About Unseen Cinema
To mark the 10th anniversary of Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film, 1893-1941, we present two programs from the twenty-program series organized by curator Bruce Posner, producer/preservationist David Shepard, and Anthology Film Archives and Deutsches Filmmuseum. In 2006, the DVD release received a special citation from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Robert Koehler commented, “It isn't often that a film, let alone a DVD release, can be said to rewrite history, but that's the case with the new seven-disc box set, Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde . . . . (W)hat makes Unseen Cinema essential for any serious film lover is the argument it makes: That long before the post-war period of Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas, Americans were experimenting with film form and subject matter. There's no more transparently false idea in film criticism than the notion that everything in cinema has been seen and written about-that there are no new discoveries. Unseen Cinema deliciously, deliriously puts a firm stop to this falsehood.”

Our notes are adapted from Unseen Cinema program notes. Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893-1941 is a collaborative preservation project sponsored by Anthology Film Archives, New York, and Deutsches Filmmuseum, Frankfurt am Main, and generously underwritten by Cineric, Inc. For more information, visit unseen-cinema.com. All prints are from the Unseen Cinema tour. The catalog and DVD set will be on sale at the screenings and in the BAM/PFA Bookstore.

Tonight's Program
Tonight's program features classics of the avant-garde including Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's Manhatta, “a radical modern masterpiece. . . one of the first American avant-garde films and a forerunner of the ‘city symphony' films,” according to Posner. Man Ray's Le Retour á la raison, Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy's Ballet mécanique, and Marcel Duchamp's Anémic cinéma are grouped with examples of early American cinema that exhibit post-modernistic tendencies.