A short made by Joseph Cornell in the late 1930s– An ode to imagination, travel and literature. In true Cornellian fashion, the film borrows footage from, among other films, a Burton Holmes travelogue; Sightseeing tours of Dutch Marken and agrarian Asia therefore become the dream of a boy at a bookstall.Read More »
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One need only look at the phenomenal The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra to see that even in the cinema’s youth filmmakers were not limited by their budgets, but by their imaginations.
Made in 1928, it had a budget of $96 (adjusted for inflation, that’s $1191.33). Sources say that the money was divvied up as such: Film Negative, $25 ($310.24), Store Props, $3 ($27.23), Development and Printing, $55 ($682.54), Transportation, etc, $14 ($173.74). The sets were made of toys and cardboard buildings that were projected like shadows.Read More »
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A Bronx morning is a portrait of a place and time, simultaneously a documentary, an avant-garde experiment, and an amateur film–although its compositional beauty and complex editing disguise that it is a 21-year old’s first attempt at moviemaking. Architectural abstractions are only part of Leyda’s portrait. The film soon naturalizes its abstractions into a vibrant vision of children’s games and adult commerce on the summer streets of the Bronx, the New York borough northeast of Manhattan.Read More »
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Stella F. Simon and Miklos Bandy’s 1927–28 16mm film, Hands: The Life and Love of a Gentle Sex, is a short, experimental, feminist film whose aesthetic is drawn from American and European modernist photography movements and early avant-garde film traditions. The film’s underlying melodramatic narrative formula is complicated by the use of hands as both protagonists and as the central aspect of its modernist mise-en-scène.Read More »
The old Salammbo lives alone on a northern island, in total destitution. Haunted by her memories, Salammbo is mistreated by the phantom of her youth, which sometimes taunts, sometimes bends her back so that she no longer sees the blue of the sky.Read More »
a beautiful and very powerful film
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“A 28-minute tour de force… a beautiful and original exploration of grief and loss.” – Mick LaSalle, San Francisco ChronicleRead More »
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“Cornell combines vaudeville and animal acts, circus performers, children eating and dancing, science demonstrations, mythical excerpts, and crucial freeze-frames of faces into a timeless structure, totally unconcerned with our usual expectations of “montage” or cinematic progression. It’s a delight to anyone whose soul has not been squashed by the heavy dictates of Art” —Larry JordanRead More »
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Disembodied parts of dancers are seen moving freely in black space… form a moving and rhythmic three dimensional design and semi-abstract shapes. – Lewis Jacobs, Avant Garde Production in America.
Experiment in the Film, Gray Walls Press, London, 1949 Our dance audience seems particularly pleased with the opportunity to enjoy such a rare film. – Margaret Cooper, Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada, 1977. Purpose: to demonstrate a (then) new dance medium totally different from the stage.
Audience: general public, dancers, artist’s.Read More »
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A man meets a woman at a deserted railroad station somewhere in northern New England. It is the middle of winter; snow is falling. The two drive to a remote farmhouse. Two strange children, who never speak, appear at the window; an old woman calls them away. First isolation, then alienation, overcome the couple. The woman has a dream, then disappears. Nothing is explained. Only footprints remain in the snow that covers the supernatural landscape. THE ANIMAL is a film about unutterable loss, fate and the unknowable.Read More »