The Joy of American Avant-Garde

Two new DVD sets spotlight shorts from Warhol, Guy Maddin and the Kuchar brothers.

Another hodgepodge disc of underground lurkers, this time skewed toward dismantlings of the horror genre, Microcinema’s “Experiments in Terror 3″ is catch-as-catch-can, but the fringe-life implied here can be intoxicating, starting with Mike Kuchar’s seminal mad-scientist “Born of the Wind” (1964), one of the classic Kuchar brothers’ meta-hyper-pulp 8mm splooges (when the two Kuchars were all of 18, already with over a dozen films behind them) that campily mocked and yet paid homage to old Hollywood forms, shot in cluttered Bronx apartments. The idea has proven deathless, and is carried on here by a new short by Guy Maddin (with busy alt-film curator/gadfly Marie Losier), “Manuelle Labor” (2007), a comic Maddin bell jar about a spontaneous birth of a full-grown hand.

There’s a Christmas short from nonexistent found-footage auteur J.X. Williams, a stick figure recap of the criminal career of serial cannibal Richard Chase, and a scatological faux-silent featurette by Florida one-man-band Clifton Childree. But kudos should go to Ben Rivers’ “Terror!” (2007), or perhaps to the first half of it, which without editorial commentary cobbles together dozens of scenes from ’70s and ’80s slasher films — that is, the scenes of waiting, anticipation, silence and confused anxiety, mixing them into a single suite of suspended mayhem. Then, unfortunately, Rivers splices up the climactic gore scenes as well, to much less effect.

“Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film 1947-1986″ (Image Entertainment) and “Experiments in Terror 3″ (Microcinema) are now available on DVD.

[Additional photo: Hollis Frampton's "(nostalgia)" (1971) from "Treasures IV: American Avant-Garde Film 1947-1986," Image Entertainment, 2009]

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