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Read Steve Anderson's feature story on Unseen Cinema for The Independent

The beginning of avant-garde film in America is habitually dated to Maya Deren’s films of the 1940s, but such filmmaking has in fact had a longer history. “Unseen Cinema” presents the first comprehensive retrospective of early American avant-garde work. With 160 titles in newly restored or preserved prints, the series postulates an innovative view of experimental cinema as not only a product of individual avant-garde artists, as we understand it today, but also of Hollywood directors and amateur moviemakers working at all levels of film production from the late 19th century through the first half of the 20th century. Many of these films have not been available since their creation more than a century ago; some have never been screened in public, and almost none have been available in pristine projection prints until now.

The period from 1925 to 1929 was a golden age for avant-garde film, with significant works produced throughout the country by such artists as Slavko Vorkapich, Robert Florey, Ralph Steiner and Robert Flaherty. This period of vitality peaked during the early 1930’s, when both industry professionals and amateurs produced an astonishing array of experimental shorts and features.

UNSEEN CINEMA is a collaborative film preservation project between Anthology Film Archives and Deutsches Filmmuseum sponsored by Cineric, Inc.

February 17: Unseen Cinema # 3
LIGHT RHYTHMS: MELODIES AND MONTAGES

Light Rhythms: Melodies and Montages brings together, perhaps for the first time, a judicious selection of short films or sequences culled from longer films that depend upon the moving visual language of cinema to circumscribe their chosen themes. Whether attempting visual music (Night on Bald Mountain), social documentary (The City), opening title sequence (Hollywood Boulevard), or transitional interlude (So This is Paris), these films evoke a vibrant and graphic depiction of their maker's mind's eye. Extremely rare 35mm prints include work by the father of non-objective film, Hollywood outsider Oskar Fischinger (Radio Dynamic, An American March) and America's foremost creator of "montage sequences," Hollywood insider Slavko Vorkapich (Maytime, Moods of the Sea).

-- Bruce Posner, Unseen Cinema Curator