Third session on this cycle of masterpieces of avant-garde American experimental cinema, in this ocassion with films by Mary Ellen Bute, Ted Nemeth, Rudy Burckhardt, Francis Lee, Maya Deren, A. Hackenschmied, Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb and James Agee.
Over the course of the 1940s, some films fell back into the autonomy of the image and into worlds created inside it. Musical orchestration and abstract forms built the cornerstone ofTarantella, while Meshes of the Afternoon demonstrates the endurance of automatism in film. The Pursuit of Happiness sees the metropolis reflected as a space of chance encounters and the search for meaning in each apparently free individual through consumption and the alienation that confined urban symphonies in the preceding years. The USA’s emergence in the Second World War shrouded a large part of avant-garde cinema productions, loading them with violence: 1941 recreates the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, for instance. The directors of In the Street unequivocally place the New York neighbourhood Harlem between the battlefield and the theatre, imbuing it with the aesthetics of street photography. More explicit violence is displayed in the camera-director-performance choreography that unfurls in Meditation on Violence.
Third session on this cycle of masterpieces of avant-garde American experimental cinema, in this ocassion with films by Mary Ellen Bute, Ted Nemeth, Rudy Burckhardt, Francis Lee, Maya Deren, A. Hackenschmied, Helen Levitt, Janice Loeb and James Agee.