Avant-Garde Box Set 2

Avant Garde2: Experimental Cinema 1928-1954
Kino Video
Suggested retail $30

I can’t think of a more valuable DVD resource than Kino’s first volume of Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and 30s. I use it constantly in my teaching, and for my own viewing. Well, thankfully, a second set is out now, and it is just as impressive. Where the first set concentrated on the European interwar avant-garde, this one chronicles many of the films of the American postwar avant-garde, most of which have been impossible to see if you don’t have a 16mm projector and a decent rental budget. For me, getting Geography of the Body and Potted Psalm on DVD was worth the price of purchase alone. The abstractions of the former...

and the playing with image as surface in the latter...

... go a long way to suggesting the search for a new visual vocabulary among the postwar filmmakers, even as the narratives fell into familiar mythopoetic territory.

Though it should be noted that this retreat to high culture was in no small part a defense smokescreen that justified the presentation of gay narratives. To that end, this box set is a valuable contribution not only to historians and teachers of the avant-garde but of gay cinematic representation.

And since I’m a tremendous fan of Gregory Markopoulos’s work, I was thrilled to see one of his early films, 1949’s Christmas, U.S.A. , included. It’s not quite the masterpiece of Twice a Man, and lacks the lushness of Psyche, but it’s already a solid example of Markopoulos’s style, which I’d perhaps best describe as the work of a Fireworks-era Anger who knows how to edit. Like some of his later films, Christmas presents, quite literally, parallel montage, with spaces alternating back and forth, then switching one strand out, then another.



I haven’t made it through all the contents yet, but there’s time to savor.