Masterworks of American Avant-Garde Experimental Film 1920-1970

Commencing in 1920 with Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand s creative collaboration on Manhatta, successive generations of experimental filmmakers and artists have worked in collaboration or alone to create a cinema capable of expressing dynamic unspoken concepts in totally abstract visual terms.

Included on this premiere collection of 30 films are the most acclaimed names of American avant-garde experimental filmmaking, including Charles Sheeler, Paul Strand, Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy, Rrose Sélavy (Marcel Duchamp), Robert Florey, Slavko Vorkapich, Ralph Steiner, Jay Leyda, James Sibley Watson, Jr., Melville Webber, Emlen Etting, Joseph Cornell, Mary Ellen Bute, Ted Nemeth, Rudy Burckhardt, Francis Lee, Maya Deren, Alexander Hackenschmied, Oskar Fischinger, Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb, James Agee, Marie Menken, Francis Thompson, Bruce Conner, Jordan Belson, Bruce Baillie, Lawrence Jordan, Jonas Mekas, Tom Palazzolo, Lawrence Janiak, Amy Greenfield, Phil Solomon, and Stan Brakhage.

To watch these films is to see the world anew through cinematic interventions: fast cutting, expressive camerawork, abstract animation, surrealistic collage, distorted and superimposed imagery, and many more extraordinary techniques. Essentially the filmmakers ask us to open our eyes and see, to permit the reception of pure sensations uninhibited by any complex web of predetermined associations dominant in mainstream Hollywood cinema.

Collected from archives around the world, and beautifully restored in high definition, the majority of vintage silent films in Masterworks of American Avant-garde Experimental Film 1920-1970 feature new musical scores from innovative composers Donald Sosin, George Antheil, Eric Beheim, Rodney Sauer, Gustavo Matamoros, Henry Wolfe and Phil Carluzzo.

Bonus Materials Include:
- Seasons... (2002, dir. Phil Solomon, Stan Brakhage)
- Alternate version of Manhatta (1920-21, dir. Charles Sheeler, Paul Strand) with a 2013 music score by Henry Wolfe and Phil Carluzzo. Honored in 2010 with a Film Heritage Award by the National Society of Film Critics.
- Booklet featuring an essay and extensive notes on restorations by curator, filmmaker, and film historian Bruce Posner.