Storming the Streets

Both historic AND cinematic insurrection on DVD this week with the release of "The Battle of Chile" and "Avant-Garde Volume 3."

Continuing the resurrective good fortune the legacy of “experimental” film has enjoyed thanks to the DVD format and the relatively ephemeral essence of YouTube — which doesn’t mean, necessarily, that the movies’ audience has grown substantially — Kino has shipped out the third volume in its “Avant-Garde” anthology series. The choices have gotten more eccentric, which is just another way of saying that any definition of “avant-garde” is porous and subject to seepage.

We get Dudley Murphy’s “Danse Macabre” (1922), Mary Ellen Bute’s “Tarantella” (1940) and James Sibley Watson’s “Tomatos Another Day” (1930) — all of them, with a few others, available elsewhere — but we also get Alberto Cavalcanti’s first film (beginning a strange, low-boil career that lasted over 50 years), the distinctive “city poem” “Rien que les Heures” (1926), and two rambunctious surrealisms from Sidney Peterson, “The Petrified Dog” (1948) and, legendarily, “The Lead Shoes” (1949), a film that in more conscientious times no undergrad film-school education would do without.

There’s a Broughton and a Kirsanoff (he’s another semi-obscure figure with a long career hopscotching between poetic experiments and commercial cinema) and a Willard Maas, as well as a pivotal film, if that’s the phrase to use, in the self-negating history of Lettrism, “Closed Vision” (1954), by Marc’O (Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin), a feature-length shot at filming a mind’s free associative amblings that’s less obnoxious but just as abstruse as fellow Situationist Isidore Isou’s “Venom and Eternity,” which was the axle of Kino’s “Avant-Garde 2″ set. If there’s anything as charming as the spittle-flecked cultural rebellion of a bygone apostatic “movement,” I haven’t seen it lately.

Other winners: Charles Ridley’s famous piece of wartime mock-prop “Schickelgruber Does the Lambeth Walk” (1941), a chunk of John Parker’s deliciously cheapo-expressionist “Dementia” (1955) (otherwise known as “Daughter of Horror”), and John E. Schmitz’s “The Voices” (1953), which was seized by the LAPD along with Kenneth Anger’s “Fireworks” from Raymond Rohauer’s Coronet Theatre in 1957, another martyr of the sorely missed dialectic between nose-thumbing artiste filmmakers and a society that was once motivated, time and time again, to raid theaters and confiscate celluloid it deemed to be “dangerous.” Those were the days.

“The Battle of Chile” (Icarus Films) and Avant-Garde Volume 3 (Experimental Cinema 1922-1954) (Kino) are now available on DVD.

[Additional photo: John Parker's "Dementia," Kino, 1955]

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