Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film, 1894-1941, a compendium of a fascinating selection of short films curated by historians and preservationists Bruce Posner and the late David Shepherd, will be simulcast on Sunday, Nov. 5, as part of an unusual arrangement, on Turner Classic Movies, the online streaming network Kanopy and at the Jones Media Center in Baker-Berry Library at Dartmouth College. The screening begins at 8 p.m. and runs for 4 hours and 15 minutes.
Making the screening even more notable will be the simultaneous playback of an additional 100 short films onto the multi-screen video wall in the Innovation Studio at the Jones Media Center.
The screening has a host of sponsors including the department of Film and Media Studies and the Leslie Center for the Humanities, at Dartmouth, White River Indie Films and the Howe Library in Hanover, which also hosts Posner’s annual series Ciné Salon, a cornucopia of rare, obscure and avant-garde films that screen on Monday nights.
It’s hard to pick highlights out of this cinematic treasure trove but here are a few that you’ll have the opportunity to see.
The Hearts of Age (1934) by William Vance and Orson Welles. One of the earliest known appearances, if not the first, of Welles on film, made when he was a high school student at the Todd Seminary for Boys in Illinois. It’s a take-off on the silent classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.
Annabelle Dances and Dances by W.K.L. Dickson, William Heise, James White and others for Edison Manufacturing Co. A selection of shorts, dating from 1894 to 1897, which feature the popular Annabelle Whitford Moore, who fluttered, pranced and leaped her way across a stage.
Legacy of a Hollywood Extra: Manhattan Cocktail-Skyline Dance; The Wolf of Wall Street- Money Machine; Sins of the Fathers-Prohibition by Slavko Vorkapich, a Serbian-American experimental filmmaker and master of the art of cinematic montage who became so synonymous with the technique that screenwriters and directors would refer simply to a Vorkapich. (1928–29), 2 minutes, three sequences.
The race is on to find and preserve the silent film legacy but, said Posner, there does seem to be an “endless circle of discovery” that makes his work perpetually intriguing.
For more information go to: film-media.dartmouth.edu/news/american-avant-garde-films-be-simulcast.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.