American Classics

Starring:American Classics
Studio: M2k
Product Type: DVD

Customer Reviews:

Gary Cooper in a Three-cornered Hat!.......2007-07-03

I love this film. This one had an impact on me when I was just a boy and saw it in B&W on TV. I used recreate the after-math of the masacre at the fort with my toy soldiers. Sure the story line stretches plausibility a bit (Catching the limb while going over the falls with Paulette Goddard hanging on your neck is a bit much even for Coop!) but not nearly so much as the things I am asked to accept as reality in modern CGI movies (as in any sequence in the latest remake of King Kong.)

I have to love Boris Karloff as an Indian chief and Miss Goddard as the indentured slave as well as Gary Cooper as an early American freedom fighter. The DeMille touches in the battle scenes and the "almost historical" feel of the film are pleasures as well.

Put this one on the shelf with "Last of the Mohicans," (when will we get the version from the 30's?)"Drums Along the Mohawk" and "Allegheny Uprising" for entertaining films of pre-revolutionary American "almost history" and enjoy.

classic Cooper , classic Demille...stunning transfer!!.......2007-06-20

Unlike the other terrific reviews that discuss the story and movie...i want to weigh in on the DVD...its terrific! Glorious color and sharp as a tack! I've been disappointed lately with several older FOX films on DVD but this is nothing short of glorious! If you are a fan of Cooper...don't hesitate! Paulette Goddard is delicious.

They Don't Make Movies Like this Anymore .......2007-06-17

"Unconquered" is a great historical epic set in pre-Revolutionary America with a "fight the enemy and never surrender" message. Gary Cooper owns the film. When he is on the screen, as is usually the case with his flicks, all the other characters revolve around him.

Cooper plays Captain Holden who is sent on a doomed mission to make peace with Indian tribes that have already decided on war. Holden's main nemesis is a traitor named "Garth" (played by Howard DaSilva) who has not only provided arms to the natives, but who is also secretly in league with them.

The romantic sub-plot involves an indentured servant, Abby Hale (played by Paulette Goddard), who is bought and freed by Holden only to be illegally re-enslaved by Garth. Both Holden and Garth are enamoured of Miss Hale, but you can easily guess which one of the two she loves back.

"Unconquered" exudes good old fashioned conservative American values and, partly for that reason, they don't make movies like this today.

Another reason you won't see a film like this today is because of it's politically incorrect portrayal of Native Americans. American Indians did torture, murder and sometimes even cannibalize settlers, including women, children and infants, but, today, Hollywood is unwilling to portray them as having been anything other than noble, peace-loving ecologists.

This DVD even has an "Introduction" warning the viewer that the White people are all portrayed as "good" and the Indians as "bloodthirsty." This is a pretty stupid thing to say given that the main villain in the film, Garth, is White. Why isn't there an introduction to the "Dancing with Wolves" DVD warning us about how, in that film, Indians are all portrayed as "good" and Whites are portrayed as "bloodthirsty"?

Outstanding.......2007-05-21

UNCONQUERED remains one of my favorite films of colonial America. The ever stoic Gary Cooper represents the backbone of the spirit of America. This film tells a great adventure tale with a lot of atmosphere of perhaps what those time my actually have been like. A visual treat in that respect.

Very Enjoyable.......2007-05-13

This film is one of Gary Coopers best. It is so good I have it in dvd and vhs. He is the greatest. They just don't have stars now like they did then and they don't make movies like they did back then. I feel sorry for the young adults now who really don't know what a good movie really is. I would recommend this movie to everyone.

Essential Classics - American Musicals (The Music Man / Meet Me in St. Louis / Seven Brides for Seven Brothers)

Average customer rating:

Great Musicals at a fabulous price!

Essential Classics - American Musicals (The Music Man / Meet Me in St. Louis / Seven Brides for Seven Brothers)
Starring: Robert Preston , Shirley Jones , Buddy Hackett , Hermione Gingold , and Paul Ford
Director: Morton DaCosta , Vincente Minnelli , and Stanley Donen
Manufacturer: Warner Home Video
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Musicals & Performing Arts | Genres | DVD | Video

Musicals & Performing Arts | Boxed Sets | Stores | DVD | Video

( E ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video
Similar Items:

Essential Classics - Musicals (My Fair Lady / Singin' in the Rain / Gigi)
The Rodgers & Hammerstein Collection [Remastered] (The Sound of Music / The King and I / Oklahoma! / South Pacific / State Fair / Carousel)
Essential Classics - Romances (Gone with the Wind / Casablanca / Doctor Zhivago)
American Movie Musicals Collection: West Side Story/Fiddler on the Roof/Guys and Dolls
Essential Classics - Dramas (The Maltese Falcon / Citizen Kane / Ben-Hur)

ASIN: B000MV9O40
Release Date: 2007-04-24

Amazon.com

This three-disc set, part of Warner's Essential Classics series, collects three truly classic films--The Music Man, Meet Me in St. Louis, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers--in one inexpensive package. The drawback is you don't get the second disc of either Meet Me in St. Louis or Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, so if you're a featurette junky or if you simply have to see the reshot version of Seven Brides, you'll want to stick with the individual releases. But this set does include the commentary tracks and any other material that was on the first disc of those two-disc sets (The Music Man still has everything that was on the one-disc release), and best of all, they have the great remastered pictures of the previous releases. So if you just want the movies looking better than ever with some bonus features thrown in for good measure, the price per movie makes this set an attractive bargain. --David Horiuchi

Description

Disc 1: THE MUSIC MAN Disc 2: MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS Disc 3: SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS

Customer Reviews:

Great Musicals at a fabulous price!.......2007-05-14

While this set doesn't include all the extra material dvd's at this price it's still well worth it for these great musicals. They are indeed classics as the title states. My favorites would be "Meet Me in St. Loius" and "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers". Not very found of "The Music Man" but the package is still cheaper than what I would pay individually. The movies speak for themselves.

Average customer rating:

A music history classic Baski at his best
Great Animated Film
Outstanding Animated Film
American pop animations classic
American Pop

American Pop
Starring: Hilary Beane , Robert Beecher , Gene Borkan , Beatrice Colen , and Ben Frommer
Manufacturer: Sony Pictures
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Drama | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Music Video & Concerts | Genres | DVD | Video

Music & Musicals | Cult Movies | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Animation | Genres | DVD | Video

DVDs Under $14.99 | Today's Deals in DVD | Special Features | DVD | Video

( A ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video
Similar Items:

Wizards
Heavy Metal (Collector's Edition)
The Nine Lives of Fritz the Cat
Fire and Ice (2-Disc Limited Edition)
Heavy Metal 2000

ASIN: 0767809548
Release Date: 1998-06-17

Amazon.com

Animator-director-screenwriter Ralph Bakshi audaciously tries to chronicle the history of 20th-century American popular music, while also placing each period into historical and social context--all in 97 minutes! Its animated, episodic narrative follows four generations of Jewish-American musicians as each painfully seeks fame through changing musical eras. Starting at the turn of the century with a piano-playing immigrant in New York, the film moves swiftly, following his offspring through such movements as Gershwin-era pop, jazz, folk music, '60s psychedelia, and punk--and only pauses for elaborate, energized musical numbers designed to showcase the work of Benny Goodman, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Lou Reed, the Jefferson Airplane, and numerous others. However, these electric set pieces provide brief dynamism in a relatively bleak film filled with hard-luck protagonists suffering through clichéd drug addiction, death, and alienation. While the film's scope is admirably ambitious, and Bakshi's stylized use of rotoscoping (tracing animation from live action) makes for fluid and often eye-popping visuals, his treatment also feels heavy handed and cuts numerous corners. And, when Baskshi ends his epic by mocking punk, and celebrating the future of rock & roll through the music of Bob Seger, one wonders whether or not he a knowledgeable grasp of his topic at all. The DVD version presents the film in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1. --Dave McCoy

Customer Reviews:

A music history classic Baski at his best.......2007-06-27

For a lead in to the history of 40's to 80's musick this is a must have. Not for children but a reall good production with great animation. Enjoy.

Great Animated Film.......2007-05-07

I'm not a fan of animation, but I really liked this movie that spans several generations of one family in the music world.

Outstanding Animated Film.......2007-03-01

I really love this movie. The closest comparison would be the animated film Heavy Metal, but this film has mellower music. This film combines great storytelling with excellent music. I did not care for his animated Lord Of The Rings or Wizards, but this movie is one of my all time favorites. A masterpiece.

American pop animations classic.......2007-02-16

American pop is one of the best animated movies ever. It tells the story of american music the characters stand out in a real way. The animation is great with the ww1 ww2 and prohibhittion being key parts for every gain something is lost the people change but the goal is the same for each generation. The 60s and 70s are shown to be dark and creepy. Great animation soundtrack and realistic story.

American Pop.......2006-01-30

This is a great accomplishment in animation and used to be a rare film to find in print. I'm glad to add it to my collection.

Unseen Cinema - Early American Avant Garde Film 1894-1941

Average customer rating:

Rare Film Festival in a Box!
A collection of films you'll find nowhere else for the serious film history buff
A great collection for anyone seriously interested in film history and it's language
Awesome -- must be seen
Massive Art-exhibition-in-a-box Collecfion of Avant-garde titles

Unseen Cinema - Early American Avant Garde Film 1894-1941
Starring: Orson Welles
Manufacturer: Image Entertainment
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Classics | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Drama | Genres | DVD | Video

Classics | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Mystery & Suspense | Genres | DVD | Video

( U ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video

Drama | Boxed Sets | Stores | DVD | Video

Classics | Boxed Sets | Stores | DVD | Video

Avant Garde - Experimental Cinema of the 1920s & 1930s
Treasures From American Film Archives - Encore Edition
Maya Deren: Experimental Films
More Treasures from American Film Archives 1894-1931
Edison - The Invention of the Movies (1891-1918)

ASIN: B000AYEIJA
Release Date: 2005-10-18

Amazon.com

Avant-garde cinema remains unseen for all sorts of reasons. Because it's rare. Because it's elusive. Because the mainstream distribution and exhibition apparatus is not designed to serve it (and, arguably, to a large extent is designed to suppress and deny it). Because people--that vast army of us proud to be unpretentious "regular moviegoers"--basically don't want to see it, fearing that it's esoteric and challenging and probably boring. These are excellent--which is to say, very real--reasons. Except that, as of autumn 2005, they're obsolete. All but the personal-resistance part, anyway. Now, thanks to Anthology Film Archives, curator Bruce Posner, and the cooperation of the world's foremost film museums, anybody with a DVD player can make the acquaintance of 20some hours of definitive avant-garde film experiences through this often dazzling seven-disc set. And whaddaya know: a lot of "unseen cinema" turns out to be fascinating, thrilling, spectrally beautiful, tantalizingly mysterious--in a word, eye-opening, to both the art of film and the world we all share.

Moreover, it's not all precious, artist(or would-be artist)-in-a-garret stuff. Some of it has glimmered on regular movie screens, from nickelodeon days through the golden age of Hollywood, doing its avant-garde thing (often without knowing it's avant-garde) as one- and two-reel narratives or astonishing sequences in commercial Hollywood pictures. A 1910 D.W. Griffith two-reeler that compresses several decades (including the Civil War) into 16 minutes. Prologue and transitional montages that goosed up pedestrian feature films with lunges into jagged surrealism and abstraction. The erotically crazed, visually dynamic, sometimes nightmarish phantasmagoria that are Busby Berkeley's "By a Waterfall" and "Lullaby of Broadway."

In Posner's own words: "American experimental film has existed since the technological inception of cinema ... The background against which the experimentalists toiled provides a fascinating review of Americana coupled with numerous cross-currents ... and an unfailing desire to create on film an image that can be viewed as an independent and provocative art.... The goal [of this set] is to present the broadest possible spectrum of experimental films produced between the 1890s and 1940s."

Each of the seven discs is organized around a central theme, and which one you first reach for will be determined by individual curiosity and susceptibility. The Devil's Plaything: American Surrealism steps off with Edwin S. Porter's 1902 Jack and the Beanstalk, its visionary transformations of settings and now-you-see-'em, now-you-don't appearances and disappearances of cast members the more remarkable for having been entirely achieved in the shooting, without postproduction optical trickery. Griffith's cameraman-to-be Billy Bitzer sends time scurrying dreamily backwards in Impossible Convicts (1905), while such classic 1920s experiments as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Telltale Heart seek to meet Edgar Allan Poe halfway by portraying distorted/demented worlds via stylized lighting and decor. The ambitious Robert Florey, whose feature-directing career would be almost entirely confined to the B zone, collaborates with montage maestro Slavko Vorkapich on The Life and Death of 9413--A Hollywood Extra and with premier production designer William Cameron Menzies on The Love of Zero.

Inverted Narratives: New Directions in Storytelling includes Suspense, a 1913 two-reeler by Lois Weber that emulates and occasionally tops her august contemporary, D.W. Griffith; the adventurous selection of camera angles and big, then still-bigger closeups continue to amaze. Charles Vidor's The Bridge, a 1929 rendering of the Ambrose Bierce story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," is starker than but not inferior to the more poetic French version that won an Oscar in the 1960s. Josef Berne's Black Dawn, aka Dawn After Dawn, weaves a Gothic spell with its account of love and death on an isolated farm, including a startling passage of sunstruck eroticism. And twelve minutes of Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand's agitprop, allegorical docudrama of American corporate fascism Native Land, narrated by Paul Robeson, inspires an urgent wish to see the entire film.

Light Rhythms: Music and Abstraction moves from surrealist milestones such as Man Ray's Le Retour à la raison, Fernand Léger's Ballet mécanique, and Rose Sélavy's Anémic cinéma (an anagram many times over) to never-seen full-length versions of montages created by Slavko Vorkapich for such films as Crime Without Passion and The Firefly. Vorkapich's mesmerizing nature poem Moods of the Sea, set to Mendelssohn's Fingal's Cave, is among the most relentlessly stunning passages on celluloid. An ecstatically extended bal sequence from Ernst Lubitsch's So This Is Paris inspires, again, a craving to see that unavailable 1926 feature film, while George L.K. Morris' Abstract Movies is an encyclopedic and hilarious amateur re-creation of fond cliches and tropes of generic filmmaking.

Still, if one had to pick a single DVD to luxuriate in (and one can: it's the only disc available separately), it would have to be Picturing a Metropolis: New York City Unveiled. The Blizzard, a Gotham panorama grabbed by an unknown cameraman standing outside the Mutoscope film company office one day in 1898, is one of the most enchanting moments you'll ever experience on film, with an urban crowd sharing the bemusement of a winter day slipping into evening, and the fairy-tale vastness of a nearby park softened by falling snow: an absentminded documentary record become sheer poetry. Bitzer's Interior New York Subway, 14th Street to 42nd Street, an unbroken take from the front of an onrushing train (with supplementary illumination supplied by lights mounted on another train on a parallel track!), was shot in 1905, though the itinerary looks exactly the same today; only the crowds have changed. (One comical, endearing touch: a mother and her children, caught in passing at Grand Central, stop in their bustling journey to stare at the camera.) The 1901 Demolishing and Building Up the Star Theatre uses time-lapse photography to chronicle the taking down, and then to imaginatively ordain the resurrection, of an urban show palace. And Robert Flaherty's 24 Dollar Island (c. 1926) is so razor-sharp and judiciously observed that it remains the definitive portrait of Manhattan on film--truly a portrait of the city itself as a living, dynamic space, with scarcely any intrusion of humankind to distract us from the place, its light and shapes and rhythms.

There's additional, virtually prehistoric contemplation of urban spaces--including the 1900 Paris Exposition and the Eiffel Tower--in The Mechanized Eye: Experiments in Technique and Form. The Amateur as Auteur: Discovering Paradise in Pictures celebrates the intentional and inadvertent sublimities of home movies. And Viva la Dance: The Beginnings of Ciné-Dance collects everything from the various Annabelle Dances of 1894-97 through Mexican footage shot for Sergei Eisenstein's Que viva México to one more bravura sequence by Busby Berkeley (from Wonder Bar) and the avowedly avant-garde Tarantella and Spook Sport by Mary Ellen Bute in 1940.

It cannot be overstated that much of this footage is beautifully preserved, whether transferred from paper prints or exhumed from still-luminous nitrate footage cached in a European archive. And the brief headnotes by such authoritative commentators as Jan-Christian Horak, David Shepard, Kevin Brownlow, and Bruce Posner himself are marvels of lucidity and concision, supplying just the right context--in a mere 50 words or so--to enable the uninitiated viewer to appreciate the film he or she is about to witness. Unseen Cinema is not just (just!) an awesome collection of film landmarks--it's a landmark achievement in its own right. --Richard T. Jameson

Description

7 DVDs - 20 Hours - 155 Classics of Avant Garde Cinema! "Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1894-1941" reveals hitherto unknown accomplishments of American filmmakers working in the United States and abroad from the invention of cinema until World War II, and offers an innovative and often controversial view of experimental film as a product of avant-garde artists, of professional directors, and of amateur movie-makers working collectively and as individuals at all levels of film production. Many of the films have not been available since their creation, some have never been screened in public, and almost all have been unavailable in copies as good as these until now. Sixty of the world's leading film archive collections cooperated with Anthology Film Archives to bring this long-neglected period of film history back to life for modern audiences.

Customer Reviews:

Rare Film Festival in a Box!.......2007-01-18

As a Cinephile who travels literally thousands of miles a year in search of
amazing old films at classic film festivals & conventions, it is my opinion
this is the best box set of films I've ever seen. Whether you're a new film
fan or an old one looking for new kicks, this is the set for you. From the
surreal dream sequence in Douglas Fairbanks 1919 masterpiece "When the Clouds
Roll By" to Neil McGuire & William A. O'Connor's dreamy short "Moonland",
you'll see where Hollywood has gone to steal ideas for some of its best (and
most well-loved) sequences. I've personally paid more than the cost of this
set on a 16mm film print of just one of the short films it contains. If I could have
only one collection of these films on dvd, it would be this all-encompassing
box set. I've never written a review before but really wanted you true film
fans out there to know about this amazing set. It is my opinion that you
won't be sorry you bought it. Good Luck and Happy Filmwatching!

A collection of films you'll find nowhere else for the serious film history buff.......2006-12-13

If I was getting a gift for TCM host and film historian Robert Osborne, and I knew he didn't already have this DVD set I would (a) be very surprised and (b) buy it for him. This DVD set is for film buffs who aren't satisfied with the essentials that everyone knows about - "Birth of a Nation", "The Jazz Singer", "Frankenstein", etc., which are great films, but don't tell the whole story of early cinema. The set was organized by Bruce Posner and runs to some nineteen hours, and is an astonishing achievement. The set consists of seven discs each of which explore a different aspect of early cinema.

Among the films included are Douglass Crockwell's "Simple Destiny Abstractions", plus some animations with some very good detail on the level of Windsor McCay. The 1928 version of "The Fall of the House of Usher" focuses more on displaying some complex optical work than the story, reducing Poe's tale to only ten minutes in length. "Night on Bald Mountain" is an example of pinboard animation, in which a film is made completely using shadows from a pin screen. This technique continued to be used for decades. Suspense - a 1913 melodrama in which a housewife and her baby are nearly attacked by a knife-wielding drifter - is included because of its split-screen techniques. However, it is also interesting as the beginnings of what became the psycho-thrillers that exist to this day.

For the budget conscious, the disc entitled "PICTURING A METROPOLIS, New York City Unveiled" is the only disc available for individual purchase. This particular disc is great for history buffs as well as film buffs for all of its views of New York City life during the period from 1890-1940. The New York City disc moves from early footage of the city, including the Edison Company's famous and poetic Coney Island at Night, to Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's well-known Manhattan, to some work by Rudy Burckhardt, the film-maker, photographer, and painter who was also one of de Kooning's earliest friends in New York.

There are also some films financed by the depression-era WPA. Among them, Elia Kazan makes an appearance in a rather odd socialist movie about the poor of New York. There are some pictures sponsored by Labor Unions that offer 'alternative newsreels' that expose illegal business thuggery and a reactionary murder cult known as The Black Legion. Entertainment figures that are later blacklisted for their political beliefs and actions also make an appearance here - most notably, Paul Robeson, an actor often forgotten because of this. Robeson can be seen narrating a film on organized labor in this collection.

The disc entitled "The Beginnings of Ciné-Dance" has quite a bit of variety, but is still clearly delimited, opening with Annabelle Moore's "Butterfly Dance" and offering near its end David Bradley's Peer Gynt of 1941, starring a teenage Charlton Heston.

Some of the best material on the set is from Hollywood, probably due to the larger budgets involved. Included in this category would be some of the original montages of Slavko Vorkapich that were done for some MGM movies. This includes a bit of film in which the entire Napoleanic war appears to play out in just two minutes. Also included is Vorkapich's opening montage to "Crime Without Passion" in which three banshees fly about and terrorize the streets of Manhattan. The Ernst Lubitsch "touch" also apparently includes montages, and there is an excerpt from 1926's "So This is Paris" that shows a flapper dance in montage. It does a good job of conveying the wildness of the place at that time, which is part of the central theme of the movie. Also included are Busby Berkeley's numbers "Lullaby of Broadway" and "By a Waterfall", which are light compared to the other pieces with their more hidden deeper meanings.

I could go on forever describing the contents of this DVD set, but these were the pieces that stood out the most to me, anyway. The label of "Avant Garde" does not really fit this collection as we know the meaning of the term today. After all, there is work here by the Edison Company, D.W. Griffith, and a host of other people who have secure places in mainstream motion picture history. The "Avant Garde" label is more of an indication that film as an artform during the time period covered was inherently avant-garde just because it was new. The quality of the video is quite good considering the probable shape of the originals. I personally love this set and think it is well worth the price.

A great collection for anyone seriously interested in film history and it's language.......2006-09-24

Unseen Cinema is a fascinating collection of films, that shows the development of (and the experiment with) the film language in America from its beginning there and half a century onward.

It's title is a little misleading. Many of the films are not really Avant Garde, unless sound testing and family films showing children opening Christmas gifts is Avant Garde. The goal of the collectors is to prove that there was an Avant Garde film making from the beginning of cinema in America (America meaning films made by Americans anywhere in the world and films made by foreigners in America). They say that this was a needle-in-a-haystack search and I have to admit that sometimes I felt that they mistook the hay for a needle. So if you want to get to know early Avant Garde film making (in general) then I rather recommend "Avant Garde - Experimental Cinema of the 1920s & 1930s". It has many of the best bits from this collections plus others not found here.

But if you are interested in film history and it's language then this is your thing. There are many fantastic films here, some of them not available anywhere else (to the best of my knowledge), such as The Telltale Heart (Charles Klein: 1928), Portrait of a Young Man in Three Movements (Henwar Rodakiewicz: 1931) and Footnote to Fact (1933: Lewis Jacobs). Portrait of a Young Man in Three Movements (54 min) is one of the greatest cinema poems I have ever seen, a must see.

There are also some great classics, here, like:
Autumn Fire (1930-33)-Herman Weinberg (a 22 min. version!).
The Fall of the House of Usher (1926-27)-J.S. Watson, Jr. & Melville Webber
The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra (1927)- Robert Florey & Slavko Vorkapich
The Love of Zero (1928)-Robert Florey & William Cameron Menzies
H20 (1929)-Ralph Steiner

The collection is on 7 disks, some of them more interesting than others. My personal favorite where the first four of them. The New York disc is probably interesting to people who live there or have been there. It did little for me and I think that the Amateur disk was a waste of time.

The transfer is quite good, often surprisingly good. The music varies. Some of it is quite fitting while others are just tiring. I for one liked the music on "Avant Garde - Experimental Cinema of the 1920s & 1930s" better (comparing the films that both of the collections share).

The real downside to this collection is the extra material. The notes at the beginning of the films are way to short and the extra information on the PDF files are not so great either. I would like to see a better bio with filmography, and some commentaries would have been nice.

So this is a great collection for anyone seriously interested in film history and it's language. Others might want to stay away.

Awesome -- must be seen .......2005-11-22

Old weird Americana takes a bow in the sprawling and richly rewarding DVD set "Unseen Cinema." Running almost 20 hours, the collection provides ample evidence that bold experimental filmmaking thrived in the early days of moving pictures -- decades before the avant-garde torch-bearer "Un Chien Andalou" seared its way onto screens in 1929.

"Unseen" curator Bruce Posner says his goal was to "provide the broadest possible spectrum of experimental films produced between the 1890s and 1940s" -- roughly, the period from Thomas Edison to WWII. And so we have everything from home movies to lavish production numbers; wispy dance performances to strident union propaganda; gothic horror to languid studies of life on a farm. Many of these films have not been seen in decades and some were never screened for the public. Others, surprisingly, were products of the Hollywood studios.

The best of the early works are triumphs of the imagination over technical limits and creaky acting -- in quite a few, the wow factor remains potent. Watching the many bits of fantasy and cinematic sleights of hand, it's easy to draw a loopy line to the works of cinematic descendants such as Ray Harryhausen, Tim Burton and George Lucas.

Plenty of big names are represented in "Unseen" -- Welles, Sergei Eisnenstein, Ernst Lubitsch, Charles Vidor, Victor Fleming, Douglas Fairbanks, Busby Berkeley, Elia Kazan -- but the set shows that much of the heavy lifting in cinema's toddling years was done by inspired amateurs and free-thinking artists known for their work in other media.

The individual discs are arranged by theme, with titles such as "The Devil's Plaything" (surrealism and fantasy), "The Amateur as Auteur" (home movies) and "Inverted Narratives" (storytelling). New York City merits its own disc, with 29 films set in the metropolis (this fascinating time capsule is available separately, retail $24.99).

For orientation, there are informal but to-the-point on-screen notes before the films. The lack of commentaries undercuts the set's many obvious academic applications -- even so, it's a mind-expanding film course in a box. For extra credit, filmographies and biographical information can be accessed via DVD-ROM.

Some of the 155 shorts and excerpts have new recordings of their original music, some have newly written scores and others remain totally silent. In the case of the mind-bending "Ballet mecanique" (1923-24) the complex original score wasn't recorded as the filmmaker intended until five years ago. The DVD set's audio tracks sound as if they came from the same shop, cutting down on jarring transitions and smoothing the way for extended viewing.

The source materials -- rounded up from 60 or so archival collections around the globe -- were restored from 35mm and 16mm prints. The full-screen images are often surprisingly good but quality proves case-by-case, of course.

Massive Art-exhibition-in-a-box Collecfion of Avant-garde titles.......2005-11-03

The contents below are from unseen-cinema; they include the contents of a 160-page softcover Series Catalog, which is sold separately, but I think you would want. This is clearly a labor of love; though I can't imagine trying to watch all this in a month of Sundays, I could see dipping into it from time to time.

=====================================

Disk 1: THE MECHANIZED EYE
Experiments in Technique and Form

The dynamic qualities of motion pictures are explored by cameramen and filmmakers through novel experiments in technique and form. Early cinematographers James White, "Billy" Bitzer, and Frederick Armitage display experimental shooting styles that wowed audiences. Other independent companies further image manipulation through creative staging, editing, and printing, such as a stunning three-screen film that predates Gance's Napoleon. Experiments by photographer Walker Evans, painter Emlen Etting, musician Jerome Hill, and the film collectives Nykino and Artkino record the world in a continual process of flux. A most extreme approach is realized by Henwar Rodakiewicz with Portrait of a Young Man (1925-31), a monumental study of natural and abstract motions.

18 FILMS:
5 Paris Exposition Films (1900)-James White
Eiffel Tower from Trocadero Palace (1900)
Palace of Electricity (1900)
Champs de Mars (1900)
Panorama of Eiffel Tower (1900)
Scene from Elevator Ascending Eiffel Tower (1900)
Captain Nissen Going through Whirpool Rapids, Niagra Falls (1901)-creators unknown
Down the Hudson (1903)-Frederick Armitage & A.E. Weed
The Ghost Train (1903)-creators unknown
Westinghouse Works, Panorama View Street Car Motor Room (1904)-G.W. "Billy" Bitzer
In Youth, Beside the Lonely Sea (c. 1924-25)-creators unknown
Melody on Parade (c. 1936)-creators unknown
La Cartomancienne (The Fortune Teller) (1932)-Jerome Hill
Pie in the Sky (1934-35)-Nykino: Elia Kazan, Ralph Steiner & Irving Lerner
Travel Notes (1932)-Walker Evans
Oil: A Symphony in Motion (1930-33)-Artkino: M.G. MacPherson & Jean Michelson
Poem 8 (1932-33)-Emlen Etting
Storm (1941-43)-Paul Burnford
Portrait of a Young Man (1925-31)-Henwar Rodakiewicz

Disk 2: THE DEVIL'S PLAYTHING
American Surrealism

Edwin S. Porter and other early filmmakers used bizarre sets, fantastic costumes, and magic lantern tricks to illuminate their fantasy films. American parody supplied Douglas Fairbanks with enough unusual material to produce the truly surreal When the Clouds Roll By (1919). The expressionistic Cabinet of Dr. Calagari (1919) influenced American sensibilities throughout the 1920s as seen in Beggar of Horseback (1925), The Life and Death of 9413-A Hollywood Extra (1927) and The Telltale Heart (1928). The emphasis shifted when amateurs J.S. Watson, Jr., Joseph Cornell, and Orson Welles crafted a unique variety of American surrealism on film unfettered by European concerns.

17 FILMS:
Jack and the Beanstalk (1902)-Edwin S. Porter
Dream of a Rarebit Fiend (1906)-Edwin S. Porter
The Thieving Hand (1907)-creator unknown, Vitagraph
Impossible Convicts (1905)-G.W. "Billy" Bitzer
When the Clouds Roll By (1919)-Douglas Fairbanks & Victor Fleming (excerpt)
Beggar on Horseback (1925)-James Cruze (excerpt)
The Fall of the House of Usher (1926-27)-J.S. Watson, Jr. & Melville Webber
The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra (1927)- Robert Florey & Slavko Vorkapich
The Love of Zero (1928)-Robert Florey & William Cameron Menzies
The Telltale Heart (1928)-Charles Klein
Tomatos Another Day (1930/1933)-J.S. Watson, Jr. & Alec Wilder
The Hearts of Age (1934)- William Vance & Orson Welles
Unreal News Reels (c. 1926)-Weiss Artclass Comedies (excerpt)
The Children's Jury (c. 1938)-attributed Joseph Cornell
Thimble Theater (c. 1938)-Joseph Cornell
Carousel: Animal Opera (c. 1938)-Joseph Cornell
Jack's Dream (c. 1938)-Joseph Cornell

Disk 3: LIGHT RHYTHMS
Music and Abstraction

The rhythmic elements of cinema are explored by artists and filmmakers fascinated by the abstract qualities of light. The American authors of avant-garde classics Le Retour á la raison (1923), Ballet mécanique (1923-24), Anémic cinéma (1926), and Une Nuit sur le Mont Chauve (1934), are finally acknowledged for their seminal artistic achievements made in Europe. Pioneer abstract films by Ralph Steiner, Mary Ellen Bute, Douglass Crockwell, Dwinnell Grant, and George Morris are compared and contrasted with Hollywood montages created by Ernst Lubitsch, Slavko Vorkapich, and Busby Berkeley. For the first time on video, composer George Antheil's original 1924 score accompanies Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy's film Ballet mécanique, a truly avant-garde cacophony of image and sound.

29 FILMS:
Le Retour à la raison (1923)-Man Ray
Ballet mécanique (1923-24)-Fernand Léger & Dudley Murphy
Anémic cinéma (1924-26)-Rrose Sélavy (Marcel Duchamp)
Looney Lens: Anamorphic People (1927)-Al Brick
Out of the Melting Pot (1927)-W.J. Ganz Studio
H20 (1929)-Ralph Steiner
Surf and Seaweed (1929-30)-Ralph Steiner
7 Vorkapich Montage Sequences (1928-37)-Slavko Vorkapich
The Furies (1934)
Skyline Dance (1928)
Money Machine (1929)
Prohibition (1929)
The Firefly- Vorkapich edit (1937)
The Firefly-MGM release version (1937)
Maytime (1937)
So This Is Paris (1926)-Ernst Lubitsch (excerpt)
Light Rhythms (1930)-Francis Bruguière & Oswell Blakeston
Une Nuit sur le Mont Chauve (Night on Bald Mountain) (1934)-Alexandre Alexeieff & Claire Parker
Rhythm in Light (1934)-Mary Ellen Bute, Ted Nemeth & Melville Webber
Synchromy No. 2 (1936)-Mary Ellen Bute & Ted Nemeth
Parabola (1937)-Mary Ellen Bute & Ted Nemeth
Footlight Parade - "By a Waterfall" (1933)-Busby Berkeley
Glen Falls Sequence (1937-46)-Douglass Crockwell
Simple Destiny Abstractions (1937-40)-Douglass Crockwell
Abstract Movies (1937-47)-George L.K. Morris
Scherzo (1939)-Norman McLaren
Themis (1940)-Dwinell Grant
Contrathemis (1941)-Dwinell Grant
1941 (1941)-Francis Lee
Moods of the Sea (1940-42)-Slavko Vorkapich & John Hoffman

Disk 4: INVERTED NARRATIVES
New Directions in Story-Telling

Early directors D.W. Griffith and Lois Weber develop the radical language of cinema narrative through audience-friendly melodramas made for nickelodeon theaters. Experimental fantasies are depicted in such independent productions as Moonland (c. 1926), Lullaby (1929), and The Bridge (1929-30). Depression era films by socially-conscious filmmakers reshape drama as demonstrated in Josef Berne's brooding Black Dawn (1933) and Strand and Hurwitz's biting Native Land (1937-41): each pictures a raw reality. Parody and satire find their mark in Theodore Huff's Little Geezer (1932) and Barlow, Hay and Le Roy's Even as You and I (1937). David Bradley's Sredni Vashtar by Saki (1940-43) boasts an inadvertent post-modern attitude.

12 FILMS:
The House with Closed Shutters (1910)-D.W. Griffith & G.W. "Billy" Bitzer
Suspense (1913)-Lois Weber & Philips Smalley
Moonland (c. 1926)-Neil McQuire & William A. O'Connor
Lullaby (1929)-Boris Deutsch
The Bridge (1929-30)-Charles Vidor
Little Geezer (1932)-Theodore Huff
Black Dawn (1933)-Josef Berne & Seymour Stern
Native Land (1937-41)-Frontier Films: Leo Hurwitz & Paul Strand (excerpt)
Black Legion (1936-7)-Nykino: Ralph Steiner & Willard Van Dyke
Even As You and I (1937)-Roger Barlow, Harry Hay & Le Roy Robbins
Object Lesson (1941)-Christoher Young
"Sredni Vashtar" by Saki (1940-43)-David Bradley

Disk 5: PICTURING A METROPOLIS
New York City Unveiled
Only Unseen Cinema DVD released as a SINGLE

The DVD depicts dynamic images of New York City and scenes of New Yorkers among the skyscrapers, streets, and night life of America's greatest city during a half century of progress, while at the same time showing changes in film style and the history of cinema experiments. Avant-garde moments pop up in the most unlikely of places including turn-of-the-twentieth-century actualities, commercial and radical newsreels, and Busby Berkeley's "Lullaby of Broadway" from Gold Diggers of 1935. Included are spectacular prints of Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's Manhatta (1921), Robert Flaherty's Twenty-four-Dollar Island (c. 1926), Robert Florey's Skyscraper Symphony (1929), Jay Leyda's A Bronx Morning (1931), and Rudy Burckhardt's Pursuit of Happiness (1940).

26 FILMS:
The Blizzard (1899)-creators unknown
Lower Broadway (1902)-Robert K. Bonine
Beginning of a Skyscraper (1902)-Robert K. Bonine
Panorama from Times Building, New York (1905)-Wallace McCutcheon
Skyscrapers of NYC from North River (1903)-J.B. Smith
Panorama from Tower of the Brooklyn Bridge (1903)-G.W. "Billy" Bitzer
Building Up and Demolishing the Star Theatre (1902)-Frederick Armitage
Coney Island at Night (1905)-Edwin S. Porter
Interior New York Subway 14th Street to 42nd Street (1905)-G.W. "Billy" Bitzer
Seeing New York by Yacht (1902)-Frederick Armitage & A.E. Weed
2 Looney Lens: Split Skyscrapers (1924) and Tenth Avenue, NYC (1924)-Al Brick
4 Scenes from Ford Educational Weekly (1916-24)-creators unknown
Manhatta (1921)-Charles Sheeler & Paul Strand
Twentyfour-Dollar Island (c. 1926)-Robert Flaherty
Skyscraper Symphony (1929)-Robert Florey
Manhattan Medley (1931)-Bonney Powell
A Bronx Morning (1931)-Jay Leyda
Footnote to Fact (1933)-Lewis Jacobs
Seeing the World (1937)-Rudy Burckhardt
Pursuit of Hapiness (1940)-Rudy Burckhardt
Gold Diggers of 1935 - "Lullaby of Broadway" (1935)-Busby Berkeley (excerpt)
Autumn Fire (1930-33)-Herman Weinberg

Disk 6: THE AMATEUR AS AUTEUR
Discovering Paradise in Pictures

These home-made films incorporate avant-garde strategies and techniques to achieve a true sense of cinematic intimacy. Glimpses of life caught unawares are found in the home movies of Elizabeth Woodman Wright, Archie Stewart, Frank Stauffacher, and John C. Hecker. Poetic lyricism finds a voice in city symphonies: Lynn Riggs and James Hughes' A Day in Santa Fe (1931) and Rudy Burckhardt's Haiti (1938). Professionally minded films, like Theodore Case's sound tests (c. 1925) and Lewis Jacobs' Tree Trunk to Head (1938), operate from a similar home-spun perspective of sincerity. Joseph Cornell offers an enigmatic but lovely homage to childhood with Children's Trilogy (c. 1938).

20 FILMS:
7 Case Sound Tests (c. 1924-25)-Theodore Case & Earl Sponable
Windy Ledge Farm (c. 1929-34)-Elizabeth Woodman Wright
A Day in Santa Fe (1931)-Lynn Riggs & James Hughes
4 Stewart Family Home Movies (c. 1935-39)-Archie Stewart
Children's Party (c. 1938)-Joseph Cornell
Cotillion (c. 1938)-Joseph Cornell
The Midnight Party (c. 1938)-Joseph Cornell
Haiti (1938)-Rudy Burckhardt
Tree Trunk to Head (1938)-Lewis Jacobs
Bicycle Polo at San Mateo (1940-42)-Frank Stauffacher
1126 Dewey Avenue, Apt. 207 (1939)-John C. Hecker

Disk 7: VIVA LA DANCE
The Beginnings of Ciné-Dance

Dance and film have shared the aspiration to creatively sculpt motion and time. Some of the first films ever made featured Annabelle's skirt dance, hand-painted in glowing colors. Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis' innovations found their way into Diana the Huntress (1916) and The Soul of the Cypress (1920). Highly cinematic renditions of dance evolved in Stella Simon's Hände (1928), Hector Hoppin's Joie de vivre (1934), and Busby Berkeley's "Don't Say Goodnight" from Wonder Bar (1934). In counterpoint, ciné-dances by Mary Ellen Bute, Douglass Crockwell, Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren, Ralph Steiner, and Slavko Vorkapich dispensed with actual dancers in favor of color, shape, line, and form choreographed into abstract light-play.

33 FILMS:
7 Annabelle Dances and Dances (1894-1897)-W.K.L. Dickson, William Heise & James White
Davy Jones' Locker (1900)-Frederick Armitage
Neptune's Daughters (1900)-Frederick Armitage
A Nymph of the Waves (1900)-Frederick Armitage
Diana the Huntress (1916)-Charles Allen & Francis Trevelyan Miller (excerpt)
The Soul of the Cypress (1920)-Dudley Murphy
Looney Lens: Pas de deux (1924)-Al Brick
Hände: Das Leben und die Liebe eines Zärtlichen Geschlechts (Hands: The Life and Loves of the Gentler Sex) (1928)-Stella Simon & Miklos Bandy
Mechanical Principles (1930)-Ralph Steiner
Tilly Losch in Her Dance of the Hands (c. 1930-33)-Norman Bel Geddes
2 Eisenstein's Mexican Footage (1931)-Sergei Eisenstein (excerpts)
Oramunde (1933)-Emlen Etting
Hands (1934)-Ralph Steiner & Willard Van Dyke
Joie de vivre (1934)-Anthony Gross & Hector Hoppin
Wonder Bar: "Don't Say Goodnight" (1934)-Busby Berkeley (excerpt)
Dada (1936)-Mary Ellen Bute & Ted Nemeth
Escape (1938)-Mary Ellen Bute & Ted Nemeth
An Optical Poem (1938)-Oskar Fischinger
Abstract Experiment in Kodachrome (c. 1940s)-Slavko Vorpapich
NBC Valentine Greeting (1939-40)-Norman McLaren
Stars and Stripes (1940)-Norman McLaren
Tarantella (1940)-Mary Ellen Bute, Ted Nemeth & Norman McLaren
Spook Sport (1940)-Mary Ellen Bute, Ted Nemeth & Norman McLaren
Danse Macabre (1922)-Dudley Murphy
Peer Gynt (1941)-David Bradley, starring Charlton Heston (excerpt)
Introspection (1941/46)-Sara Kathryn Arledge

SERIES CATALOG
"Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893-1941"

Unseen Cinema catalog features 30 essays, articles, and documents and 65 annotated photographs. Authors are scholars, critics, and filmmakers whose knowledge of the early avant-garde derives from either direct experience as a participant or years of scholarly research. Many hard-to-find photographs and sources detail the first decades of American experimental cinema in the United States and abroad.

Table of Contents
Foreword-Jan-Christopher Horak
Words and Pictures-annotated photographs
1. The Grand Experiment-Bruce Posner
2. Hollywood Extras: One Tradition of `Avant-Garde' Film in Los Angeles- David James
3. Emlen Etting: Three Films-R. Bruce Elder
4. The Attraction of Nature in Early Cinema-Scott MacDonald
5. "Le Retour á la raison": Hidden Meaning-Deke Dusinberre
6. Music for "Ballet Mécanique": 90s Technology Realizes a 20s Vision-Paul D. Lehrman
7. Sara Kathryn Arledge: "Introspection"-Terry Cannon
8. Busby Berkeley and America's Pioneer Abstract Filmmakers-Cecile Starr
9. Joseph Cornell: An Exploration of Sources-Lynda Roscoe Hartigan
10. Discussing D.W. Griffith-Jay Leyda
11. Maurice Tourneur and "The Bluebird"-Jan-Christopher Horak
12. Diva of Decadence: "Salome"-Kenneth Anger
13. W.K.L. Dickson: Pioneer Filmmaker-Paul Spehr
14. Elizabeth Woodman Wright: "Windy Ledge Farm"-Karan Sheldon & Bruce Posner
15. Robert Florey and the Hollywood Avant-Garde-Brian Taves
16. Working on "The City"-Henwar Rodakiewicz
17. Warren Newcombe: "The Enchanted City"-Stephen J. Schneider
18. My Films-J.S. Watson, Jr.
19. J.S. Watson, Jr.: "Nass River Indians"-Lynda Jessup
20. ...And Melville Webber-Dale Davis
21. Making "Twenty-four Dollar Island"-Robert Flaherty
22. Avant-Garde Production in America-Lewis Jacobs (excerpts)
23. Rutherford Boyd and "Parabola"-Douglas Dreishpoon
24. Notes on New Cinema of 1929 and 1930-Harry Alan Potamkin
25. Herman G. Weinberg: "Autumn Fire"-Robert A. Haller
26. Unanswered Questions: Eisenstein's "Qué Viva México!"-Herman G. Weinberg
27. My First Movie and "The Hearts of Age"-Orson Welles interviewed by Peter Bogdanovich
28. Highway 66: Montage Notes for a Documentary Film-Lewis Jacobs
29. The American Vanguard: Flux and Experience-R. Bruce Elder
30. New Artistic Process-Claire Parker and Alexandre Alexeieff

Treasures From American Film Archives - Encore Edition

Average customer rating:

A good collection, but the sequel boxed set was better
A Landmark Box Set
What a gold mine!
Good, but "More" is better
Available again May 2005?!?!

Treasures From American Film Archives - Encore Edition
Starring: Treasures from American Film Archives
Manufacturer: Image Entertainment
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Drama | Genres | DVD | Video

( T ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video

Drama | Boxed Sets | Stores | DVD | Video

More Treasures from American Film Archives 1894-1931
Unseen Cinema - Early American Avant Garde Film 1894-1941
Avant Garde - Experimental Cinema of the 1920s & 1930s
The Movies Begin - A Treasury of Early Cinema, 1894-1913
Edison - The Invention of the Movies (1891-1918)

ASIN: B0007WFXYO
Release Date: 2005-05-10

Amazon.com

It may look like a grab bag at first--50 preserved films from 18 American archives spanning the years 1893 to 1985 and encompassing everything from documentaries and home movies to experimental films and animation--but this unprecedented collection has a clear focus. It celebrates the scope and wealth of cinema history's "orphans," the films abandoned by the marketplace and left to nonprofit organizations to rescue. This is the proof of their efforts, and only a tiny, tantalizing example of what has been preserved. The "stars" of the set are the features: the startlingly savage 1916 William S. Hart Western Hell's Hinges and the luscious 1922 two-strip Technicolor feature The Toll of the Sea (the first color feature ever made) with Anna May Wong. Also included are The Chechahcos from 1924 (the first film ever shot in Alaska) and the extravagant (if stagy) original 1916 Snow White. John Huston's stunning documentary The Battle of San Pietro and Joseph Cornell's obscure but entrancing 1936 surrealist classic Rose Hobart are further highlights.

But there are wonders to be found throughout the collection, from a trip through Interior New York Subway circa 1905, to the gorgeous avant-garde 1928 The Fall of the House of Usher, to the only film of Orson Welles's legendary 1936 Haiti-set stage production of Macbeth in the 1937 documentary We Work Again. The breadth of work is astounding and all of it is fascinating, whether it's a revealing glimpse of a forgotten social landscape in a home movie; the preservation of theater, dance, and concert recitals in one-of-a-kind records; or an ancient work of pioneering cinema.

The four-disc set is handsomely designed, with easy-to-navigate menus featuring extensive notes and short documentaries about each archive (narrated by Laurence Fishburne), and a detailed, informative 150-page booklet accompanies the set. It's a one-of-a-kind project and a true film treasure. --Sean Axmaker

Description

For the first time ever, America's film archives are joining forces to release their most exciting, unseen treasures on DVD. The 50 films in this four disc set have been meticulously preserved by eighteen of the nation's premiere archives, including the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the Museum of Modern Art, George Eastman House, UCLA, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Featuring numerous supplements and produced by the nonprofit National Film Preservation Foundation, "Treasures from American Film Archives" shows the amazing variety of films made from coast to coast over the last 100 years. With narration by Laurence Fishburne, this set is an absolute must for film collectors! Films include: Groucho Marx's home movies (1933, 2 min.), D.W. Griffith's "The Lonedale Operator" (1911, 17 min.), the earliest film version of "Snow White" (1916, 63 min.), "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1928, 13 min.), "Negro Leagues Baseball" (1946, 8 min.), "The Autobiography of a Jeep" (1943, 10 min.), Joseph Cornell's found footage film "Rose Hobart" (1936, 19 min.), "Returning on the Zeppelin Hindenburg" (1936, 7 min.), the early 2-color Technicolor feature "The Toll of the Sea" (1922, 54 min.), the William S. Hart western "Hell's Hinges" (1916, 64 min.), the first commercially-shown U.S. film "Blacksmithing Scene" (1893, 1 min.), plus silent features, documentaries and newsreels, avant-garde shorts, early animation and special effects films, home movies, and much more. Visit http://www.filmpreservation.org/ for a complete listing of all films included.

Customer Reviews:

A good collection, but the sequel boxed set was better.......2007-05-18

This original set of films from the American Film Archives is interesting to students of cinema history and history in general, but it is not that entertaining in the ordinary sense. The first set I bought, "More Treasures from the American Film Archives" seemed to do a better job of mixing pure entertainment with films that had a social or historical significance than this one. That set included one or two silent feature films including an early Ernst Lubitsch, a Rin Tin Tin silent, and a very early gangster film, on each DVD along with the short subjects. That being said, this is a unique and interesting set of films that I found very worthwhile. However, if you are uncertain, start with the "More Treasures from the American Film Archives" set first. If you don't like that set I am almost sure you will not like this one. Nobody else bothered to list all of the films on this set and their descriptions, so I do that next:

ACADEMY FILM ARCHIVE, ACADEMY OF MOTION PICTURES ARTS AND SCIENCES:
1. Luis Martinetti, Contortionist (1894, 1 minute), kinetoscope of the Italian acrobat made by the Edison Co.
2. Caicedo, King of the Slack Wire (1894, 1 minute), the first film shot outdoors at the Edison Studios.
3. The Original Movie (1922, 8 minutes), silhouette animation satire on commercial filmmaking, by puppeteer Tony Sarg.
4. League Baseball (1946, 8 minutes), footage featuring Reece "Goose" Tatum, the Indianapolis Clowns, and the Kansas City Monarchs.

ALASKA FILM ARCHIVES, UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA AT FAIRBANKS
5. The Chechahcos (1924, 86 minutes), first feature shot entirely on location in Alaska. This is a melodrama set during the Alaska gold rush with some great scenery included.

ANTHOLOGY FILM ARCHIVES
6. Rose Hobart (1936, 19 minutes), artist Joseph Cornell's celebrated found-footage film that mainly takes footage from Hobart's film "East of Borneo", combines it with some other scenes, and winds up as a surreal short.
7. Composition 1 (Themis) (1940, 4 minutes), Dwinell Grant's stop-motion abstraction.
8. George Dumpson's Place (1965, 8 minutes), Ed Emshwiller's portrait of the scavenger artist and his home.

GEORGE EASTMAN HOUSE
9. The Thieving Hand (1908, 5 minutes), special-effects comedy.
10. The Confederate Ironclad (1912, 16 minutes), Civil War adventure with the heroine saving the day.
11. The Land Beyond the Sunset (1912, 14 minutes), social problem drama about a tattered newspaper boy who yearns for a better life.
12. Snow White (1916, 63 minutes), live-action feature of the Brothers Grimm tale starring Marguerite Clark.
13. The Fall of the House of Usher (1928, 13 minutes), avant-garde landmark created by James Sibley Watson, Jr., and Melville Webber from Poe's short story.

JAPANESE AMERICAN NATIONAL MUSEUM
14. From Japanese American Communities (1927-32, 7 minutes), home movies shot by Rev. Sensho Sasaki in Stockton, California, and Tacoma, Washington.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
15. Demolishing and Building Up Star Theatre (1901, 1 minute), the time-lapse demolition of a New York building, preserved from a paper print.
16. Move On (1903, 1 minute), Lower East Side street scene, preserved from a paper print.
17. Dog Factory (1904, 4 minutes), trick film about fickle pet owners, preserved from a paper print.
18. Princess Nicotine; or, The Smoke Fairy (1909, 5 minutes), special-effects fantasy of a tormented smoker, by the Vitagraph Company.
19. White Fawn's Devotion (1910, 11 minutes), probably directed by James Young Deer and the earliest surviving film by a Native American.

MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY
20. Cologne: From the Diary of Ray and Esther (1939, 14 minutes), small town portrait by amateur filmmakers, Dr. and Mrs. Dowidat.

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
21. Blacksmithing Scene (1893, 1 minute), first U.S. film shown publicly.
22. The Shoe Clerk (1903, 1 minute), comic sketch with celebrated early editing.
23. Interior New York Subway, 14th St. to 42nd St. (1905, 5 minutes), filmed by Biograph's Billy Bitzer shortly after the subway's opening.
24. Hell's Hinges (1916, 64 minutes), William S. Hart Western about a town that earns its own destruction.
25. The Lonedale Operator (1911, 17 minutes), D.W. Griffith's rescue drama, starring Blanche Sweet.
26. Three American Beauties (1906, 1 minute), with rare stencil color.

NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION
27. We Work Again (1937, 15 minutes), WPA documentary on African American re-employment, including excerpt from Orson Welles' stage play of "Voodoo Macbeth".
28. The Autobiography of a Jeep (1943, 10 minutes), the story of the soldier's all-purpose vehicle, as told by the jeep itself.
29. Private Snafu: Spies (1943, 4 minutes), wartime cartoon for U.S. servicemen, directed by Chuck Jones and written by Dr. Seuss.
30. The Battle of San Pietro (1945, 33 minutes), celebrated combat documentary directed by John Huston.
31. The Wall (1962, 10 minutes), USIA film on the Berlin Wall made for international audiences.

NATIONAL AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM
32. From The Keystone "Patrician" (1928, 6 minutes), promotional film for new passenger plane.
33. From The Zeppelin Hindenburg (1936, 7 minutes), movies by a vacationing American family made on board 1 year before its destruction.

NATIONAL CENTER FOR JEWISH FILM
34. From Tevye (1939, 17 minutes), American Yiddish-language film, directed by Maurice Schwartz, adapted from Sholem Aleichem's stories.

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY
35. From Accuracy First (ca. 1928, 5 minutes), Western Union training film for women telegraph operators.
36. From Groucho Marx's Home Movies (ca. 1933, 2 minutes).

NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY
37. From Beautiful Japan (1918, 15 minutes), early travel-lecture feature by Benjamin Brodky.

NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY
38. From La Valse (1951, 6 minutes), pas de deax from George Balanchine's 1951 ballet, featuring Tanaquil Le Clercq and Nicholas Magallanes and filmed at the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival.
39. Battery Film (1985, 9 minutes), experimental documentary of Manhattan, by animator Richard Protovin and photographer Franklin Backus.

NORTHEAST HISTORIC FILM
40. From Rural Life in Maine (ca. 1930, 12 minutes), footage filmed by Elizabeth Wright near her farm of Windy Ledge, in southwestern Maine.
41. From Early Amateur Sound Film (1936-37, 4 minutes), scenes of family life captured by sound-film hobbyist Archie Stewart.

PACIFIC FILM ARCHIVE
42. Running Around San Francisco for an Education (ca. 1938, 2 minutes), early political ad, shown in San Francisco theaters, that helped win approval of local school bonds.
43. OffOn (1968, 9 minutes), Scott Bartlett's avant-garde film, the first to fully merge film and video.

UCLA FILM AND TELEVISION ARCHIVE
44. Her Crowning Glory (1911, 14 minutes), household comedy, with comic team John Bunny and Flora Finch, about an eight-year old who gets her way.
45. I'm Insured (1916, 3 minutes), cartoon by Harry Palmer.
46. The Toll of the Sea (1922, 54 minutes), Anna May Wong in an early two-strip Technicolor melodrama, written by Frances Marion.
47. The News Parade of 1934 (10 minutes), Hearst Metrotone newsreel summary of the year.
48. From Marian Anderson: The Lincoln Memorial Concert (1939, 8 minutes), excerpt from a concert film, reconstructed from newsreels, outtakes, and radio broadcast materials.

WEST VIRGINIA STATE ARCHIVES
49. From West Virginia, the State Beautiful (1929, 8 minutes), amateur travelogue along Route 60.
50. From One-Room Schoolhouses (ca. 1935, 1 min), amateur footage from rural Barbour County.

A Landmark Box Set .......2005-09-11

The features TOLL OF THE SEA with Anna May Wong and Kenneth Harlan and SNOW WHITE starring Marguerite Clark are worth the price of this set alone!! These two classics are worth repeated viewings. This set is loaded with short films from the era notably the avant-garde FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER which looks amazingly like what someone might make take today if they wanted to make an avant-garde silent film. A set you will go back to time and time again, definately a must for anyone with a serious interest in early film.

What a gold mine!.......2005-09-07

What a gold mine! I purchased this collection due basically to an interest in film as a medium and art form; I've not quite completed the second of four disks.

But what a fascinating collection of excerpts, newsreels, training programs, films, featurettes and commercials. You get to see glimpses of street life in New York City in 1903, baseball in the middle of the last century, staged mini-films on elaborate sets, abstract "art" shows, amateur documentaries, even Groucho Marx at home! ... the variety of what's included only providing for more fascination ("What will be next?!").

As I believe another reviewer said, or implied, people with attention spans for nothing but six violent explosions per millisecond will have some difficulty watching these. Doesn't matter; whether they see them or not, they're indebted to films like these for the films we see today. I've also read the essays included with each film: A *lot* of inspiring work went into this collection.

I hope some of the sales proceeds go to film restoration! At some point, I'll be purchasing the second set not only to see more, but to contribute to preservation of this art form. Film and music ... what would our world be without them?

Good, but "More" is better.......2005-07-26

This collection of 50 preserved films spanning 75 years of film history aptly shows the value of film preservation, and enables fans of film to support preservation by purchasing this collection. There are four classes of film in this box: early commercial films by famous or obscure studios and film makers; amateur films, including sentimental glimpses of a region of the US (rural Minnesota, West Virginia, Maine), news reels or other documentaries, and avant-garde or experimental films. There's something for everyone who likes old movies, but it's only the most committed fanatic of the film medium who will find everything here of equal interest.

The most universally appealing in this box are films with stories that combine the potential to appeal to the modern viewer with a glimpse into the imagination of film pioneers who were defining conventions in technique that are standard today. In this category we include The Lonedale Operator, a Biograph gem from 1911 directed by D.W. Griffith, advanced for its time in editing, story-telling and character development; The Land Beyond the Sunset, an Edison one-reeler from 1912 that shows how far film directors had mastered the ability to squeeze the right amount of story into seven minutes; and Hell's Hinges, an entertaining 1916 Western feature starring W. S Hart in a role that presages the work of Gary Cooper in High Noon and Clint Eastwood in The Unforgiven. There are also historically interesting films like a newsreel "year in review" of 1934 (a tough year!) and a one-reeler called The Confederate Ironclad, which was, we learn. one of many movies made during the 50 year anniversary of the Civil War. Finally, there's The Toll of the Sea an early technicolor vehicle with a very powerful performance by 17 year old Anna May Wong, albeit in a rather crude reworking of the Madame Butterfly story.

Pretty much the remainder of this collection is of historical or cultural interest. There's a version of Snow White from 1916 that was alleged to have inspired Walt Disney as a youth; a remarkable, but short, home movie from 1933 of Groucho Marx and his family at home, a brief excerpt from Marian Anderson's historic 1939 Easter Sunday concert on the mall in DC, an amateur movie of the Negro Baseball League in action, and Joseph Cornell's 1936 surrealistic "re-mixing" of a B jungle movie into a faintly erotic fixation on its female star "Rose Hobart", a movie Salvador Dali allegedly flipped over.

I personally liked volume two of this collection ("More treasures") better than this one -- it focused more on important, forgotten commercial films and less on the amateur or the avant garde. But the highlights of volume one make it, and its companion, treasures to own indeed.

Available again May 2005?!?!.......2005-02-03

YES! According to their website. Go to:

http://www.filmpreservation.org/dvd/treasures.html

For me, right now this is the holy grail of OOP DVD box-sets. They never turn up used on this site, and the few auctions that go up on Ebay get up to ridiculous amounts of money (last one went for upwards of $200). I hope to God that this is true. I would love it if Amazon could confirm it and post the date on this page. Finally, it's back (and at a lower price, too!) and I for one am very excited. Let's hope that it goes through OK. Every other reviewer has already spoken for the content you get in this priceless set, all I can say is HALLELUJAH...

More Treasures from American Film Archives 1894-1931

Average customer rating:

Entertaining early films, many never seen before on DVD
Selig's 1910 WONDERFUL Wizard of Oz - the BEST!!
More Treasures!
Iris in
Surprising, inspirational and enjoyable

More Treasures from American Film Archives 1894-1931
Starring: More Treasures from American Film Archives
Manufacturer: Image Entertainment
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Classics | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Documentary | Genres | DVD | Video

( M ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video

Documentary | Boxed Sets | Stores | DVD | Video

Classics | Boxed Sets | Stores | DVD | Video

Treasures From American Film Archives - Encore Edition
The Movies Begin - A Treasury of Early Cinema, 1894-1913
Unseen Cinema - Early American Avant Garde Film 1894-1941
Edison - The Invention of the Movies (1891-1918)
Avant Garde - Experimental Cinema of the 1920s & 1930s

ASIN: B0002JP1VW
Release Date: 2004-09-07

Description

Like the first "Treasures from the American Film Archives" produced by the National Film Preservation Foundation, "More Treasures" takes as its starting point the preservation work of our nation's film archives. More Treasures covers the years from 1894 through 1931, when the motion pictures from a peepshow curio to the nation's fourth largest industry. This is the period from which fewest American Films survive. Five film archives have made it their mission to save what remains of these first decades of American film: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, George Eastman House, The Library of Congress, The Museum of Modern Art and the UCLA Film and Television Archive. More Treasures (made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities) reproduces their superb preservation work-fifty films follwed by six previews for lost features and serials.

Customer Reviews:

Entertaining early films, many never seen before on DVD.......2007-01-27

Besides the films themselves, this set has a very well done booklet containing detailed information on each film as well as information on the preservation involved. Just about all of the silent films include at least some notes in the form of text that appear on the DVD that are selectable by the user, and most include user-selectable commentary tracks by film historians as well. The first entry on disc one is possibly the first film that ever included sound. In this 1894 entry, frequent director of Edison Company films William Dickson is seen playing the violin into a megaphone while two men dance to the music. It is only 15 seconds long, so the film is repeated several times while the extensive commentary plays. Many early Edison films were experiments such as these. Also included is a D.W. Griffith early short, the melodramatic "The Country Doctor" (1909). The title character must choose between tending his own sick daughter and a neighbor. Thus the doctor must choose between his duty as a physician and his loyalty to his own family. Mary Pickford has a small role.

Running only 13 minutes, Otis Turner's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1910) is the first attempt to bring the Frank Baum novel to the screen. There's no commentary on this one, though it would be helpful, because I know I was confused. In this version, two strange unnamed animal creatures plus the scarecrow are blown by the cyclone, along with Dorothy, to Oz. "The Invaders" is a remarkable 1912 film about Native Americans using force to avenge a broken treaty when surveyors unlawfully enter their territory, leaving open the question of who really are the invaders. It has a surprisingly sophisticated depiction of the Native American characters considering when it was made, and deals honestly both with the offenses committed against them and with their own weaknesses. Chester and Sidney Franklin's "Gretchen the Greenhorn" (1916), stars Dorothy Gish in an early gangster film. This film is also "feature-length" and runs 55 minutes. Notice a remarkably slender Eugene Pallette as the bad guy. In the talkies he comes to be known for his portly figure and trademark frog voice. "The Breath of a Nation" is a 1919 cartoon that is making fun of then newly implemented prohibition and whose title is a spoof on D.W. Griffith's ground-breaking film from four years earlier. Next there is the Ford Motor Company's "De-Light: Making an Electric Light Bulb" (1920) which shows each step of assemblage of a bulb at the factory. It's unsubtle message is the praise of progress via mass production, and, of course Ford Motor Company's part in all of this. Disc one ends with a five-minute talkie "greeting" by playwright George Bernard Shaw, shot in 1928, which comes across more as a test run of sound technology than anything.

Disc two starts with five minutes of film shot by Edwin S. Porter of the Edison Company that consists of scenes of ordinary people going about their daily lives in New York City in 1901 and 1903, and is typical of the early "actualities" of which early motion pictures consisted. In a similar, but much later film, "A Bronx Morning" (1931), people are shown going about their daily business one morning in the Bronx. Eleven minutes long, people are shown jumping rope, rocking a baby carriage, entering and exiting the subway, etc. There are also some good shots of some 1930's Bronx neighborhoods themselves. "From Leadville to Aspen: A Hold-Up in the Rockies" (1906) is an eight minute short that documents a train robbery. The hold-up itself is shot from the point of view of a passenger seat, and the thieves' attempted get-away is shot from the vantage point of the very front of the train. The notes for this film say that this short was intended to be shown to passengers onboard a train, one of the earliest examples of films being used to entertain travelers. A contrasting view of big business from that shown in the Ford Motor Company's assembly line film on disc one is seen in "Passaic Textile Strike" and also in 1912's "Children Who Labor". These films show the value of trade unions and the tragedy of child labor via docu-dramas focusing on the hardships of specific families. Another early talkie in this set has "Gus Visser and His Singing Duck" (1925), in which Gus Visser sings the song, "Ma (He's Making Eyes At Me)", and soon the duck begins to accompany him by quacking. Its actual purpose was as an experiment in efforts to create a workable way to add sound to movies. Mr. Visser is not famous for anything else other than this one experiment in sound on film.

My personal favorite in the whole set is the 74-minute "Clash of the Wolves" (1925), starring Rin Tin Tin, that great German Shepherd star of the 20's. Rin is the wolf hybrid everyone wants to shoot, until one day prospector Dave Weston finds him incapacitated by a cactus thorn and dying slowly of thirst in the desert. Dave's compassion overcomes his desire to kill the wolf for the bounty on his head, and he takes him to his cabin and treats his wound. "Lobo" becomes Dave's constant companion, and eventually saves him from the film's villain. Since Rin Tin Tin was so popular in the 1920's and remains so, it is a wonder more of his silent features haven't been preserved and restored for us to enjoy.

Next there is a silent newsreel from 1926 that includes a segment on a strange sport that involves men on horseback and a giant rubber ball, and a short piece on Mussolini. Animators Max and Dave Fleischer are creators of "Now You're Talking" (1927), in which an abused phone goes to the hospital and, as a "phone doctor" takes notes, the phone talks about how he has been mistreated by various users. The film is an attempt to show early phone customers that banging on the phone will do no good at establishing a connection, and also has something to say about proper and safe storage of the device. The message - "treat your phone kindly". "There It Is" (1928) is a silent feature starring writer/director/star Charley Bowers as a detective from "Scotland Yard" sent to investigate the case of the "Fuzz-Faced Phantom". Scotland Yard is spoofed as an actual yard full of Scottish detectives all wearing kilts and sporting bagpipes. Aside from Bowers and the Phantom, the other characters have to play it straight and endure a series of indignities in order to solve the case. Charley's assistant in all of this is MacGregor, a stop-motion animated insect who lives in a matchbox and also wears kilts. Truly an odd choice for a sidekick.

Disc three begins with the short, and somewhat confusing, "Rip Van Winkle" (1896) starring the earliest-born actor to ever appear in a film, Joseph Jefferson (1829-1905), in the title role. This is followed by a film under a minute in length showing the obviously rehearsed actions of Thomas Edison working in his chemical laboratory. There's also a 12-minute film by one of the earliest female filmmakers, Alice Guy Blache, who actually owned her own studio from 1910-1914. Her film "Falling Leaves" (1912) is a melodrama about a young girl who is saved from the consumption by a new miracle cure. The title comes from the initial pronouncement from a doctor that she will live only "until the last leaf falls". Dave Fleischer was author of the "Inklings" series of cartoons, and this set contains "Inklings #12". Here Fleischer draws a picture of Rin Tin Tin, but at an odd angle, asks the audience to guess who it is, then properly orients the drawing so you can recognize the famous canine. Next he performs another puzzle-like animation in which he takes apart a drawing and then reassembles it to produce "The House that Jack Built".

"Lady Windermere's Fan" (1925), is one of Ernst Lubitsch's earliest American films, adapted from Oscar Wilde's play, and is the feature film included on disc three. Lubitsch manages to get his famous "touch" across on this film, even without the benefit of spoken dialogue. He is just wonderful at conveying emotion with gestures, glances, and in this movie, with the way a doorbell is pushed. I found the overall story rather uncompelling, but it was still interesting to see such a master director at work.

Disc 3 also contains some real film oddities including two talking shorts via DeForest Phonofilms, one featuring Eddie Cantor and the other Calvin Coolidge in 1924. Phonofilm talkies, which were made between 1923-1926, never caught on with the public. This was partly due to the static nature of the camera, and partly due to the fact that DeForest was not a particularly good salesman. "The Memory of a Nutty Cameraman" (1925) shows some odd visual effects involving New York City landscapes that is similar to the work of Georges Melies, who had been making such films for over twenty years when this short was made.

This set is certainly a must-have for any serious student of early cinema, including all kinds of early films, plus it's very entertaining to boot.

Selig's 1910 WONDERFUL Wizard of Oz - the BEST!!.......2006-12-08

I am reviewing this DVD ONLY because it has the 1910 Selig film of "the Wonderful Wizard of Oz", which I have on the 3-Disk MGM Oz DVD. And despite what you see written, 'Wonderful' IS in the TITLE, not just 'Wizard'!!! This short film, I believe, is the best short Oz film because it is more faithful to L. Frank Baum's original book than the previous stage musical and the later Silent B&W films (especially Larry Semon's horrid Chadwick Picture) and when watched, can be easily seen as a big influence on the MGM Musical. When I first found out about this film from "the Annotated Wizard of Oz", I expected it to be a 1 hr film, so when I found out for myself what was in the film ("Oz: Before the Rainbow" book), I was a little disappointed, but not too much - and I can use my imagine to see a few scenes which were not filmed.
After the opening title, a mule causes trouble on a farm for a farmer, his wife & farmhands (despite no names, believed to be Aunt Em & Uncle Henry; in slow-motion Dorothy can be seen running away in the background). Playing with Toto and his ball (with a cow and the same mule), Dorothy meets and releases the Scarecrow who helps her & her animals friends 'hide' from the on-coming Cyclone (sorry, but we don't actually see any funnel, just wind & stuff blowing), which takes them all to Oz. Meanwhile, King Wizard of Oz sends out a proclamation for somebody to save him from Momba the Wicked Witch, who constantly terrorizes him & his palace courtiers. In a forest Glinda transforms Toto into a *giant* bulldog to protect Dorothy from Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow discovers the Wizard's proclamation. They then all meet and oil up the Tin Woodman who plays a picolo/flute and a appears-out-of-nowehere cat. The friends walk off (arm-in-arm), meets and get captured by witch Momba and her army of creatures & men, but Dorothy destroys her, setting them all free. At the Emerald City Wizard rewards the friends by making Scarecrow King and attempting to return Dorothy to Kansas in a balloon. The film ends with a small parade.
There are many great things about this film, because it contains bits from the book never seen in any other films: Uncle Henry sitting on the front door step (same time as Dorothy, see in slow motion), Dorothy is a little girl (almost 10) who gets a lovely new dress in Emerald City and Toto is a Cairn Terrier, there are many Guards modelled on the Soldier with Green Whiskers (Omby Amby), the girls who make the Wizard's balloon are dressed up as Glinda's Quadling Girl Guards and Glinda herself looks exactly like Denslow's original drawing. When we first see Glinda and the Cowardly Lion, we even see a background cameo of what could be the Fighting Trees and the Yellow Brick Road!! There are a few little disappointments though: first is the ending: Dorothy doesn't actually get back to Kansas until the end of the 2nd Selig Oz film "Dorothy and the Scarecrow in Oz" and (at least on the MGM DVD) there is no cast listing. Second I think there was a little too much Stage Musical resemblance and finally how Toto stays a bulldog as well as all the extra animals. I do wish this film had been an hour long taking up just about almost all of the book, but I wish even more that all Selig films (this one, 'Dorothy & Scarecrow', 'the Land of Oz' maybe even 'John Dough and the Cherub' as well as making "Ozma of Oz") had been put together to make "The Selig Oz Hour"!
Another important thing: except for Toto, none of the aniamls animals have names, despite earlier appearances - the Mule makes his 1st appearnce here BEFORE Hank from "Tik-Tok (Man?)" and the cat is not the same Eureka from "Dorothy & Wizard".
I would most certainly pick the short Selig Oz Films as the Best Depictions than the 1914-5 feature-length/long 'Oz Film Manufacturing Company' films of "His Majesty, the Scarecrow", "Patchwork Girl" and "Magic Cloak (NOT Oz!!)", all of which have the middle-end focusing on long scenes not always in the books.

More Treasures!.......2006-06-14

Both the first box set and this one are amazing. They're stunning. With credit given to preservation foundations, laboratories, commentators and contributors, each of the box sets presents 50 films of varying lengths which might have been lost forever, and in some cases were found only recently. When I saw the first program on this set, a film 112 years old as of 2006, with synchronized sound, I started flipping out to a friend; I couldn't believe what I was seeing. That it's been preserved. That we still have this.

Not everything on the sets interests me; some items are more "curios" than things of actual interest (to me personally). But I watch every minute of every film, and read every essay included, and listen to every commentary (the first set has essays but no commentaries). There is so much to see and to learn about where film today came from; you see so many influences on today's films in the way that film evolved. After I saw the first box set, I knew I wouldn't be missing this one. It's uplifting, and it's heartbreaking, and the fact that people are taking the time and care to preserve these films and allow us to see them makes the world seem a little bit of a better place.

Special shout-out to the "musical director" who takes great care, and draws upon extensive knowledge of the history of music in and beyond film, in creating amazingly apt piano accompaniments for the pieces without sound, and who defers to orchestral, ethnic or "chamber" musical arrangements always where it is appropriate. He adds another whole dimension to what we're seeing, enhancing the notion of seeing these films, to an extent, as they were originally intended.

Iris in.......2006-05-08

What an astonishing and entertaining box set! This three-disk set with the unwieldy name and robust price tag is one of the best collections I've watched in a long time. These `films' - some are only thirty seconds long - range in date from 1894 to 1931. Almost all are silent, save for a couple of experimental sound films. A comprehensive review is out of the question, so I'll limit myself to short observations on some of my favorites from each disk.

Disk One - Things are kicked off with `Dickson Experimental Sound Film' (ca. 1894), a 15-second film that features two-men dancing and a man playing a violin in front of a huge metal cone, the microphone for the wax cylinder the sound was recorded on. This set is dotted with experimental movies like this one. Out of context they're a little mystifying, but this one comes with a short commentary track. The commentary track lasts a few minutes, and the movie is looped behind it. All films come with program notes which are found both on-screen (handy) and in a two-hundred page book. I think a lot of people will get a kick out of the 13-minute `The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' (1910). It's certainly inventive enough, but the Scarecrow, Tin Man & Lion look different, the Wizard looks creepy, and I was never that much of an Oz fan to begin with. My favorites from the first disk are the two feature films, at least feature length for their time: `The Invaders' (1912- 41 mins) and `Gretchen the Greenhorn' (1916- 58 mins.) `The Invaders' is an early western that features real Lakota Sioux playing the indians. It's a smart film that feels authentic. `Gretchen the Greenhorn' is a charming story starring the 18-year-old Dorothy Gish (Lillian's little sister) as a young Dutch girl joining her father in America. There's an innocence and a sincerity to it that I found completely winning.

Disk Two - This is the second set I've acquired recently that contains `Gus Visser and His Singing Duck' (ca. 1925 - 90 sec.) It's another synchronized sound experiment, and remains a hoot. Also of interest was the 12-minute `Early Color Films,' a trio of films from 1916, 1929 and 1926 that used different experimental color processes. This one really benefits from the commentary track. The 1926 entry is `The Flute of Krishna,' choreographed by Martha Graham. My favorite film on this disk has to be `Clash of the Wolves' (1925 - 74 mins), a Rin Tin Tin silent. Rin Tin Tin plays Lobo, a wild dog who gets a thorn in his paw and is rescued by a borax miner. There's a pretty girl, a staid father, an unscrupulous claim-jumper, and stunts galore. Also included on this disk is a Charley Bowers two-reeler (19 mins) from 1928, a silent, titled `There It Is.' Bowers is the great unknown silent movie comedian, a stop-action animation innovator and one of the more surreal moviemakers to come out of Hollywood's early years.

Disk Three - Kicks off with `Rip Van Winkle' (1896- 4 mins.) Rip is a series of very short scenes from the enormously popular stage play starring Joseph Jefferson, who was an established stage actor before the Civil War. The film was produced and shown on mutoscope machines, a flip-card, peep viewer affair that lost out to projector presentation of films. Like many of the films on this set, this isn't inherently interesting, but if you're interested in film history it's fascinating. The big one on this disk in Ernst Lubitsch's `Lady Windermere's Fan,' (1925 - 89 mins) starring Ronald Colman, a witty and sophisticated movie from Oscar Wilde. Perversely, perhaps, I like the rougher, less polished films in this set. `Life of an American Fireman' (1903- 6 mins) and `Falling Leaves' (1912 - 12 mins) are two earlier films that may not be in the same league as Lubitsch's film, but they have an appealing simplicity. What I liked best about `Life of an American Fireman' was its demonstration that movies had to find a narrative strategy. Here's what I mean - there's a scene (hope I'm not blowing the plot), set inside a tenement room, smoke billows and mother and child are trapped in a burning building. Mother opens window and shouts for help. Fireman enters, ladder appears outside window, fireman hauls mother and child out of burning building. This is all done in one continuous shot. Next we're outside the building with the fireman. We see a woman open a window, shout for help. Fireman appears in the window, ladder is emplaced, mother and child are rescued. This just isn't the way scenes are cut. When the film takes us outside, it also goes back in time to the woman in the window calling for help. It seems an intuitive thing - we don't go back in time when we change point of view, but `Life of an American Fireman' proves that, along with close ups and such, continuity had to be figured out as well.

This is a great set, especially for those interested in film history. Heck, it's a lot cheaper than a college course. A couple other highlights - Martin Marks provides the music for all the silent films, and he provides notes for every movie he scores. I think his contribution can't be overstated. Great musical accompaniment. Also on each disk is a silent Fleischer brother animation.

Surprising, inspirational and enjoyable.......2005-03-13

This marvellous second set of rare archival material never before released on video truly is a treasure for anyone interested in the development of motion pictures in all its genres. I found the diverse variety on these 3 dics surprising and impressive, as well as very educational. An excellent book contains all the background information you might start to wonder about once you see some of the unusual and unexpected short films, and there are commentaries by critics and historians on the discs as well. As a silent film enthusiast, I was most delighted to see the four feature films (over an hour in length) in this set, as well as the poignant D.W. Griffith short, "The Country Doctor" an action-packed episode from the movie serial "The Hazards of Helen", and the fascinating 1907 Edison short, "The Teddy Bears" with impressive puppet animation. And I was simply amazed by the fun animations by the Inkwell Studios and in particular, the bizarre comedy short "There It Is" with Charley Bowers.

The four feature films show the development of the movie: from the stirring story about Sioux and Cheyenne conflicts in Thomas Ince's "The Invaders" of 1912, to the plight of Dutch migrants who fall victim to a gang of counterfeiters in "Gretchen the Greenhorn" played superbly by the talented Dorothy Gish, then to "Clash of the Wolves" in 1925 starring Rin-Tin-Tin, the amazing super dog, giving the most impressive performance I've ever seen by an animal actor; and finally the smooth and sophisticated Ernst Lubitsch rendition of Oscar Wilde's "Lady Windermere's Fan" rounds off this collection. Apart from these feature films, each disc has been carefully arranged to present a balanced and fascinating variety of short films in chronological order, lasting from about 1 to 20 minutes and covering advertisements, documentaries, promotional material, educational films and some surpringly good early experiments with color and sound. Apart from the entertainment value of the feature films and quality shorts, I'm sure most people with an inquisitive mind and a general interest in our recent history and development should find this box set a real treat.

Average customer rating:

Japanese-American GIs in WWII
An Essential WWII FILM from Robert Pirosh

Go for Broke
Starring: Warner Anderson , Hugh Beaumont , Gianna Maria Canale , Akira Fukunaga , and Don Haggerty
Director: Robert Pirosh
Manufacturer: Alpha Video
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Action & Adventure | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Drama | Genres | DVD | Video

Adventure | Kids & Family | Genres | DVD | Video

Drama | Kids & Family | Genres | DVD | Video

Action & Combat | Military & War | Genres | DVD | Video

Drama | Military & War | Genres | DVD | Video

Documentary | Independently Distributed | Stores | DVD | Video

Action & Adventure | Independently Distributed | Stores | DVD | Video

4-for-3 Action & Adventure | 4-for-3 DVD | Stores | DVD | Video

4-for-3 Drama | 4-for-3 DVD | Stores | DVD | Video

4-for-3 All DVDs | 4-for-3 DVD | Stores | DVD | Video

Independently Distributed | Indie & Art House | Stores | DVD | Video

DVDs Under $7.49 | Today's Deals in DVD | Special Features | DVD | Video

( G ) | Titles | Features | DVD | Video
Similar Items:

Unlikely Liberators: The Men of the 100th and 442nd
Beyond Barbed Wire/Go For Broke
Play Dirty
Beach Red
Flying Tigers

ASIN: B0007OP1XA
Release Date: 2005-03-29

Customer Reviews:

Japanese-American GIs in WWII.......2007-02-28

This is a very good film directed by Robert Pirosh, who scripted HELL IS FOR HEROES with Steve McQueen, about Japanese-American GIs in WWII trained and assigned to fight in Europe during the war. Taught and brilliantly acted and executed this is one of the best war films to come out of that era. It depicts and addresses many of the social issues of Japanese-Americans detained unjustly but given a chance to prove themselves as loyal Americans but more importantly as men of honor defending their country be the politics right or wrong. A good one all around.

An Essential WWII FILM from Robert Pirosh .......2006-10-12

GO FOR BROKE! This is a very entertaining film directed by Robert Pirosh about the formation of the WWII 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Based on factual events and what makes it unique is that the 442 was made up of Japanese-American volunteers who served in the European, essentially Italy and France, theater of battle. Van Johnson, giving one of his best performances, portrays Lt. Mike Grayson in charge of a platoon of these troops. Van Johnson as Lt. Grayson carries as much prejudice against Japanese-Americans as did the rest of the country at that point in the war. The film appears true to its subject depicting prejudice and resentment from both sides of the issue. The combat scenes have a sense of reality about them never losing sight of the horrors of war. The photography by Paul C. Vogel and detailed sets by Cedric Gibbons and Eddie Imazu enhance this point. However, this film does run the gamut of emotions and the camaraderie of the Japanese-American soldiers developed along side Van Johnson's Lt. Grayson is extremely well conveyed and is a high point of this film. This is a very good film, somehow forgotten and deserves to be seen and stand along side other essential WWII films.

Average customer rating:

All-American Boy Strikes Out
" the King of Serials on DVD...VCI Entertainment ~ Jack Armstrong (1947)"
Good Columbia serial, nice print, villain's worth the price!
My grandfather's review

Jack Armstrong: The All-American Boy
Starring: John Hart , Rosemary La Planche , Claire James , Joe Brown Jr. , and Pierre Watkin
Director: Wallace Fox
Manufacturer: Vci Video
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

General | Action & Adventure | Genres | DVD | Video

General | Classics | Genres | DVD | Video