DVD Treasures From American Film Archives - Encore Edition:
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Category: Classics (Silents/Avant Garde)
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DVD Treasures From American Film Archives - Encore Edition
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
Review(s): DVD Treasures From American Film Archives - Encore Edition
A Landmark Box Set
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!
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
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.
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