Features: DVD
In the latter half of the 20th Century, Raymond Rohauer was one of the nation's foremost proponents of experimental cinema. Programming diverse films at the Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles, and making the films in his personal archive available for commercial distribution, he helped preserve and promote avant-garde cinema.This two-DVD collection assembles some of the most influential and eclectic short films in the Rohauer Collection, including works by Man Ray, Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, Watson & Webber, Fernand Leger, Joris Ivens, Dimitri Kirsanoff, Jean Epstein, and Orson Welles.
Editor's Note
Raymond Rohauer is often associated with his work preserving and promoting the films of Buster Keaton. But he was also one of the biggest supporters of experimental and avant-garde filmmaking during the latter half of the 20th Century, and this collection presents some of the highlights of his archive. The 24 titles by highly influential artists and filmmakers represent many of of the movements and innovations emerging at the time, which remain influential within the art world. Marcel Duchamp, whose readymade sculptures and theories of art and spectatorship were truly revolutionary, made ANEMIC CIMEMA in 1926, as an experiment in tricks of both the eye and word. Fernand Leger's BALLET MECANIQUE is a stunning dance of mechanical parts at work, an example of modernism's interest in the aesthetics of the machine, and Viking Eggeling's objective SYMPHONIE DIAGONAL displays many of those concerns as well. MANHATTA, by photographer Paul Strand and painter/ photographer Charles Sheerer, is sometimes described as the first American avant-garde film, and takes as its subject a day in the life of New York City. The multiple films by American Dadaist and Surrealist Man Ray include EMAK-BAKIA, L'ETOILE DE MER, LE RETOUR A LA RAISON, AND LES MYSTERES DU CHATEAU DU DE. Each is an example of the remarkable scope and innovation of this Brooklynite who spent many of his working years in Paris. Hans Richter, Germaine Dulac, Jean Epstein, and Sergei Eisenstein all have work in the collection as well, making this an outstanding record of the fulminating creativity and cross-pollination in art and film in the 1920s and '30s.
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