CU Cinema shows early avant-garde films, hosts filmmaker Bill Morrison

Cornell Cinema and the Pentangle film series present six programs from the 15-program series "Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893-1941," which premiered at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2001 and has been touring the world ever since.

Curated by filmmaker and historian Bruce Posner, this ambitious project includes 160 newly restored prints. The six programs screening at Cornell include portraits of '20s and '30s New York; work by pioneers of abstract animation, such as Oskar Fischinger and Mary Ellen Bute; films by amateur filmmakers like Joseph Cornell; Hollywood montage sequences; and some more well-known work, such as Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy's "Ballet Mecanique" (1924), Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand's "Manhatta" (1921) and Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray's "Anémic Cinéma" (1925).

The series begins Tuesday, April 8, at 7 p.m. with "Picturing a Metropolis: NYC Unveiled," highlights of which include Edwin S. Porter's "Coney Island at Night" (1905), Robert Flaherty's "Twenty-Four Dollar Island: A Camera Impression of New York" (c. 1925-27), Rudy Burckhardt's "Seeing the World -- Part One: A Visit to New York" (1937) and Busby Berkeley's "Lullaby of Broadway" sequence from "Gold Diggers of 1935." Local musician Peter Dodge will provide live musical accompaniment for the silent films in this program.

Other programs will screen as follows: "Light Rhythms: Melodies & Montages" (Sunday, April 13, at 7:30 p.m.); "Cinema's Secret Garden: The Amateur as Auteur" (Tuesday, April 15, at 7:30 p.m. in the Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts, $3); "Writing With Lightning: D.W. Griffith, Mary Ellen Bute and Busby Berkeley" (Sunday, April 20, at 7:30 p.m.); "A F***ing Miracle!: Revolutions in Technique and Form (Tuesday, April 22, at 7 p.m.); and "Dance, Dance, Dance: Image, Movement, Abstraction" (Thursday, May 1, at 7 p.m.). Curator Bruce Posner will present the Tuesday, April 22, program. All screenings will be held in Willard Straight Theatre, except where noted. There will no admission charge for the Sunday night screenings; other screenings will be $6 general, $5 students and seniors, and $4 Cornell graduate students and kids 12 and under, except where noted.

For a complete listing of titles screening as part of each program, visit http://cinema.cornell.edu. "Unseen Cinema" is a collaborative film preservation project between Anthology Film Archives and Deutsches Filmmuseum sponsored by Cineric Inc. The presentation of programs at Cornell is co-sponsored with the Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA).

According to curator Posner: "The beginning of avant-garde film in America is habitually dated to the films Maya Deren made in the 1940s, but such filmmaking has, in fact, had a longer history. 'Unseen Cinema' presents the first comprehensive retrospective of this earlier American avant-garde." To learn more about Deren, Cornell Cinema presents the Ithaca premiere of "In the Mirror of Maya Deren" (2002). Documentarian Martina Kudlacek's gemlike study tells the life story of independent film giant and feminist icon Deren (1917-1961). The film will screen Thursday, April 10, at 7:15 p.m. and Saturday, April 11, at 5 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre. Admission is $4.

Cornell Cinema's immersion in early forms of avant-garde filmmaking will be topped off with a visit by award-winning filmmaker Bill Morrison, who will present his feature-length work "Decasia" (2002) on Friday, April 11, at 7 p.m. in Willard Straight Theatre. "Decasia," created from restored nitrate film, uses decaying found footage from the early days of cinema to investigate mortality and people's attachment to historical material, even as it falls apart. The film is accompanied with music by Bang On A Can. It will be preceded by Morrison's short film "The Film of Her" (1996), the story of a Library of Congress clerk who saves a cache of paper reels, some of the earliest forms of cinema, and then reconstructs and imagines history through a memory of "Her," a woman's image he first saw in his youth. Morrison, the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship for filmmaking in 2000, has shown his collected works in solo shows at New York's Museum of Modern Art, London's Institute of Contemporary Art and Buenos Aires' Museo de Bellas Artes, among others. Four of his titles are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, including "The Film of Her."

His visit is co-sponsored with the Central New York Programmers' Group and the Electronic and Film Arts Grants program of the Experimental Television Center in Owego, both of which are supported by the New York State Council on the Arts. Additional funding is provided by CCA. Admission for the Thursday, April 10, screening of "In the Mirror" and Friday, April 11, screening of "Decasia" is $6 general, $5 students and seniors, and $4 Cornell graduate students.