NYAB Event - "Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894 – 1941" Exhibition

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At Maya Stendhal Gallery
Media: Film

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The product of the largest film preservation endeavor ever, Unseen Cinema is the only comprehensive collection of independent American film from the earliest days of cinema. Widely considered a masterpiece of film restoration and preservation, the ambitious project took over 10 years to complete, realized through the steadfast commitment of Anthology Film Archives along with sixty of the world’s largest film archive institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, The Library of Congress, The British Film Institute, and George Eastman House. Film curator Bruce Posner and film historian Robert A. Haller organized the project, and David Shepard made the series available for digital format.

Exhibited for the first time in its entirety will be the Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941 DVD collection, which was released by Anthology Film Archives last year in conjunction with Image Entertainment. The collection contains a wealth of diverse approaches to the medium, and the range of cinematic enterprise captured is remarkable. Expanded to 180 films with a total running time of over twenty hours, Unseen Cinema represents Anthology Film Archive’s relentless dedication not only to preserving films crucial to cinema history, but also to making these films accessible to film scholars, historians, artists, and film enthusiasts all over the world.

Offering a totally new cinematic experience, the exhibition will be presented in a seven-monitor installation format. Exhibiting these films simultaneously together creates a total immersive environment, allowing viewers to grasp a full sense of the creative impulses and tendencies motivating experimental film before World War II. Playing on each monitor will be one of the seven themes representing the scope of early American film heritage memorialized in Unseen Cinema – The Mechanized eye, The Devil’s Plaything, Light Rhythms, Inverted Narratives, Picturing a Metropolis, The Amateur as Auteur, and Viva la Dance. Highlights include Portrait of a Young Man (1925-31) by Henwar Rodakiewicz, Light Rhythms (1930) by Francis Bruguiere, Charles Klein’s The Telltale Heart (1928), Le Retour á la Raison (1923) by Man Ray, Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand’s Manhatta (1921), and An Optical Poem (1939) by Oskar Fischinger among others.

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