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Treasures From American Film Archives (4 Volumes) [12 DVD9s] (2000-2009)

Classics/Documentary/Experimental | Black and White/Colour | English Dolby Digital 2.0 | English Intertiles | 2265 mins

For silent and experimental film fans, four box sets dedicated to the most historically important American moving images.

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Academy Film Archive, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences™

Luis Martinetti, Contortionist (1894, 1 minute), peepshow kinetoscope of the Italian acrobat made by the Edison Co.

Caicedo, King of the Slack Wire (1894, 1 minute), the first film shot outdoors at the Edison Studios.

The Original Movie (1922, 8 minutes), silhouette animation satire on commercial filmmaking, by puppeteer Tony Sarg.

Negro Leagues Baseball (1946, 8 minutes), footage featuring Reece "Goose" Tatum, the Indianapolis Clowns, and the Kansas City Monarchs.

Alaska Film Archives, University of Alaska Fairbanks

The Chechahcos (1924, 86 minutes), first feature shot entirely on location in Alaska.

Anthology Film Archives

Rose Hobart (1936, 19 minutes), artist Joseph Cornell's celebrated found-footage film.

Composition 1 (Themis) (1940, 4 minutes), Dwinell Grant's stop-motion abstraction.

George Dumpson's Place (1965, 8 minutes), Ed Emshwiller's portrait of the scavenger artist.

George Eastman House

The Thieving Hand (1908, 5 minutes), special-effects comedy.

The Confederate Ironclad (1912, 16 minutes), Civil War adventure, here accompanied by the original music score, in which the tough heroine saves the day.

The Land Beyond the Sunset (1912, 14 minutes), social problem drama about a tattered newspaper boy who yearns for a better life.

Snow White (1916, 63 minutes), live-action feature of the Brothers Grimm tale starring Marguerite Clark.

The Fall of the House of Usher (1928, 13 minutes), avant-garde landmark created by James Sibley Watson, Jr., and Melville Webber from Poe's short story.

Japanese American National Museum

From Japanese American Communities (1927-32, 7 minutes), home movies shot by Rev. Sensho Sasaki in Stockton, California, and Tacoma, Washington.

Library of Congress

Demolishing and Building Up Star Theatre (1901, 1 minute), the time-lapse demolition of a New York building, preserved from a paper print.

Move On (1903, 1 minute), Lower East Side street scene, preserved from a paper print.

Dog Factory (1904, 4 minutes), trick film about fickle pet owners, preserved from a paper print.

Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy (1909, 5 minutes), special-effects fantasy of a tormented smoker, by the Vitagraph Company.

White Fawn's Devotion (1910, 11 minutes), probably directed by James Young Deer and the earliest surviving film by a Native American.

Minnesota Historical Society

Cologne: From the Diary of Ray and Esther (1939, 14 minutes), small town portrait by amateur filmmakers, Dr. and Mrs. Dowidat.

Museum of Modern Art

Blacksmithing Scene (1893, 1 minute), first U.S. film shown publicly.

The Gay Shoe Clerk (1903, 1 minute), comic sketch with celebrated early editing.

Interior New York Subway, 14th St. to 42nd St. (1905, 5 minutes), filmed by Biograph's Billy Bitzer shortly after the subway's opening.

Hell's Hinges (1916, 64 minutes), William S. Hart Western about a town so depraved that earns its own destruction.

The Lonedale Operator (1911, 17 minutes), D.W. Griffith's race-to-the-rescue drama, starring Blanche Sweet.

Three American Beauties (1906, 1 minute), with rare stencil color.

National Archives and Records Administration

We Work Again (1937, 15 minutes), WPA documentary on African American re-employment, including excerpt from Orson Welles' stage play of "Voodoo Macbeth".

The Autobiography of a Jeep (1943, 10 minutes), the story of the soldier's all-purpose vehicle, as told by the jeep itself.

Private Snafu: Spies (1943, 4 minutes), wartime cartoon for U.S. servicemen, directed by Chuck Jones and written by Dr. Seuss.

The Battle of San Pietro (1945, 33 minutes), celebrated combat documentary directed by John Huston.

The Wall (1962, 10 minutes), USIA film on the Berlin Wall made for international audiences.

National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution

From The Keystone "Patrician" (1928, 6 minutes), promotional film for new passenger plane.

From The Zeppelin Hindenburg (1936, 7 minutes), movies by a vacationing American family made on board this famous lighter-than-air-craft, one year before its destruction.

National left for Jewish Film

From Tevye (1939, 17 minutes), American Yiddish-language film, directed by Maurice Schwartz, adapted from Sholem Aleichem's stories.

National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution

From Accuracy First (ca. 1928, 5 minutes), Western Union training film for women telegraph operators.

From Groucho Marx's Home Movies (ca. 1933, 2 minutes).

National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

From Beautiful Japan (1918, 15 minutes), early travel-lecture feature by Benjamin Brodky.

New York Public Library

From La Valse (1951, 6 minutes), pas de deax from George Balanchine's 1951 ballet, featuring Tanaquil Le Clercq and Nicholas Magallanes and filmed at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival.

Battery Film (1985, 9 minutes), experimental documentary of Manhattan, by animator Richard Protovin and photographer Franklin Backus.

Northeast Historic Film

From Rural Life in Maine (ca. 1930, 12 minutes), footage filmed by Elizabeth Wright near her farm of Windy Ledge, in southwestern Maine.

From Early Amateur Sound Film (1936-37, 4 minutes), scenes of family life captured by sound-film hobbyist Archie Stewart.

Pacific Film Archive

Running Around San Francisco for an Education (ca. 1938, 2 minutes), early political ad, shown in San Francisco theaters, that helped win approval of local school bonds.

OffOn (1968, 9 minutes), Scott Bartlett's avant-garde film, the first to fully merge film and video.

UCLA Film & Television Archive

Her Crowning Glory (1911, 14 minutes), household comedy, with comic team John Bunny and Flora Finch, about an eight-year old who gets her way.

I'm Insured (1916, 3 minutes), cartoon by Harry Palmer.

The Toll of the Sea (1922, 54 minutes), Anna May Wong in an early two-strip Technicolor melodrama, written by Frances Marion, and here accompanied a performance of the original music score.

The News Parade of 1934 (10 minutes), Hearst Metrotone newsreel summary of the year.

From Marian Anderson: The Lincoln Memorial Concert (1939, 8 minutes), excerpt from a concert film, reconstructed from newsreels, outtakes, and radio broadcast materials.

West Virginia State Archives

From West Virginia, the State Beautiful (1929, 8 minutes), amateur travelogue along Route 60.

From One-Room Schoolhouses (ca. 1935, 1 min), amateur footage from rural Barbour County.

4 DVDs

DVD RELEASE: May 10th, 2005 (First Edition 2000)

SYSTEM: NTSC

SCREEN: Various from (Picture boxed) 1.15:1 to Full Screen (Standard) - 1.33:1

COLOR: Black & White/Colour

AUDIO: Dolby Digital 2.0 (Mono)

LANGUAGE: Silent/English

INTERTITLES: English

RUNTIME: 642 minutes

FILE SIZES: 6.64/7.34/6.54/7.09GB

More Treasures From American Film Archives 1894-1931

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Disc 1:

Dickson Experimental Sound Film 1894 - One man plays the violin while two others dance - the best subject that could be rounded up in short notice?

Buffalo Bill's Wild West 1894 Annie Oakley, Buffalo Dance, Bucking Bronco - Three brief bits commemorate the famous show. Oakley tries to do her stuff on a stage the size of a small living room.

The Suburbanite 1904 - The notion of moving into a suburb is made into a farce, with movers breaking everything and the cook fighting the mother-in-law.

The Country Doctor 1909 - D.W. Griffith shows his superior style in a sentimental story of illness in the sticks.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz 1910 - A clever program uses cheap effects but good stage-quality costumes and entertainingly silly dances.

Early Advertising Films Admiral Cigarette 1897 Flash Cleaner 1920 Buy an Electric Refrigerator 1926 The Stenographer's Friend 1910 - Advertisements never die. Here we get killer tobacco and an attempt to market a stenographic device that apparently never really worked.

The Invaders 1912 (short feature) - Francis Ford and/or Thomas Ince made this early Indian Western about Indian dealing with dishonest treaties.

The Hazards of Helen: Episode 26 1915 - A fun serial episode with a heroine who saves the day when the railroad breaks down ... but she apparently comes back in the next episode as a 'helpless' female who must prove herself all over again.

Gretchen the Greenhorn 1916 (feature) - Dorothy Gish in a terrific melting-pot drama. Young Gretchen arrives from Holland with a duck under her arm (it doesn't sing) and becomes involved with gangsters. Eventually she finds a nice Italian boy.

The Breath of a Nation 1919 - A Gregory La Cava / Grim Natwick animated comedy making fun of prohibition. Liquor turns an effeminate sissy into a he-man, we're given to understand here.

De-Light: Making an Electric Light Bulb 1920 - Another industrial film contrasts hand-blown light bulbs with the new machine age method.

Skyscraper Symphony 1929 - Film experimentalist Robert Florey makes an avant-garde film just looking up at New York's tall buildings. The first token 'art' film on this set.

Greeting by George Bernard Shaw 1928 - Shaw addresses his audience briefly in this charming record of the great author. If only we had films like this of Abraham Lincoln.

Disc 2:

The Streets of New York 1901-03 What Happened on 23rd Street, At the Foot of the Flatiron, New York "Ghetto" Fish Market -

Delightful glimses of sidewalk traffic - true documentaries. Watching the pedestrians all concerned to keep their hats from blowing away is funnier than the gag of the lady's dress being blown up by the subway grating ... 50 years before The Seven Year Itch.

From Leadville to Aspen, a Hold-Up in the Rockies 1906 - This isn't as advanced as The Great Train Robbery but it is a fascinating mix of travelogue (all the scenery seen from the front of a train) and a robbery story, with some very-well timed action, condsidering the whole film is only two or three takes.

The "Teddy" Bears 1907 - Hilarious. An abbreviated version of the nursery tale ends with Teddy Roosevelt shooting Ma and Pa bear dead, confiscating their stock of Teddy Bear toys for Goldilocks, and marching Baby bear off to captivity!

Children Who Labor 1912 - A serious use of the new medium propagandizes the need to stop child labor abuse.

Early Color Films Concerning $1,000 (excerpt) 1916, Exhibition Reel of 2-Color Film (excerpt) 1929, The Flute of Krishna 1926 - Three different approaches to color. The first is 2-lens Kodachrome, then Brewster Color (several cartoons) and then a Martha Graham performance with her students doing Indian-style dances.

Lotus Blossum (surviving reel of feature) 1921 - An adventure story filmed by Chinese Americans. The title cards have both English and Chinese text.

Gus Visser and his Singing Duck 1925 - A quickie recording of a vaudeville act. Weird performer Visser sings a ditty, punctuated by the duck quacking. It's better than Aflack! and you can't see Visser squeezing the duck or anything ...

Clash of the Wolves (feature) 1925 - A full length Rin-Tin-Tin adventure from Warners.

International Newsreel 1926 - A rare intact newsreel with full logos and titles

Now You're Talking 1927 - A longish Fleischer-animated film teaches telephone etiquette and proper treatment of Ma Bell's equipment. Includes old telephones being taken to the hospital for emergency care.

There It Is 1928 - A wacky Charlie Bowers comedy about a detective and his animated Scottish aide, a tiny fuzzy creature. Bizarre.

A Bronx Morning 1931 - another experimental film is Jan Leyda's artfully-constructed series of views of street scenes from elevated trains, etc.

Disc 3:

Rip Van Winkle 1896 - In the beginning, involved stories were told with several short films, projected separately. One shot = one film. These add up to four minutes.

Mr. Edison at Work in his Chemical Laboratory 1897 - just a shot of the genius "at work" pretending to mix chemicals. He doesn't spit on the floor once.

Life of an American Fireman 1903 - The famous movie about firemen rescuing a family that was later re-edited, confusing film history when critics assumed it introduced parallel intercutting. This is the original cut.

Westinghouse Works 1904 - A big company's record of its giant factories. One long trucking shot taken from an overhead gantry is impressive.

Falling Leaves 1912 - Alice Guy Blachés story about tuberculosis, censored because of its progressive treatment ideas.

Hollywood Promotional films Hands Up (exhibitor's reel) 1918, C-V News (filming Greed) 1923, Movie Lover's Contest 1926 - It's not very edifying knowing the kind of promo drek I cut for years was being done this early. There's hoo-haw touting a new serial, some okay shots of the crew of Greed in the desert (no stars or Von Stroheim), and an annoying quiz contest.

De Forest Phonofilms A Few Moments with Eddie Cantor 1923, President Coolidge, Taken on the White House Grounds 1924 - Eddie Cantor's vaudeville patter and Coolidge's serious speechifying are recorded for all time. Cantor looks like he'd be more fun as President.

Inklings 1925 - Fleischer animation turns clever drawing tricks into a short subject: we see a bearded man being drawn, and then the picture is inverted and it becomes a wolf ...

Lady Windemere's Fan (feature) 1925 - An entire Ernst Lubitch silent comedy, intact and in great shape. Ronald Colman seduces May McAvoy in Oscar Wilde's story -- without dialogue.

Cockeyed 1925 - Trick cameraman Alvin Knechtel plays Weegee-like tricks with split screens. Very well done, and proves that silent cameras had excellent registration - no weave or jitter here at all.

The Passaic Textile Strike 1926 - New Jersey strikers had their own propaganda weapon to counter big business-controlled news outlets in this prologue for a Union pride film. This is the 'communist menace' as perceived in the 1920s.

Tramp, Tramp, Tramp 1926 - An out of the inkwell Fleischer sing-along movie.

Zora Neale Hurston's Fieldwork Footage 1928 - Talk about ethnographic studies - this collection of filmic documents shows how rural Floridian blacks were living out in the logging camps.

Trailers for Lost Films 1923-28 - These trailers are sometimes the only surviving bits of lost features: In The Days of Daniel Boone, The Silent Flyer, The American Venus (with a short glimpse of Louise Brooks), The Great Gatsby, Beau Sabreur, and the lost Emil Jannings / Ernst Lubitsch film The Patriot.

3 DVDs

DVD RELEASE: September 7th, 2004

SYSTEM: NTSC

SCREEN: Various from (Picture boxed) 1.15:1 to Full Screen (Standard) - 1.33:1

COLOR: Black & White/Colour

AUDIO: Dolby Digital 2.0 (Mono)

LANGUAGE: Silent/English

INTERTITLES: English

RUNTIME: 573 minutes

FILE SIZES: 7.39/7.26/7.17GB

Treasures III: Social Issues In American Film 1900-1934

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Disc 1: The City Reformed

The Black Hand 1906, 6 min.

Perhaps the very first 'Mafia' film. Thugs extort money from an honest Italian butcher, but two policemen hide in his freezer to catch them. Like many of these early 'expose' stories, this was based on an incident that happened only a few days before filming.

How They Rob Men in Chicago 1900, 25 seconds

A cynical bit of social comment: A thief uses a woman to distract his mark. When the victim is helpless on the floor, a policeman just takes his money!

The Voice of the Violin 1909, 16 min.

D.W. Griffith

Godless terrorists -- Marxist, anarchists, and other good-for-nothings -- enlist an unhappy musician to help bomb the house of a 'monopolist'. Since these groups actually existed, this is a fascinating record of their image in the media of the time.

The Usurer's Grip 1912, 15 min.

An interesting drama about a common problem: we're told that 35% of NYC workers owed money to illegal lenders, and were doubly helpless because exposure usually resulted in being fired from one's job.

From the Submerged 1912, 11 min.

Theodore Wharton

A fully realized socially conscious story. A penniless bum comes into an inheritance and finds out that his new society swells have a bad attitude to poverty ... they go on a 'slumming party' to observe the amusing folks on skid row.

Hope - A Red Cross Seal Story 1912, 14 min.

An early example of a film designed to raise awareness for a specific problem, in this case tuberculosis. A doctor scoffs at the idea that TB, a 'city problem' could rear its head in a country setting.

The Cost of Carelessness 1913, 13 min.

Underwritten by a streetcar company, this early traffic safety film shows people how to get on and off streetcars without being crushed or shredded by traffic. Some fairly convincing mayhem on Main Street. To demonstrate a streetcar fitted with a special catcher shield, the filmmakers actually partially run over a small boy.

Lights and Shadows in a City of a Million 1920, 7 min.

A Ford Motor Company film promoting public charity for a community fund.

6 Million American Children Are Not in School 1922, 2 min.

Lewis Selznick produced this public-service film protesting against child labor. Kids haul fabric in New York and six year-olds process shrimp in Biloxi. The notes for this one show that the filmmakers exaggerated some of the facts, although the child labor situation in 1922 was still nothing to brag about.

The Soul of Youth 1920, 80 min.

William Desmond Taylor

Hollywood's most famous murdered director made this story of the Juvenile Court system championed by one Judge Lindsey. Several case stories are dramatized, stressing a sympathetic approach and family adoption over dank orphanages.

A Call for Help from Sing Sing! 1934, 3 min.

This is an expanded newsreel segment (with sound) in which an outspoken prison warden calls for reforms to keep young offenders out of prison. It acknowledges the fact that thousands of boys and young men abandoned by the Depression are out looking for work, and are bound to get into trouble.

Disc 2: New Women

Kansas Saloon Smashers 1901, 1 min.

Edwin S. Porter

An amusing one shot-one angle film of 'Carrie Nation' and her Temperance women destroying a bar; a special effect shows a mirror breaking without harming the mirror. Kansas saloons had been outlawed for years, so the sheriff arrested her for disturbing the peace. "You can't be charged with destroying that which does not exist!"

Why Mr. Nation Wants a Divorce 1901, 2 min.

Edwin S. Porter

A typical reactionary joke film. While Carrie is out terrorizing saloons, her husband tries to cope with the kids and a baby. A sign on the wall says, "What is a home without a MOTHER?"

Trial Marriages 1907, 12 min.

Francis Marion

Another backlash film reacting to the notion blind marriage agreements might not be the best idea for society. Each of the comic vignettes takes the man's point of view; each of his 'trial unions' is a total disaster. A progressive idea held up to ridicule.

Manhattan Trade School for Girls 1911, 16 min.

Girls between 14 and 17 attend this 'useful trade' academy, stressing that most working class kids didn't even go to high school before the 1920s. It's sort of a finishing school for the underprivileged.

The Strong Arm Squad of the Future 1912, 1 min.

A weird, prejudiced cartoon that pictures suffragettes as psychos, masculine brutes and neurotics.

A Lively Affair 1912, 7 min.

A more elaborate slam at suffragettes shows the women as irresponsible, yammering ninnies. One steals a little girl's bicycle (typical suffragette behavior!) and they argue during a card game. The cops have to come break up their meeting before it turns into a riot, and they all land in the hoosegow. This must have helped form a lot of negative opinions.

A Suffragette in Spite of Himself 1912, 8 min.

Bannister Merwin

Made in England by the Edison Company, this shows a man victimized when some kids tack a pro- women's rights sign on his back. Once again, chaos, but the hysterics this time are all male.

On to Washington 1913, 80 seconds

A newsreel fragment showing New Jersey suffragettes beginning a march to Washington. Compare the 'costumes' with the Temperance Parade in The Wild Bunch, which is supposed to take place in the same year.

The Hazards of Helen, Episode 13 1915, 13 min.

Paul C. Hurst

Spirited Helen Holmes is the star of this action serial. A railroad telegraph operator loses her job after her office is robbed, but she goes after the thieves as if she were Indiana Jones, and gets her old job back again. Very exciting action in and around trains; and surely a liberating fantasy for young girls.

Where Are My Children? 1916, 65 min.

Lois Weber

One of the best films here, this feature is for birth control but against abortion. A group of rich housewives secretly have abortions so as not to interrupt their leisurely lifestyle; while one husband yearns to have children. Then comes an abortion-related death, a trial, and a revelation that brings on the demand of the title. With a creepy, The Blue BIrd- like depiction of heaven populated with children waiting to be born -- and abandonded to limbo when their mothers destroy them.

The Courage of the Commonplace 1913, 13 min.

A Vitagraph film with a well thought out message. A hardworking girl on a farm sacrifices everything to help out, including her chance to escape to a better life at college. Very much like George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life, Mary Charleson lets her 'pretty' sister have the easy road with beaus and dates while she takes care of baby brothers and gives up her school money to help buy a new horse.

Poor Mrs. Jones! 1926, 46 min.

Produced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, this is practically work of art. Frazzled farm wife Leona Roberts takes a needed vacation to visit 'rich' relatives in the city, only to find that conditions in the city leave a lot to be desired. Beautifully made on all counts.

Offers Herself as a Bride for $10,000 1931, 2 min.

A great little time capsule: a quickie interview with a woman who became a media sideshow by advertising herself as willing to marry for money to help support her parents. One expects a scam artist but the woman placing the ad is obviously sincere. The disc set notes tell her entire story, outside the brief film newsreel.

Disc 3: Toil and Tyranny

Uncle Sam and the Bolsheviki I.W.W. Rat 1919, 40 seconds

The collection moves into pure propaganda with an anti-Union cartoon propagated by The Ford Motor Company, which presents all labor organizers as literal vermin to be exterminated. Pretty ugly stuff. Curiously, the assassin-farmer does his dirty work while Hiding Behind the 'American Institutions'.

The Crime of Carelessness 1912, 14 min.

A manufacturer's association produced this effective piece about a thoughtless worker whose smoking burns down a factory. Interestingly, the argument isn't totally one-sided; the owner is accused of blocking fire exits as well. It ends with a labor-management reconciliation almost identical to Metropolis, made fifteen years later.

Who Pays? Episode 12 1915, 35 min.

Future director Henry King co-wrote and stars in this final chapter of a serial about labor strife in a northwestern lumber yard. A brutal foreman starts a fight that results in the firing of an employee, whose wife dies from worry. In retaliation, the employee steals a Union organizer's gun (?) and tries to assassinate the heartless mill owner. A prime forerunner of the "It's everyone's problem" school of social consciousness; blame is not assigned to one side of the issue.

Labor's Reward 1925, 13 min.

One reel survives of an originally longer serial produced by the AFL. The importance of working and buying Union label only is driven home with some fairly weak melodramatics. This sums up the uninspired good intentions of much pro-Union propaganda.

Listen to Some Words of Wisdom 1930, 2 min.

A talkie newsreel conversation between 'Mr. Courage' and 'Mr. Fear' is a rather silly attempt to convince people to keep spending after the Stock Market crash, to make America strong again. That's a mistake! The best advice for early 1930 is to get your money out of uninsured bank accounts!

The Godless Girl 1928, 128 min.

Cecil B. DeMille

The most prestigious feature in the set is this typically brilliant, but politically insane show about an absurd conflict between rabid Christians and provocative atheists. It's De Mille's last silent picture and stars Marie Prevost and James Duryea (who, if the IMDB is correct, as Tom Keene, would later star in Plan 9 from Outer Space). Scandal-crazy atheist kids disrupt a high school and a counter-riot by Bible-thumper teens results in the death of a young girl. Three are sent to a reform institution, including the leader of the Christian zealots (yeah, sure), and the picture suddenly switches to a kids-in-sadistic-prison epic. The ending message is supposed to be about tolerance, but in the movie I see, the atheist changes her stripes. With a stunning riot scene and one of the better fire scenes in early film history.

Disc 4: Americans in the Making

Emigrants Landing at Ellis Island 1903, 2 min.

Raw newsreel footage of foreigners alighting on American soil.

An American in the Making 1913, 15 min.

U.S. Steel made this picture about the great opportunities for immigrants in the steel industry, killing several birds with one film by including bits about the Steel works' safety programs and socially progressive schools, etc., for children of the workers. It's a terrific look at how 'good' immigrants are pictured; our Czech hero forgets all about the Old Country, finds himself a nice American schoolteacher and starts with a clean slate.

Ramona 1910, 16 min.

D.W. Griffith

Griffith's classic reduces the famous story to a handful of vignettes, but is an impassioned plea for Indian rights. Stars Mary Pickford and Henry B. Walthall.

Redskin 1929, 82 min.

Victor Schertzinger

A deluxe Paramount picture filmed in 2-strip Technicolor, except for scenes in the White Man's world, which are in tinted B&W. Canyon de Chelly and a Pueblo rock community provide scenery for a pretty good story of a Navajo (Richard Dix) who rejects White society while at college and returns to his tribe. They reject his modern ways as well, so he decides to steal his beloved from the enemy Pueblo tribe before she can be forced to marry a brave she doesn't love (Noble Johnson). Reasonably well told and exciting; the message is folded into a conventional narrative.

The United Snakes of America 1917, 80 seconds

Another feeble political cartoon short by the increasingly left-wing Ford Motor Company. Giant serpents representing evil German sympathizers, the congress and 'propagandists' hinder Uncle Sam from fighting the Hun.

100% American 1918, 14 min.

Arthur Rosson

Mary Pickford animates this cute short about a petty girl that hears a patriotic speech and changes her ways. She saves for war bonds instead of squandering her money like her frivolous girlfriend. Her end reward is the return of her war hero and a big party!

Bud's Recruit 1918, 26 min.

King Vidor

A great little picture about a foppish fellow who doesn't want to go to war. His gung-ho younger brother volunteers in his name, forcing him to act like it was his idea all along. When he leaves at the end, the movie communicates hints that it might be a big mistake. This is said to be King Vidor's earliest surviving film, and it's quite sophisticated in effect.

The Reawakening 1919, 10 min

The Ford Motor Company sponsored this cheery picture about maimed veterans being made 'good as new' by veterans' hospitals, given artificial limbs, etc. Its heart may be in the left place, but the film studiously avoids the thousands of men left with terrible disfigurements, or restricted to bed for the rest of their lives because of lung damage from gassing.

Eight Prohibition Newsreels 1923 - 1933, 13 min.

The collection ends on a light note with a set of shorts depicting the changing attitude toward Prohibition. Halfway through, even the filmmakers seem to regret seeing the cases of booze being smashed. Sound newsreels at the end have famous politicians like Al Smith and Fiorello La Guardia expressing contempt at an official finding declaring that prohibition must be maintained. Unfortunately, Prohibition was one of the main offshoots of the suffrage movement!

4 DVDs

DVD RELEASE: October 16th, 2007

SYSTEM: NTSC

SCREEN: Various from (Picture boxed) 1.15:1 to Full Screen (Standard) - 1.33:1

COLOR: Black & White/Colour

AUDIO: Dolby Digital 2.0 (Mono)

LANGUAGE: Silent/English

INTERTITLES: English

RUNTIME: 738 minutes

FILE SIZES: 7.49/7.24/7.25/7.71GB

Treasures IV: Avant Garde Film 1947-1986

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Disc One:

Harry Smith

Film No. 3: Interwoven 1947-49 3 min.

Described as an "alchemist, mystic, & bohemian at large", Smith made this jaunty animated picture without benefit of a camera. It's a lively series of morphing patterns set to Dizzy Gillespie jazz, and has been called "five instruments with optical solo". Crude but alive, the film couldn't be made with a computer and have the same effect. It defines what our UCLA film instructors hailed as a saving grace: "It's organic!" Named to the Library of Congress in 2006. (BTW, Harry Smith has equal importance as an anthologist of American folk music: The Harry Smith Project: The Anthology Of American Folk Music Revisited.)

Jonas Mekas

Notes on the Circus 1966 12 min.

Mekas founded the magazine Film Culture in 1954 and wrote for the Village Voice. The movie is a stuttering, fragmented look at the circus in impressionist fast cuts, accompanied by Jim Kweskin and the Jug Band. Mekas has a website: www.jonasmekas.com

Bruce Bailie

Here I Am 1962 10 min.

Some of the films included here don't seem all that avant-garde. Bailie, a Bay Area veteran who founded Canyon Cinema in 1960, simply filmed some developmentally challenged kids at a special school called the East Bay Developmental left. The content-driven film isn't particularly experimental; we simply watch the faces of the children and think about their personalities.

Chick Strand

Fake Fruit Factory 1986 22 min.

Another film from the Canyon Cinema group. Ms. Strand taught for 24 years at Occidental and made this movie in Mexico. Without a single establishing shot it covers the mostly female Mexican workers at an artificial fruit factory, all in choker close-ups. They work on their little models and discuss paints as well as their sex lives; we hear gossip about the (Anglo) factory owner, who apparently is unaware of the content of their (subtitled) dialogue. Eventually they attend a picnic at a pool. It's intimate, engaging and it works. Film theoreticians taught that the human face is all that is needed to create an absorbing film; this picture proves it.

Jane Conger Belson Shimane

Odds & Ends 1959 4 min.

This somewhat spoofy picture was made by the wife of experimental filmmaker Jordan Belson, who said offhandedly that she "just got high and put it together." The title is accurate, as the movie is constructed from leftover pieces of other films including advertising footage. The audio is a fake hipster narration that begins with sincere-sounding artistic observations but soon segues into a more practical viewpoint: "Money is irrelevant but being subsidized is great!"

Robert Breer

Eyewash 1959 3 min.

By the late 1950s Jordan Belson was already making the experimental, abstract Vortex movies that would later become a staple of head-trip light shows. Many late 50s avant-garde efforts were abstract movies that sought to induce different moods with distorted visuals. This picture is re-photographed from animation projected on still slides, and relies on transformations for its major effects. Many blurs, some nice abstract images.

Storm de Hirsch

Peyote Queen 1965 9 min.

Ms. Hirsch actually began in the early 50's, making experimental feature-length dramas. For this piece she cut, etched and painted directly on film. It's described as a "mystic exploration of life" and is compared to Action Painting. For some sequences she uses un-split 35mm / 16mm printing negative, resulting in four split screens, the left side an inversion of the left. Peyote Queen was probably described as psychedelic, a term just being applied to film and music in 1965.

Pat O'Neill

7362 1967 10 min.

This film is technically sophisticated in a way not common to most avant-garde efforts. O'Neill worked with effects advertising guru Robert Abel in the early 1960s and later contributed animation to a couple of Star Wars episodes; he set up the optical company Lookout Mountain Films. Using hi-con film stock 7362, O'Neill dazzles us with an array of auto-matting and bi-pack tricks that transform items like a rocking oil pump into kaleidoscopic patterns. Some of the mechanical abstractions resemble montages in Metropolis. The complex, mesmerizing moving images seem to mirror some invisible function in our own heads. This is the best brain-warp picture in the set.

Wallace Berman

Aleph 1956-66? 8 min.

Berman was a Beat artist known for a hand-printed art and poetry magazine called Somina. This is his only film; he showed it infrequently to guests, usually one at a time. Stan Brakhage rescued Aleph and blew it up to 16mm. The jazzy track is a new addition by John Zorn.

Saul Levine

Note to Pati 1969 7 min.

Saul Levine loved 8mm and Super-8 and taught film; the movie is a series of blurry shots taken in a snowstorm in Medford, Massachusetts. This reviewer didn't see much connection between the film and the praise in the Treasures IV booklet. Levine's accomplishments as an activist and educator seem more interesting.

Joseph Cornell

By Night with Torch and Spear 1940s? 8 min.

Cornell is famous as the maker of collage boxes using found objects. After a few early film works he became more associated in film through artists he inspired or sponsored, like Lawrence Jordan. This show of indeterminate date was discovered in a stack of cans donated to the Anthology Film Archives. Like Cornell's famous Rose Hobart, it is a compilation of discarded footage, some of it from educational pictures. The title is taken from an inter-title seen at the end; the great new score is by John Zorn.

Stan Brakhage

The Riddle of the Lumen 1972 13 min.

The undisputed King of the avant-garde filmmakers, Stan Brakhage has already been the subject of a large Criterion collection, with another rumored to be on the way. He described this piece as an ode to light -- reflected, filtered, shining -- light is the "hero". As with many Brakhage films, the accompanying text introduction is necessary to gain a clue as to what is going on.

Christopher Maclaine

The End 1953 34 min.

Another filmmaker championed by Brakhage. Something of a Beat epic, Maclaine's mini-feature is a disjointed melodrama about the last day in the lives of five passionate people. A portentous, demented narrator interrupts at regular intervals to speak over a black screen. A nuclear war is about to wipe everyone out, and the narrator frames all of his statements in doomsday banalities. It's like a Coleman Francis film, or the home movies of a particularly emotional psychotic. The five people wander through San Francisco while the editing throws in random cutaways to odd subjects, like somebody's forearm. At the finish the voiceover tells us that nothing makes sense and that we'll have to "make our own movie" by assembling the random pieces in our heads.

Disc Two:

Shirley Clarke

Bridges Go-Round 1958 min.

Back we go to New York, to Shirley Clarke, later the maker of commercially exhibited feature works like The Connection, Cool World and Portrait of Jason. Building on her experience making films for the Brussels World's Fair, Clarke harnesses bi-pack techniques to superimpose multiple moving images of New York's bridges. Because of rights issues she used alternate soundtracks, one by Louis & Bebe Barron (which sounds suspiciously like cues for Forbidden Planet) and another by jazz man Teo Macero. Ms. Clarke came to UCLA to teach in the early 1970s and was much admired.

Marie Menken

Go! Go! Go! 1962-64 11 min.

New York painter Menken was married to Willard Maas, a poet and professor. For eleven thrilling minutes her time-lapse camera wanders Manhattan and Brooklyn capturing the living, breathing city. She eventually ends up at Coney Island. Scanning the video at a slow speed produces an endless document of commuters, street activity and necking beachgoers as if seen through a Time Machine; we know that the 1964 date is correct because the movie Captain Sindbad is playing at a theater near the boardwalk. The Treasures booklet tells us that Menken & Maas were reportedly the models for Martha and George in his play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Ken Jacobs

Little Stabs at Happiness 1959-63 15 min.

At this point the films in the collection veer into self-conscious Camp territory, losing their innocence along the way. Notorious filmmaker Jack Smith and Jerry Sims play an infantile couple acting out an absurd non-drama. Smith's oral-fixated clown has a blue nose; Sims wears a sheet of cellophane in her hair. She smiles while he tortures a Howdy Doody doll. We love ya, Ken, but the whole thing is trying too hard.

Ron Rice

Chumlum 1964 23 min.

Ron Rice is another Jack Smith collaborator who ran with the Warhol crown and died young. This Camp mini-saga uses a score of Warhol notables, all wearing exotic costumes from Mom's attic and cavorting in sets made of sheer drapes, balloons, and whatever jetsam was available -- an Arabian Nights amateur haunted house. It's an elaborate ode to group narcissism, Kenneth Anger without the spiritual/demonic dimension: much writhing in hammocks, nothing gross or obscene. The percussion audio track is by Angus MacLise of The Velvet Underground. This is definitely more Underground than avant-garde.

Andy Warhol

Mario Banana (No. 1) 1964 4 min.

Warhol apparently filmed static "screen tests" of his large assembly of actors, "personalities" and hangers-on; this one-take wonder is a slow-motion close-up of cross-dressing Mario Montez eating a banana, with a predictably suggestive, comic result. Warhol's Superstars certainly proved that one could generate a bogus celebrity "in-crowd" out of thin air.

George Kuchar

I, An Actress 1977 9 min.

On the other hand, George Kuchar and his brother Michael are the Real Deal ... they were making vaguely aberrant Hollywood-influenced Camp home movie epics at the age of 12, and were regularly banned from amateur shows. But their crazy parade of weirdness caught on in Art School, leading to demented epics like Hold Me While I'm Naked (1966) and Sins of the Fleshapoids. This exuberant effort is a project in a film class Kuchar was teaching. Aspiring actress Barbara Lapsley is hounded and harassed to let go and give an open performance in a screen test- like one shot setup. A wig on a post stands in for her co-star. Kuchar keeps breaking in to coach Lapsley and enthusiastically act out her role; the interplay is hilarious.

Robert Nelson & William T. Wiley

The Off-Handed Jape ... & How to Pull It Off 1967 8 min.

Not so amusing but reportedly representative of an avant-garde spur in the direction of stand-up comedy, this is a performance piece by a pair of "Funk Artists", sort of an anti-vaudeville act in search of laughs. One of the comedians does look a bit like John Astin, however.

Owen Land

New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops 1976 10 min.

A more involved piece that resembles a Monty Python sketch performed in a state of acute depression. The recorded instructions from some forgotten record (about learning how to follow instructions?) are the basis for an absurd "test". A skeptical but compliant man takes the test and "enters" an illustration on the test form; eventually succumbing to instructional overload. A concept film that almost makes it to the finish line. It ends with the filmmaker running with a banner reading THIS IS A FILM ABOUT YOU.

Lawrence Jordan

Hamfat Asar 1965 13 min.

Jordan was honored with an entire disc of his work in last year's The Lawrence Jordan Album. This relatively early film shows the basic filmmaking M.O. that served Jordan for decades: cut-out illustrations animated over a static background, in this case, a vintage ink drawing of a seaside cliff. Fanciful objects are created by combining images; many transformations occur.

Standish Lawder

Necrology 1969-70 11 min.

A brilliant concept film, the kind we film students would have killed to have invented for our UCLA Project One. For a full nine minutes, a steady flow of escalator riders rises backwards through the frame and into darkness. It's the multitude of humanity spread out before our eyes, to the music of Sibelius. The title (which means a list of the dead) suggests they are rising to heaven; the cumulative honesty of all the real faces is deeply affecting. They're just riding an escalator in Grand Central Station, but many of their faces already seem resigned to a meaningless eternity. Oddly, the filmmaker's addition of a cynical joke at the end doesn't break the magic spell.

Larry Gotheim

Fog Line 1970 11 min.

Other concept films aren't so successful. This item consists of one unbroken shot of fog lifting on a country landscape. Eleven slow minutes later (apparently the length of a 16mm film magazine) what was a hazy blur is now a hazy view of a hill, some trees and telephone lines. Not exactly a transcendental experience, yet I can easily imagine it being praised to the heavens by some of my film school colleagues.

Hollis Frampton

(nostalgia) 1971 36 min.

Then again, there do exist "pretentious" art filma that wildly overachieve. We're suspicious of Frampton's autobiographical memoir when it's described as a study of the "disjuncture of Image and memory", but then the shockingly simple concept movie goes way beyond our expectations. We see twelve prints of Frampton's favorite photos burn, one after another, on an electric stove. A narrator (Michael Snow, the maker of the similarly profound Wavelength) describes the image and tells an anecdote or two on how it came to be made. The gag is that the images and the speeches are offset -- each description/story aligns with the next photo, not the one we're looking at. We cannot associate any of the anecdotes to an image until the next photo comes up, by which time we're already listening to a new story. The memory of each picture quickly fades, like our own memories. Also, each story ends long before its accompanying photo finishes burning. The recurring silent images lingering on ashes are a reminder of the ultimate fate of all memories. As we near the end, we realize that there will be at least ONE STORY for which we'll have no picture at all ... which is strangely distressing. The voiceover finishes with words that might describe every filmmaker's desperate wish: "Here it is. Look at it. Do you see what I see?" One movie like (nostalgia) compensates for weeks spent watching unrewarding filmic junk.

Paul Sharits

Bad Burns 1982 6 min.

This is a rather late entry in the eternal, infernal student filmmaking subgenre known as "The Film Burns In The Gate". We all made or proposed pictures like this; Monte Hellman made good use of the gag in Two-Lane Blacktop and Sidney Lumet sort of did it in Fail-Safe. Burns worked with Stan Brakhage in Denver and experimented with re-photographing film in various states, finding opportunities in accidental technical mishaps. This entire exercise is a mostly out-of-focus shot of a strip of film moving crookedly through the frame, with a blur effect from a slightly unsynchronized shutter. The film periodically slows down, just enough to start burning. Like, Far Out.

2 DVDs

DVD RELEASE: March 3rd, 2009

SYSTEM: NTSC

SCREEN: 1.33:1

COLOR: Black & White/Colour

AUDIO: Dolby Digital 2.0 (Mono)

LANGUAGE: English

RUNTIME: 312 minutes

FILE SIZES: 6.41/7.0GB

EXTRACTION:

ENGINE: DVD Decrypter

DVD: Full Dual-Layer DVD

FILE EXTENSION: .ISO (Image)

SCANS: 600 DPI PDF Booklet = 253MB

TOTAL FILE SIZE: 92.8 GBs

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Rating:
2.5 out of 5 by Book123