — to universities in the United States and Canada as both DVDs and DVD/DSL bundles.
Read MoreMajor works by masters of their respective genres, Maya Deren and F.W. Murnau, are being screened April 22nd (Deren) and 23rd (Murnau) at MoMI.
Read More“Cinema of Sensations: The Never-Ending Screen of Val del Omar,” a major exhibition devoted to the work of José Val del Omar (1904–1982), a visionary Spanish artist, filmmaker, and inventor who approached cinema as a multi-sensory experience, is on view at the Museum of the Moving Image through October 1, 2023.
Read MoreExperimental Film Programs at Tribeca Film Festival, April 21 – May 2, 2010
Jon Gartenberg has programmed experimental and avant-garde films for the Tribeca Film Festival since 2003. This year’s selections include three programs offering a range of movies spanning 3 continents & 6 countries.
Check www.tribecafilm.com for screening times, venues and tickets.
Program 1:
VISIONARIES(2010, Chuck Workman), 88 min. World Premiere.
In Precious Images, his 1986 Academy Award®-winning short, director Chuck Workman assembled a breathtaking eight-minute collage of singular images from classic Hollywood movies. In Visionaries, Workman brings alive, in counterpoint to the commercial film industry, the vibrant history of the American avant-garde cinema. In engaging interviews with renowned underground filmmakers and critics including Ken Jacobs, Robert Downey, Su Friedrich, P. Adams Sitney, and Amy Taubin, Workman reveals how this artistic movement highlights subjective vision, sensory experience, and dreams over plot and storyline. The director skillfully intersperses these intimate conversations with a stylistically diverse array of extracts from experimental films of all stripes. Dating from the 1920s to the present, avant-garde films by such pioneering artists as Man Ray, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Andy Warhol, and Sadie Benning vividly illustrate for the general audience a qualitatively different kind of moviegoing experience distinct from that promulgated by the commercial cinema. Workman's documentary pays special tribute to filmmaker, curator, and critic Jonas Mekas and Anthology Film Archives, the organization that he founded. It is the premier American institution dedicated to the preservation and promotion of avant-garde film culture, assuring a long-term home for this alternative cinema right alongside the Hollywood classics.
--Jon Gartenberg
Program 2:
TRAVEL DIARIES
YANQUI WALKER & THE OPTICAL REVOLUTION(2009, Kathryn Ramey), 33 min. New York Premiere.
THE TRAVELOGUES(2009, Dustin Thompson), 49 min. World Premiere.
Co-Presented with Black Maria Film + Video Festival.
The travel diary genre provides the format for experimental filmmakers Dustin Thompson (TheTravelogues) and Kathryn Ramey (Yanqui Walker and the Optical Revolution) to explore, in richly textured and multilayered pictorial and audio fashion, journeys of adventure and conquest. Ramey portrays American expansionist William Walker's ascent to the presidency of Nicaragua in 1856. This film is densely structured. Threading together educational film clips, expressive animation, location photography, on-screen text, voiceover narration, and an array of experimental filmmaking techniques, the filmmaker raises compelling questions about visual perception and the construction of history.
In The Travelogues, Dustin Thompson creates a more personal story. He travels with his film camera across two continents and compiles a series of mini-narratives, suggestive of loves gained and lost. He generates lyrical images, shot at oblique angles and developed with shifting camera speeds; in each scene, the heightened film grain tends to move the depiction of the natural universe toward abstraction. From the prologue through to the epilogue of his journey, this artist travels a fine line between real and imagined worlds.
--Jon Gartenberg
Program 3:
EXPERIMENTAL COLLISIONS[Short Film Program]
The 10 experimental films in this program portray locales found in both natural and urban landscapes across three continents. A few of these artist-filmmakers literally embed the earth (soil and mud) into the fabric of the celluloid. Moreover, they portray these environments with a riveting array of avant-garde techniques that range from mirror images to extended tracking shots leading directly into the mind's eye. They further infuse these found footage, animation, and live action experimental films with dynamic editing rhythms that radically reshape the viewer's perception of reality, leading to Rorschach-like impressions. In experimental cinema, everything culminates in abstract patterns ingrained in the landscape of the film frame.
--Jon Gartenberg
Films include:
• Grandmother’s Eye (2010, Sweden, Jonathan Lewald), 5 min. North American Premiere.
• Release (2010, US, Bill Morrison), 12 min. World Premiere.
• Walkway (2009, US, Ken Jacobs), 9 min. North American Premiere.
• Lachen Verlernt(2009, Great Britain, Tal Rosner), 10 min. World Premiere.
• This disk is the same as the other one(2009, France, Jean-Jacques Palix), 9 min. North American Premiere.
• Collision of Parts (2010, US, Mark Street), 15 min. World Premiere.
• Berlin (2010, Canada, Martin Laporte), 8 min. World Premiere.
• The Delicate Art of the Bludgeon (2009, France, Jean-Gabriel Periot), 4 min. North American Premiere.
• Black White Black White(2009, US, John Thompson), 15 min.World Premiere.
• TheVisible and Invisible of a Body Under Tension(2009,France, Emmanuel Lefrant), 7 min. North American Premiere.
