Director: Various
Year: 1894-1941
Country: USA
Language: English
Length: 1104 mins
Format: NTSC | R0
Colour: Black & White and Colour
Aspect Ratio: 1.33: 1
Certificate: E

Synopsis

Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde 1894-1941 reveals hitherto unknown accomplishments of American filmmakers working in the United States and aboard from the invention of cinema until World War II and offers an innovative and often controversial view of experimental Film as a product of avant-garde artists, of professional directors and of amateur moviemakers working collectively and as individuals at all levels of Film production. Many of the films have not been available since their creation, some have never been screened in public and almost all have been unavailable in copies as good as these until now. Sixty of the world's leading Film archive collections cooperated with Anthology Film Archives to bring this long neglected period of Film back to life for modern audiences.

Film Listing

Contents: 7 dvds – 19 hours -155 films
- The Mechanized Eye – Experiments in technique and form.
- The Devil's Plaything – American Surrealism.
- Light Rhythms – Music and abstraction.
- Inverted Narratives – New directions in storytelling.
- Picturing A Metropolis – New York City unveiled.
- The Amateur As Auteur – Discovering paradise in pictures.
- Viva La Dance – The beginnings of cine-dance.

Special Features

- Digitally mastered from newly preserved and restored 35mm and 16mm prints.
- New recordings of original music by George Anthell, Marc Blitzstein and others; new Film scores by Eric Beheim, Neal Kurz, Paul A. Lehrman, Guy Livingston, Rodney Saucer, Donald Sosin and others.
- Film Notes and filmmakers biographies by historians and scholars Kevin Brownlow, David Curtis, Robert A. Haller, Jan-Christopher Horak, David James, Scott MacDonald, Bruce Posner, David Shephard, Paul Spehr, Cecil Starr and 32 others.
- Rare photos of the Film and filmmakers.
- Essay by curator Bruce Posner.