Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893 - 1941

The series offers an innovative and at times controversial view of experimental film, understood in this context as the product of avant-garde artists, Hollywood directors and amateur filmmakers working at all levels of film production during the last decade of the 19^th and first half of the 20^th centuries. Many of these films have not been available since they were created more than a century ago, while others have never been shown in public. Original projection copies were available in only very few cases.

Since the invention of motion pictures at the Edison Laboratory in New Jersey at the end of the 19^th century, film production has attracted artists, writers, photographers, poets, choreographers, playwrights, designers and people from many other creative fields to the United States. These dreamers and schemers, who Herman G. Weinberg affectionately called ‘film lovers’, created an important group of films that captured the essential elements of the atmosphere of the era. The development of early American avant-garde film was simultaneous with (if not immediately prior to) many of the great 20^th-century North American art movements. The aesthetics of the first avant-garde films abound with prominent examples that correlate, either in style or in substance, with modernism, surrealism, social realism, abstract expressionism, and later, minimalism, structuralism, beat, pop, punk and post-modernism. The final emergence of these art movements in painting, sculpture, performance art, theatre, literature and music included the legacy of the revolutionary work done by these oft-forgotten experimental filmmakers.

The programme, which includes pieces like Twenty-Four Dollar Island (Robert Flaherty, ca. 1926) and A Bronx Morning (Jay Leyda and Leo Hurwitz, 1931), is complemented by a conference with curator Bruce Posner and two special sessions in which musicians Alex Under and I. A. Bericochea give recitals to accompany the screenings, using music appropriate to the avant-garde nature of the films.