Film Search
The fourth installment in the series “Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film, 1893-1941,” this selection of experiments at the margins of cinema is incoherently programmed but well worth seeing. Often the films register quite differently than their makers intended: Slavko Vorkapich and John Hoffman's impressionistic, somewhat pompous Moods of the Sea (1942) tries to marry ocean imagery with the Mendelssohn on its sound track (crashing waves for loud sections, birds for calm ones), and while it's hard to take as seriously as it seems to demand, it fascinates by pushing the visualization of music to such an extreme. An excerpt from Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke's The City (1939) is interesting less for its urgently presented social themes than for its almost delirious montage, and Christopher Young's surrealist Object Lesson (1941), in which a classical bust appears in a variety of settings, is so nutty it becomes compelling. Also included are a film by Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker, two films by Oskar Fischinger that try to synchronize music with abstract imagery, a silent film of shifting light patterns by Francis Bruguiere and Oswell Blakeston, and numerous montage sequences created by Vorkapich for Hollywood films (and shown silent) that are meaningless out of context. 83 min.
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Sorry there are no showtimes for Light Rhythms: Melodies & Montages on Saturday, November 21.
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