Center for Visual Music - Store

          Other Avant-Garde DVDs and Videos

While all are not specifically visual music, these are important works we highly recommend.

 

  Mekas, Maas, Menken and Namath: Visions of Warhol. 1963-1990. Scenes from the life of Andy Warhol, as seen by four pioneer avant-garde filmmakers and close friends of the Pop-artist. Titles include: Award Presentation to Andy Warhol (Jonas Mekas, 1963) with Gerard Malanga, Baby Jane Holzer, Ivy Nicholson, Gregory Markopoulos, etc.; Andy Warhol’s Silver Flotations (Willard Maas, 1964); Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol (Jonas Mekas, 1963-1990), with Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Barbara Rubin, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Mick Jagger, etc.; Andy Warhol (Marie Menken, 1965); Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable (Ronald Nameth, 1967), with the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed, John Cale, Nico, Ingrid Superstar, etc. 81 minutes, color. Re:Voir USA release. VHS, NTSC.

Documenting Warhol’s multimedia lightshow with the Velvet Underground and Nico, “Ronald Nameth does with cinema what the Beatles do with music: his film is dense, compact, yet somehow fluid and light. An eerie world of semi-slow motion against an aural background of incredible frenzy. He makes kinetic empathy a new kind of poetry.” (Gene Youngblood) ONLY A FEW LEFT

Private home use $40.         Institutions $200 (permits screening for non-paying audience in an institutional context)


 Jonas Mekas' 3 Friends. (1992-1995). VHS Video, NTSC. Includes Zefiro Torna and Happy Birthday to John. On October 9th, 1972, half of the music world gathered in Syracuse, N.Y., to celebrate the opening of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Fluxus show, designed by George Maciunas. On the same day, a smaller group gathered in a local hotel room to celebrate John's birthday. This film is a record of that occasion. The soundtrack consists of singing by John, Yoko, Ringo Starr, Allen Ginsberg, Phil Oaks, an many others. The film includes footage of the John Lennon/Yoko Ono concert at Madison Square Garden on August 30th, 1972, the vigil in Central Park on December 8th, 1980, and other rare footage. Includes a 32-page booklet of Jonas Mekas' diary entries used in the soundtrack. 52 mins, Re:Voir USA release.

Private home use $40.         Institutions $200 (permits screening for non-paying audience in an institutional context)


Jonas Mekas, This Side of Paradise. (1999) VHS Video, NTSC. “Unpredictably, as most of my life’s key events have been, for a period of several years of late sixties and early seventies, I had the fortune to spend some time, mostly during the summers, with Jackie Kennedy’s and her sister Lee Radziwill’s families and children. Cinema was an integral, inseparable, as a matter of fact, key part of our friendship. The time was still very close to the untimely, tragic death of John F. Kennedy. Jackie wanted to give something to her children to do, to help ease the transition, life without a father. One of her thoughts was that a movie camera would be fun for children. Peter Beard, who was at that time tutoring John Jr. and Caroline in art history, suggested to Jackie that I was the man to introduce the children to cinema. Jackie said yes. And that’s how it all began. The images in this film, with a few exceptions, all come from the summers Caroline and John Jr. spent in Montauk, with their cousins Anthony and Tina Radziwill, in an old house Lee had rented from Andy Warhol for a few summers. Andy himself spent many of his weekends there, in one of the cottages, as did Peter Beard, whom the children had adopted almost like their older brother or a father they missed. These were summers of happiness, joy, and continuous celebrations of life and friendships. These were days of Little Fragments of Paradise." — (Jonas Mekas). Re:Voir USA release, 35 mins, b/w & color.

Private home use $40.         Institutions $200 (permits screening for non-paying audience in an institutional context)


Jurgen Reble, Passion. (1989-1990)

Includes Rumpelstilzchen and Passion. Reble focuses on exploring the film material through bacterial processes, weathering, and chemical treatment during and after development. Rumpelstilzchen and Passion are hand-developed films about creation, evolution, and destruction. Reble also does live performances developing and decomposing film loops using chemicals, acids, and silver-replacing agents. Published by Re:Voir, Video, NTSC, 69 mins.

Private home use: $40        Institutions: $200 (permits screening for non-paying audience in an institutional context)


Michael Snow Presents. Includes a 40-page booklet of texts on the film. Snow invites us to contemplate and put into question his chosen medium, in an oscillation between what is represented and its process and material. Published by Re:Voir, Video, NTSC, 90 mins.

 

Private home use: $40        Institutions: $200 (permits screening for non-paying audience in an institutional context)


  Fluxus - Fluxfilm Anthology (1962-1970). Includes 37 short films ranging from 10 seconds to 10 minutes in length. These films (some of which were meant to be screened as continuous loops) were shown as part of the events and happenings of the New York avant-garde. Fluxus’ interdisciplinary aesthetic brings together influences as diverse as Zen, science, and daily life and puts them to poetic use. Filmmakers include Nam June Paik, Jeff Perkins, George Landow, Paul Sharits, John Cale. Contains a 32-page booklet by Maeva Aubert presenting an overview of the individual artists and films. VHS Video, NTSC, 120 minutes. Published by Re:Voir, May 2004. Private home use: $40; Institutions: $200.00 SOLD OUT

Private home use $40.         Institutions $200 (permits screening for non-paying audience in an institutional context)


 Barbara Hammer: Sanctus (1989-1992). Includes Still Point, Sanctus, Vital Signs. Inclues a 40-page booklet about the films by Stefani de Loppinot and Florent Guezengar. "This work on the film emulsion adds moveable and multicolored radiation, reworking and excoriating the very matter of the film (both the light and the light-sensitive surface), to the white radiation of the X-ray, altering its forms, in much the same way as human skin is here rendered more present by its invisibility." (Florent Guezengar) 36 minutes. Re:Voir USA release. VHS, NTSC.

Private home use $40.         Institutions $200 (permits screening for non-paying audience in an institutional context)



 

Maya Deren: Experimental Films (1943-1946). Includes Meshes of the Afternoon, At Land, and Ritual in Transfigured Time. Published by Re:Voir, 47 minutes, Video, NTSC.

Private home use $40.         Institutions $200 (permits screening for non-paying audience in an institutional context)


Ken Jacobs, Tom Tom The Piper's Son. Video, NTSC. Boxed set containing the 2-hour film and a 214-page bilingual book, a special issue of Exploding, the French magazine of analysis in film experimentation. "I wanted to ‘bring to the surface’ that multi-rhythmic collision-contesting of dark and light two-dimensional force areas struggling edge to edge for identity of shape… to get into the amoebic grain pattern itself – a chemical dispersion pattern unique to each frame… stirred to life by a successive 16-24 frame-per-second pattering on our retinas, the teeming energies elicited (the grains! the grains!) then collaborating, unknowingly and ironically, to form the always-poignant-because-always-past illusion. A movie about penetration to the sublime, to the infinite...." — (Ken Jacobs). Published by Re:Voir, total running time 133 minutes, b/w & color.

Private home use $75.         Institutions $300. (permits screening for non-paying audience in an institutional context)


More Re:Voir USA releases:

Adolf Mekas, Hallelujah the Hills. (1963) VHS Video, NTSC. Adolfas Mekas, born in Lithuania, arrived in the United States with his brother Jonas in 1949. They founded Film Culture, the magazine of independent cinema, in 1954. Adolfas Mekas’s Hallelujah the Hills bears witness to his knowledge and love of cinema, as well as the immense freedom to be found in all the films of the New American Cinema. Replete with innovative cinematic homages ranging from Sergei Eisenstein to Jean-Luc Godard, Hallelujah the Hills is a paean to the cinema and, in the words of its creator, "a song of love, friendship, and youth." Mekas’s story follows two young men (Peter H. Beard and Marty Greenbaum) who have for seven years been courting the same woman (played by both Sheila Finn and Peggy Steffans). When they return to propose marriage in the eighth year, they discover that she has already wed another man. The jilted suitors embark on a camping trip in the Vermont woodlands where comic romps are punctuated by bittersweet recollections of the woman. Time Magazine praised the film as “a far-out and very funny farce, the first cubistic comedy of the new world cinema.” Published by Re:Voir USA, b/w, 82 min.

Private home use $40.         Institutions $200 (permits screening for non-paying audience in an institutional context)


Patrick Bokonowski, COURTS MÉTRAGES. (1972-1993) VHS Video, NTSC. TITLES INCLUDED: La Plage (1991, color, 12 min.); La Femme qui se poudre (1972, b&w, 18 min.); Déjeuner du matin (1974, b&w, 12 min.); and Au bord du lac (1993, color, 6 min.). “Relentlessly reworking ‘real’ images, using techniques borrowed from painting and animated film, Patrick Bokanowski is an author of stature, capable of creating an insane and cataclysmic universe of unquestionable beauty.” — Michel Perez (on Déjeuner du matin). Published by Re:Voir USA, b/w & color, 48 min.

Private home use $40. (Institutions $200, link coming)


Patrick Bokonowski, L'Ange. (1977-1982) VHS Video, NTSC. Bokanowski's feature-length film features music by Michèle Bokanowski. "In this Breughel or Bosch cloaked in a 19th century tail coat, characters 'à la Boltanski,' infinitely coupled to their either seemingly trivial or simply absurd chores, at once mobile (in grinding jerks) and frozen in a sort of infernal eternity, meet in various parts of an unidentifiable location, on and around, it seems, an immense expressionist staircase which leads, nevertheless, to a final luminous irradiation. This film, programmed non-stop in a Tokyo cinema for nearly ten years (as was Cocteau's BLOOD OF A POET in New York in the 50's), has reached cult status among amateurs of a most deeply disrupting and bewitching cinema." — (Jean-Michel Frodon). Published by Re:Voir USA, color, 70 min.

Private home use $40.        (Institutions $200, link coming)


Letterist Films - Woman, Women! 1978-1995. VHS Video, NTSC. ARTISTS/TITLES INCLUDED: The Witness or Timid Expectations (Christiane Guymer, 1984, color 9 min.) Blue Kisses and Marshmallows (Hélène Richol, 1983, color, 10 min.) All Women Are Joan of Arcs (Suzanne Lemaître, 1984, color, 25 min.) Woman Is Not What She Used to Be (Hélène Richol, 1978, color, 10 min.) End Memory (Pip Chodorov, 1995, color, 6 min.) A Love Story (Maurice Lemaître, 1978, 8 min.). "If the woman is — happily — not what she used to be, as one of the women in this collection of letterist films beautifully demonstrates, she will soon become, through ongoing struggle, not the future of mankind, but her own future, to everyone’s great delight. Proof that she must perhaps also find companionship with men in this creative combat is offered here by the presence among them of two of her fellow warriors; our focus on the woman, or on women, can signify neither myth nor exclusion." — Maurice Lemaître, 1998. Published by Re:Voir USA, color, 68 mins.

Private home use: $40  (Institutions $200, link coming)


Maurice Lemaitre's Le Film est Deja Commence? (1951-1993) VHS Video, NTSC. TITLES INCLUDED: Film Annonce (1993, color, 3 min.) Le Film est déjà Commencé? (1951, color, 59 min.). "Heir to the dadaist, surrealist, and abstract filmmakers of the 1920's, Lemaître managed to combine equally aesthetics with politics — no easy task and one that fully justifies the current recognition of his work." — Gérard Courant, Libération. Published by Re:Voir USA, color, 62 mins.

Private home use: $40        Institutions: $200 (permits screening for non-paying audience in an institutional context)


Please contact CVM for other information, and let us know if there are other titles you'd like to see us carry in this store.

e

Ordering Information:

Via Credit Card - click the order button next to each item; or call CVM with your order via telephone at 213-683-1514 (12-6pm PST).

Via Check - For dvds, videos and books, add US$5.50 shipping for first item, .50 for each additional item. CA residents please add 8.25% tax to cost of videos/DVDs (shipping cost is not taxed).
Via University/Institutional PO - contact us at CVM Store. NOTE: Institutional rates listed do not include public performance rights, only classroom use and non-paying educational use is permitted. Museum exhibitions do NOT fall under these categories; no usage in museum exhibitions is permitted for any of the dvds or videos sold by CVM, please inquire for information on additional permissions and procedures for such requests.

Mailing address: Center for Visual Music, 453 S. Spring Street, Ste 834, Los Angeles CA 90013 (Tel 213-683-1514).

Prices listed do not include shipping. Please allow up to 2 weeks to fulfill order; though most ship within 3 business days.

PLEASE NOTE: We cannot accept returns unless product is defective.


Other Links - links to other dvds and books available online through amazon

 

For additional information, please contact CVM Store

Return to CVM Main Store Page

CVM Home

Google Groups Subscribe to CVM Mailing List
Email:
Browse Archives at groups.google.com

OR subscribe via email to list at centerforvisualmusic.org