Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941

An authoritative and exhaustive smorgasbord for students of film history, Unseen Cinema is one of the best academically-oriented DVD sets of 2005. Covering some of the same territory as Kino's Avant-Garde set (VL Online-9/05), it's a more far-reaching and better-organized compilation, featuring a whopping 155 films that prove—individually and collectively—that the medium of film provided a creative playground for experimental artists from the very beginning of motion pictures in the mid-1890s. Curated by Bruce Posner (who also wrote the essay included in an accompanying booklet) and culled from 60 archival collections from around the world, the set includes many films that were considered lost forever or previously unknown, comprising a veritable one-stop resource of alternative filmmaking from the first 50 years of motion pictures. Many of early cinema's avant-garde pioneers are represented, of course (including Fernand Léger, Jay Leyda, Norman McLaren, Man Ray, Melville Webber, and others), but what's most fascinating is how many of these offbeat experiments were created by filmmakers who later enjoyed commercial success in Hollywood, such as Busby Berkeley, Victor Fleming, Ernst Lubitsch, Elia Kazan, and Orson Welles. From abstract expressionism to amateur experiments in non-narrative form, these films demonstrate versatility at every level of production, from elaborate studio works to micro-budget efforts by complete unknowns with only raw film stock and sheer ingenuity at their disposal. When appropriate, the films are presented in complete silence, although most are accompanied by new recordings of their original music, or new scores recorded exclusively for this collection. Also included are concise, knowledgeable notes for each film, and filmmaker biographies, written by such noted film scholars as Kevin Brownlow, David Shepard, and many others, along with rare photos of the films and filmmakers. In terms of artistic merit and educational value, this boxed set is easily the best of its kind. Highly recommended. Editor's Choice. (J. Shannon)