Unseen Cinema Pt. 1I am working through the UNSEEN CINEMA set now and I'm finally getting a look see at what Anthology Film Archives did in terms of synchronizing the recordings I sent them - that was four years ago! My 78 of John Alden Carpenter's "Skyscrapers" works beautifully with with an early 1930s Slavko Vorkapich montage on the theme of prohibition. A MUST see is "The Furies" (1934) the Vorkapich film which precedes the prohibition on the set. A woman is murdered, and women's spirits fly out of the bloodstains over the city to menace kissing couples in office buldings. Very strange and intense - I quite like the fabrics the Furies wear.
The Joseph Cornell "Thimble Theater" film to which they synched my "Circus Organ Solo" is a homemade film collage that mixes up discarded home movies and other old footage into an assemblage ordered by Surrealist logic. I watched all of the Cornell films in the set, some of which utilize common footage and represent different assemblings of the same material. There is a home movie of a children's party which contains a scene of a little baby boy trying to eat an apple, but he keeps falling asleep - it's really cute and it makes me wonder if Cornell filmed that one himself.
Cornell used to claim that he never used a camera to make any of his films, but he appears in one shot, and there is a color film of a puppet animation that is obviously original, so that makes me suspicious that this comment was sheer hyperbole. But clearly the vibe that comes from Cornell's films is that of a very private artist, looking at movies and utilizing his personal taste to find ways of assembling the various shots with an eye to distort the sense of "meaning."
Uncle Dave Lewis
I think you'll need copies of these things - we're having a big taping party this weekend so hopefully I can pull you a "greatest hits" tape out of it. My wife, though, is worried about the expense of buying tape - we're really broke this week, even though I just got paid. Keep your fingers crossed!