Review: Silent Avant-Garde on Kino Blu-ray

Kino Lorber’s Silent Avant-Garde Blu-ray gathers several highlights from their indispensable but now out-of-print Avant Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and ’30s DVD set from 2005 alongside other important and enduring avant-garde films from the 20th century. The 21 shorts included here are a riveting survey of American and European avant-garde filmmaking, from movements as disparate as constructivism and Dadaism, in addition to city symphonies and early experiments with animation.

While a majority of these films were made in the 1920s and ’30s, two of the standouts in this collection are from decades later. Ralph Steiner’s Look Park, edited by Nathaniel Dorsky and released in 1973, playfully functions as a follow-up to Steiner’s famed 1929 short H2O. Like that earlier film, Look Park focuses primarily on the extreme abstractions that can be discovered in Earth’s most bountiful resource. After opening with traditionally picturesque wide shots of the eponymous park, Steiner takes his camera closer and closer to a waterfall, revealing new, increasingly abstract patterns in the reflections of the sun, ultimately going so close to the water that the light begins to rapidly pulsate like an electrified sine wave. Nature is morphed beyond recognition into something completely foreign yet equally gorgeous.

The impulse to defamiliarize the familiar is also a running theme in Francis Thompson’s 1957 film N.Y., N.Y. Here, one of the most photographed cities in all of cinema is warped and fragmented through an impressive arsenal of lenses. Resembling something of a city symphony funneled through funhouse mirrors, Thompson’s thrillingly inventive techniques find a new kind of beauty in the iconic architecture of the Big Apple. If there’s any sort of recurring motif in this release, it’s New York City, which also plays a central role in Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta, Robert Flaherty’s Twenty-Four Dollar Island, Jay Leyda’s A Bronx Morning, all of which use the hustle and bustle of the city as a means for visual expression.

Hollywood, too, makes an appearance in Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapich’s hysterical The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra, which, nearly 100 years after it was made feels so strikingly modern, both in its damning commentary of the Hollywood’s dream factory and its startling visual grammar, that it could almost pass for a work by Guy Maddin. Joseph Cornell’s Eclipse (a.k.a. Rose Hobart) is also ostensibly about Hollywood, though its focus isn’t on the production of films, but rather the effects films produce within us.

Springing from Cornell’s own obsession with the actress Rose Hobart, his film consists of a cut-down and re-edited version of East of Borneo, with only the shots of Hobart remaining. It’s simple in concept, but the new footage transforms the tropical paradise setting of the original film into something of an irreducible nightmare in which Hobart herself remains trapped. Without it, Peter Tscherkassky’s 1999 masterpiece Outer Space would likely not exist.

The remaining films are a hodgepodge of assorted curios, including Orson Welles’s Hearts of Age, made when he was just 19, and five minutes of footage that Sergei Eisenstein shot in Mexico in 1930 and several of Slavko Vorkapich’s montages for Hollywood films in the early ’30s. Marcel Duchamp’s Anemic Cinema and Man Ray’s Return to Reason are the most important of these additional films, but Miklos Bandy’s Hands: The Life and Loves of the Gentler Sex may be the most distinctive. Consisting solely of fragmented shots of female and male hands interacting with one another, this strangely alluring work turns the mundane into a symphony of pure movement—a sensual ballet of limbs that miraculously runs the gamut of emotions through its sheer precision and economy of motion.

Image/Sound

The 21 shorts compiled here are from HD to 5K scans from 16mm and 35mm picture elements. As such, the quality of the image varies from film to film, but the level of detail and sharpness is for the most part stellar. Black levels are also quite impressive and the strong contrast ratio adds even more to the overall clarity of the images. This is, of course, great across the board, but it’s particularly beneficial for the various films shot all around New York City from the 1920s to the ’50s. Many of the shorts come with newly composed pieces from modern experimental musicians, which all sound quite wonderful in their stereo presentation on the disc.

Extras

Dada? Nada.

Overall

Kino’s gorgeous new Blu-ray attests to the breadth of scope of the American and European avant-garde, while remaining economically priced for the cinephile on a budget.