Bleu Shut

One of the more accessible examples is Bleu Shut. Robert Nelson's 1970 film won a National Film Preservation Award and, like Eureka, is a meditation on cinematic time. Where Gehr's film emphasizes the materialist side of the sturctural-materialist equation, Bleu Shut is concerned primarily with the sturctural side. The film comprises discrete units divided by minute, with a clock in the corner revealing the elapsed time. In contrast to ficiton films which ask the spectator to submit to a narrative time, here the experience of real time is played with. And played with is the right term: Bleu Shut approaches its materialism with both an aleatory aesthetic and a sense of humor.

Audience: Fairly accessible as far as experimental work goes. I find the film entertaining - and some students do as well - but that reaction may vary by crowd. Do note that there is a brief but graphic clip of an old pornographic stag film.

Basics: Robert Nelson, 1970, 16mm, color, 30m

Distribution: Canyon Cinema, 16mm rental, $125 + shipping + fees

Eureka

Eureka (1974), to me, suggests the expressive potential that structural film can have. Taking an early cinema actuality film and slowing it down through frame-by-frame shooting, Ernie Gehr creates a meditation on cinematic time. From the description – and from what I know of the use that 60s and 70s avant-garde filmmakers made of early cinema – I expected more tinkering with the image, either by montage, image manipulation or projection effects. Instead the film presents the original footage with a film speed (3-4fps? Gehr says he extends each frame 6-8 times) that hovers right at the cusp of our perception of continuous motion. The spectator thereby is both able to see the individual frames and to follow the movement. At times this gives a ghostly effect. Meanwhile, the slowness of the shot – a barely interrupted dolly along a city’s trolley tracks – is matched by the overall busy-ness of what passes in front of the camera. Motion becomes a controlled, ongoing revelation of space and activity.

Classroom audience: I suspect undergraduates, beyond the most advanced, will find this challenging, given the running time for a limited number of shots. Would work very well in a class on early cinema (where I saw it, in fact), or a unit on structural film, or cinematic time.

Basics: Ernie Gehr, 1974, 16mm, b&w/si, 30m, $90

Distributor: Canyon Cinema 16mm rental, $90 + shipping + fees

Useful readings: Mary Ann Doane, Emergence of Cinematic Time
Scott MacDonald, "Ernie Gehr: Camera Obscura/Lens/Filmstrip" Film Quarterly Vol. 43, No. 4. (Summer, 1990), pp. 10-16.

Soft Grand Opening

Pardon the abortive launch of this blog: great idea, too little time this semester. Fortunately, some colleagues and I have been screening and renting 16mm films for courses this semester, so I will be posting write ups over the coming couples of weeks.

TV history

This blog has been dormant far too long, even though I have a few posts I've been meaning to write up. For now, I'll just link to the PopMatters website and their list of TV that should be on DVD. TV certainly poses special challenges for those scholars and teachers who are looking for historical texts without existing video distribution. I've been forced to rely on the Vanderbilt Television News Archive and various collector websites.

Correction, Please

Correction, Please: or, How We Got into the Pictures
(Noel Burch, 1979, British Arts Council [TV])

I’ve talked about this film elsewhere, but I’m pleased to note that this half-forgotten Noel Burch film about early cinema does have a video distributor, Concord Video in the UK (they’re the distribution arm of the British Arts Council, who produced Correction, Please). Last I checked, 120 pounds sterling can get you an NTSC conversion VHS copy for your institution (75 pounds for PAL). The website, meanwhile, lists DVD copies (PAL) available. Given the exchange rate, that's not cheap for American purchasers, but it's a title worth owning.

Made in 1979, Correction, Please is really two things at once. Part of it is a pedagogical film, illustrating the changes that film underwent in the transition from early to classical cinema. My favorite part are the five recreations that mimic, loosely, discrete moments in film history:

Circa 1903
Griffith Biograph one-reeler, c. 1909
Transitional Hollywood film, with errors, c. 1915 (not pictured below)
Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (Lang, 1925)
Mature silent classical Hollywood, late 1920s



At the same time, Burch’s film belongs to a lineage of experimental works of the 1960s and 1970s which used early and pre- cinema as inspiration for counter cinema practice. Like Thom Anderson’s Edward Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (which also deserves a write up here at Not on DVD), Correction Please reflects on cinemagoing, though where Anderson’s film is about the perceptual quality of film viewing, Correction is about the narrational dimension of spectatorship.




“How we got into the pictures” is meant figuratively and more literally.

About This Site

Today, at Causeway Film and Video Forum, Diana King has an interesting write up on a video short called The Bachar Tapes. But what struck me equally was her rationale for a pending series of posts:

Many films, especially educational documentary and video art pieces, are simply not available for inexpensive home rental from Netflix and other sources. In an effort to provide an entry point to some of these titles, the Forum welcomes descriptive entries of the relatively hard to find.

Being a film scholar (currently a lecturer at Temple University) who has written on film availability and 16mm distribution at my blog and at the group site Dr. Mabuse's Kaleidoscope, this sentiment struck a chord. Diana's idea is something that meets an unfulfilled need in the film blogosphere and something that would benefit from the collective energies of multiple contributors (the wisdom of crowds, to use a cliche). An email or two later, Diana and I agreed that a group site devoted to materials not on commercial DVD could be a beneficial resource for film scholars, educators, librarians, and cinephiles. Hence the present site.

Of course, there's so much material that has not seen the light of day in the home video market. Works meant for the art market. Much of post World War II experimental film. Films forgotten and television broadcasts not meant to be more than ephemeral. For the purposes of this site, works released with institution-purchase-only policies or with institutional pricing (say, more than $75 a tape or DVD) will count as "not on DVD."

The actual films or media works discussed will be left up to contributors, but the site provides an excellent opportunity to discuss experimental film; video art; political, experimental, and educational documentary; and feature narrative, including works whose canonical status or national cinema importance has not translated into availability. The focus, that is, leans distinctly toward highbrow film culture and the institutional/educational milieu, but it need not preclude consideration of orphaned films, historical television texts, recent undistributed American independents, forgotten commercial cinema, or cult cinema.

Some ends to discussion, and why a group blog might be particularly effective:

Curatorial. One goal of writing about titles that are institutional rentals or on institutional purchase-only DVDs is to help scholars identify titles they really do want to rent or request for institutional purchase without being disappointed, since the vendor catalogs can be more than a little obscure.

Practical. Film markets are rapidly changing. Tracking down even rental copies can be difficult for many titles. The appearance of gray market and import video sources has been a boon to film and television studies scholarship and teaching, but brings its own problems and issues. By sharing information or serving as a place to ask for such information, Not on DVD can complement existing resources like the Frameworks discussion forum.

Pedagogical. Where for a host of reasons, widely known narrative films (released on DVD) will continue to be a mainstay, but many teachers want to include a broader range of material, whether as a one-off week on experimental film, a course on video art, or an integration of shorts into a film history course. I would love to know what contributors and readers teach.

Film Culture/Promotional. As the writing online film journals and the ever-expanding cinephila blogs show, there's considerable interest in the range of cinematic expression. By highlighting otherwise overlooked works, Not on DVD can participate in and hopefully add to this discussion.

Those who wish to become contributing members can email me. Or folks can send news and queries my way for posting here. And for those works whose exile in obscurity is over, I am setting up a companion site, Now on DVD.

Enjoy.